 I am elated to be here. I've got not create too much calamity with. I'm Sonia Renee Taylor amongst lots of things. The thing that I am most happy about being right now the thing I'm most happy about being right now is amongst you all. I feel really deeply, deeply, deeply in gratitude to be at the bottom of the world with a collection of brilliant change makers and thinkers and folks who are willing to do the uncomfortable work of transforming the world, which requires the uncomfortable work of transforming ourselves. So I feel deeply in gratitude to be in community with you all, in deep, deep gratitude. I am the founder and radical executive officer of the body is not an apology. My favorite thing about making up shit is that you get to make up shit. So when I founded the body is not an apology, I was like, CEO is really boring. I'd rather be an REO. And so that's how we ended up radical executive officer. This conversation today is what I'm calling radical alchemy, catalyzing social change through personal transformation. All the work that I've done has been by accident. Everything has been the happenstance of stumbling into some area that terrified me and through it watching the miraculous happen. And part of that that Ellie and Nathaniel spoke to earlier today is that there is not some special formula to that. I am not some hero. A human having a human experience. The problem is that we have human experiences in isolation. And so we think it's just us. And I am a firm believer that rather than being in isolation, I have my really frail, raggedy human experiences with other humans so that we all know that sometimes we're frail and raggedy. And that's OK. It's part of the journey. So I want to talk about the body is not an apology and how we got started and who we are and all that good stuff. Also, oops, or I changed the world is the second part of that. The body is not an apology is a digital media and education company committed to radical self-love and body empowerment as the foundational tool for social justice and global transformation. Quite simply, I don't believe that we change the world without changing ourselves. We cannot build out there what we have not built in here. And we believe that the manifestation of injustice and equity and discrimination in many ways is about our inability to make peace with the body, our own bodies, and other people's bodies. And so through the work of information, dissemination, education, and community building, we foster radical unapologetic self-love, which we believe translates into radical human love in action, in service, toward a more just, equitable, and compassionate world. That being motivated from here makes us want to do out there. Right? So before the body's not an apology was a digital media platform, and I'll tell you about all the things we do in a minute, I want to tell you how we started, because to me that's one of the most cool things about it. We started as a conversation. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine named Natalie at a poetry slam in Knoxville, Tennessee. Natalie is a 30-something white woman with cerebral palsy who is afraid she might have an unintended pregnancy. She was disclosing this to me because we're friends and because I'm nosy. And there are some people who've known me all for less than 24 hours, and you know I might get in your business. Where's Kimia? Kimia knows I get in your business. It's a thing I do. Yeah? And so I asked Natalie about this unintended pregnancy. I asked what made her decide to have unprotected sex with this person who was just a casual partner. And Natalie's response to me was that her disability made it difficult for her to be sexual, and so she didn't feel entitled to ask this person to use a condom. And my response to Natalie in the conversation was your body is not an apology. It's not something you offer to someone to say sorry for my disability. And as I said it, the words stuck. I said it, but it didn't leave me. And I knew that something was going to happen with that sentence, your body is not an apology. I just didn't know what. But my hunch was that it was going to become a poem because I'm a poet. And so when something resonates, I make art out of it. And so I went back later on that night and I started writing this poem called The Body Is Not An Apology. And I continued to do that poem around the world for a while. But before I get to that point, I want to talk about what was present in that conversation that was what I call the transformational portal. What happened in the exchange between Natalie and I is that, one, there was a presence of radical honesty. I honestly asked her about something that most people would feel inappropriate about asking about. Who am I to ask you about why you're not, about your sexual health choices? What she met me in my radical honesty with was radical vulnerability. She told the truth. She told the scary, unmasked truth of her shame. And what I met her with was radical empathy, understanding both the times that I had used my body as an apology, and a stand that both of us did not have to stay in that place. Those three elements of communication and relationship created something that I did not know was going to happen. But just that moment created an opening. So anyway, I started sharing the poem around all of my shows. I know you all are like, wow, she's naked right here. I am pretty less in my skivvies here. So I started sharing the poem. The body is not an apology on my shows and on the road. But that was pretty much as far as it went. I was preparing. This photo is me preparing for a show. And I snapped a selfie of myself. And I felt really sexy. I think I'm sexy. I don't know what you all think. I'm feeling myself in this photo. But I also kept the photo inside my phone for months and months and months and months and months. And I would only every once and again be like, hey, look at this really hot photo I took of myself. And not share that photo. And what I got to was that the reason I wasn't sharing the photo is because while I felt hot and sexy and whatever else, there was also some other narrative running. There was an additional story happening. And the additional story was a story of shame. The additional story was, first of all, who am I to feel beautiful and sexy and powerful in my body? Who am I? How is that absolutely contradictory to what the world says I should believe about this fat, black, queer body? And so I didn't share the photo. And so second transformational moment is the night I was sitting on my friend's couch in California and I decided to share the photo. I didn't decide to share the photo because some vision from heaven was bestowed upon my heart that we should transform the world. No, I decided to share the photo because someone shared a photo with me of a plus-sized model named Tara Lynn. And I thought she was really sexy, so I googled her. And I found that she had just been hired to be a lingerie model for this major company. And the first photo I saw of her was in a black corset. I saw someone with big, juicy thighs who someone paid lucratively to put those big, juicy thighs on the internet. And I was like, well, if Tara Lynn can do it, I can post the photo on Facebook. And so I posted this photo on Facebook. And the caption on it said, share an image where you feel empowered and beautiful in your body. And the next morning I woke up and about 20 people had tagged me in photos. And I was like, this is really neat. Obviously we want a space to feel good about ourselves. That's cool. I'm gonna start a little Facebook page. And since I have this poem that has this name, I will name the Facebook page The Body is Not an Apology. And that is how we came into being. So I just talked about that, right? Like what was present that kept me from sharing that image, shame, fear, judgment, isolation, messages about my body, right? About the way that my body shows up on the planet. And then a choice, a choice spurred by someone else's choice to live unapologetically in their body spurred my choice to live unapologetically in mine, which prompted 20 other people to do the same in a photo which prompted me to start a Facebook page which created the inception of The Body is Not an Apology. Today, February 9th is, well, it's February 10th here. Cause I lost the day, what was yesterday but is today where I am from. Space time continuum. It is the sixth anniversary of my posting that photo onto the internet. And so we'll get to, I'll come to quickly to what's happened since then, but I wanna take a moment and I wanna talk about this idea of radical self-love and why radical self-love has to be radical, right? You would think it shouldn't be. You're like, yeah, you should just love yourself. That's not radical, right? But I would offer that it is absolutely radical and that without a radical notion of self-love, we don't actually change. We don't actually change ourselves and we don't actually change the world. So a couple of things about the definition of radical. Don't try to read all these words. I'm terrible with slides. I'll tell you the things, right? So anyway, radical is defined as going to the root or origin of a thing. It's fundamental. It is extreme or thoroughgoing, particularly in regards to changing traditional forms. It favors drastic political, economic and social reform. Radical ideas, radical and anarchistic ideologies. And it forms the basis or the foundation of a thing, meaning it exists inherently in it. I don't know about you, but I absolutely am clear that a love that is transformative has to be at the root or origin of us. And the reality is it is, have you ever seen a baby who hates their thighs? Raise your hand. Have you ever seen a three-year-old who's like, I'm just so over this pooch? You've never seen it, right? And the reason you've never seen it is because we come here inherently in love with ourselves, inherently in love with the vessels that carry us through the world, and inherently in love with other people's vessels. We think it's really cool that our thighs are squishy and that our skin is the color it is and that our hearer feels the way that it feels. We come here enamored with us, right? And so the question is, when do we stop being enamored with us? We need a love that's extreme. We live in extreme times. I live in California, in the United States, with a President Trump. I don't know what is more extreme than that, right? And so what we need is an extreme love to challenge those structures. That the outcomes of a lack of self-love are not just personal outcomes. The outcomes of a world that lacks love, that lacks a relationship of empathy and justice and compassion with other bodies is a world that is impacted both politically, economically, and socially. It's the world we live in right now when we go out from this gorgeous grounds into that world, what we see is a world that is a vision of a lack of love, right? And so we need something that changes, transforms the political, economic, and social systems of our society, right? And that it's the basis of foundation. Everything that we build has to be built on top of this notion of love. Or else we're just building the same shit that's already here, right? We have torn down a thousand structures, a thousand systems, and built back the same ones. They look different, but they're the same. Chattel slavery in the U.S. is just the prison industrial complex today, right? These have not changed. They just look different. So radical self-love requires that we change all of those systems. Right now, the body is not an apology, sees that our current social framework views all these things as separate, right? How I feel about myself is separate from social justice, which is separate from media and technology, which is separate from our economy and our political systems. And what we propose that the body is not an apology is that none of these things are separate, that our pretending that they're separate only reinforces the marginalization and oppression that is baked into them. And that when we have a whole and integrated perspective with ourselves and with the world, we catalyze change. But not until then. All right. So the body is not an apology today is a digital media company. We see about on a good month, 700,000 visitors to our website. On a raggedy month, we see about 250,000 visitors to our website. Our content probably reaches about a million folks a month through our social media platforms, our digital magazine and education, community building platforms and all that good stuff. I work with a team of 26 folks in four countries who helped me pull off this idea of radical self-love in the digital sphere. And all of them are amazing, brilliant folks who do this for almost nothing for very, very, very, very, very, very, very little money and a lot of effort and a lot of heart and a lot of time and a lot of belief that radical self-love is a way to change the world, right? So this is our radical education platform. We have a web-based platform where we do workshops and education seminars based on these concepts, teaching folks how to apply this idea of radical self-love to the work of personal transformation and then how to catalyze that into social change. We built a thing that looks like Facebook but isn't Facebook. Does all the things that Facebook does without being Facebook. We're gonna need this. Yeah, we're gonna need this these coming days, whatever. So that's who we are, that's what we do, boom. That's not what I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about why the body. Why do we use the body as the model to do this work? And so like I said before, the way our relationship to our bodies has impact and that impact is both personal. It is social and it is political. So we talk about the personal as body shame, the ways in which we haven't reconciled the we that we live in every day, right? Through the lens of race, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, mental health status, our bodies. That's the site of the outcomes of oppression are on the body, right? If it doesn't matter what the structure it is that you're talking about at the end of the day, if my water source isn't clean because we have decimated clean water, right? That's a climate change issue that lives on the body, right? And so the one thing we all share in common is that we gotta have a body to do this journey here, right? And so it's essential that we talk about how that impacts us, the physical self as we navigate the world. I'm gonna squeeze past these because I don't have a whole bunch of time because I don't wanna, so anyway, there's a personal impact and we see that thing, we see those personal impacts and suicide rates, we see those personal impacts and social impacts on the ways in which biases around bodies result in death, right? It's not just like, oh, I don't like my body and so, oh, I feel bad. No, it's, oh, society has a narrative about black bodies and so that's why black boys in America are 21 times more likely to be killed by the police. We have a narrative about bodies which is why trans women of color have disproportionate levels of violence and a life expectancy of 35. This is not about self-esteem, which is nice, right? This is about social change and its impact on the body. So some other things that has political stuff, 37 women have ever served as governor in the U.S., actually right now it's 39. Boom, compared to 2,369 men, right? And if you begin to look at the intersections of identities, how many disabled women, how many queer people of color, if we don't live single issue lives, we don't have single issue bodies. So when you start to look at the intersections of those identities, you really see the ways in which we have reliance on what I call default bodies, right? That there are some bodies that are inherently a little easier to navigate the world in and then there are some that are not, right? And we have to deconstruct why that is, right? So when we don't do this work, when we don't think about the body, this is the outcome. Historically, and today, the body is not apology calls that body terrorism. The ways in which the exempt, the oppressions of the world on our bodies make it a horrifying experience to be in a body on this planet. And how do we challenge that? I want to leave with three quotes and then I'm gonna get off this stage. People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors who will only see us versus them can make a rebellion but not a revolution. Therefore, any group that achieves power no matter how oppressed is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously adopted different values. It's the brilliant Gracely Boggs. Audrey Lord says the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but the peace of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us. Lila Watson says, if you have come to help me, don't waste your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together. Our liberation is bound up together in these bodies. Thank you.