 Hi, everybody. Make sure I'm out of the feedback zone for that. I'm going to introduce myself briefly, just because if you enter my name on Google, you might get some surprising results. So I'm talking a little bit about navigating the gender landscape. And for me, this goes back to 2003. And this was when I was an undergraduate. And my big goal was to grow up and be a lawyer. That's what I was going to do. That's what I was going to be. I was studying literature. And one day I was leaving a lecture, and I walked past this free and anonymous HIV testing clinic. And there was a call for volunteer test counselors. And something that I'd heard in lecture was really weighing on me. I was in a very contemplative mode. And there was one day left in the application period. And I thought, what the hell? What the hell? What am I doing? This is just a volunteer position. It was only supposed to be for five hours a week. Well, flash forward almost a decade later. That little volunteer position changed my entire life. I wound up coordinating that clinic. I did the free and anonymous testing. That meant I was doing the pretest counseling. I was doing the actual test administration. And I was doing results disclosure, which means you tell people whether or not they have received an HIV positive or negative result. I went on to go work at Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco. And they are a very large homeless youth agency. Actually, one of the largest and one of the first to be totally youth focused. And a lot of great queer programming. I had my office at this fantastic facility for HIV positive homeless youth, the first in the country dedicated entirely to providing services for people like that. In terms of an in-base clinic with a medical doctor, full-time RN who was there, full-time housing, private bedrooms, meals, the whole nine yards. Fantastic job. I did street-based outreach. I was still doing counseling. I was working at about five different clinics in San Francisco. And it was still my job to tell people whether or not they had HIV and to do long-term care. So I was doing a lot of work with AIDS care. I wound up getting a grant. I went to Tanzania. That was really fantastic. I was in the Bogamoio area. And I was working in the district hospital out in the field as well. My job was to provide care. But where I was going, there were so few doctors. It was basically triaging death. To go out into the bush, to go into people's homes, and to say, basically, who needed help first? That was what the goal was ostensibly. What it meant was saying is this person is going to pass away by the end of today. And this person is probably going to pass away by the end of the week. That's kind of depressing work. There's a lot of great things. And I don't want to paint the picture of the dying Africa, because it was also really incredible. I did that. And I went back to Larkin Street Youth Services. But it was a little bit harder for me to work in a corporate-style nonprofit. A lot of the ways of where the money is coming in, a lot of questions, a lot of problems, and then the earthquake in Haiti hit. And I had a moment where it wasn't even a question. I knew I was just going to go down. I got permission from my supervisor. My supervisor got permission from his supervisor. That supervisor didn't move up the chain of command. And three weeks before I left, I was informed. We're going to wait for the airplane. From, maybe it's a drone. Three weeks before I was scheduled to depart, I was told that if I left for Haiti, I would not have a job when I returned. And I said, I accept. So when I came home from Haiti, I began my full-time career as a queer-independent porn star. I'm a sex worker. I'm very involved in sex worker activism. And I'm very involved in challenging a lot of the norms that are in the porn industry, a lot of which are gender. So I also want to ask a question. Who here has ever screwed up somebody's gender pronouns? So we have some familiarity with this issue. For those of you who don't know what it means to screw up someone's gender pronouns, let me explain. Because that might seem really obvious. You look at somebody, they're a man or they're a woman. And you call them he or she. And what does it mean to make that kind of mistake? Oh, maybe it means that some people are a little bit ambiguous and you got it wrong. You call them a man when they're a woman or you call them a woman when they're a man. But that's still in a binary. That's still saying you're either one or the other and you make the mistake and you correct it. When I started to do queer porn, this is where my notions of gender really started to get challenged. I was screwing up pronouns all the time because I would work with someone who was male-identified but had a vagina. I was working with someone who was female-identified but had a penis. All kinds of different things happening with the body and with the presentation. And I was also confronted with people who said, I don't relate to gender at all. I'm gender queer or I am agender. I use they pronouns or I use Z or zur or her with an HIR and all kinds of crazy things. And I was really getting sad because I was making people sad all the time. And I did want to screw it up. And I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm just never going to use a gender pronoun ever again in my life. They. I like they. They is broad. And at first I was doing this just to kind of dodge the screw up. And after a while, I think I started to get the point of the lesson. And that's the point of why do we have to rush to put a flag down on somebody's gender in the first place? And that's where this story goes on. A map. A map has a compass on it for north, south, east, or west. But we know that space is bigger than that. We know that when we interact with space, we're not just going north, south, east, or west. We could go up. We could go up into space. And what direction is that? What if we went down into the ground? What does it mean if someone's on a different part of the globe? What happens when we change the dimensions of a map? And just north, south, east, and west are a little bit more confusing. What about those spaces in between north, south, east, and west, when you're southeast or northwest, somewhere kind of in between? That's some more space. So it's not as simple as left, right, up, down. There's actually a very big space, a lot of dimensions. And so gender is kind of broken down into many of them. And I could start to talk now. And in 30 minutes, and I'm just never going to finish all the dimensions of gender. But because we're in a tech crowd, we're gonna start out with a very simple way to think about it. Hardware and software. We've got hardware. This is kind of our chasis, is what we get around in the world with. And it's made up of a lot of different things. We have morphology. And morphology is gonna be what you're looking at, what you see, what you interact with. And that's where we tend to start to designate gender right away. When someone has a child, is it a boy or is it a girl? What do they have? What's in between their legs? And then we tend to make the decision right then and there without thinking about it. No one asks an infant, because an infant can't answer. We just take a look. You're a boy. And that's where you start to see the blue and the pink and the toys and the expectations. And we actually do know, there's a lot of great studies that show that when an infant, if they're all kind of swaddled up and wearing blue, will be handled by people around them differently than if that same child is swaddled up in pink. We will actually start to have different things we say, different ways that we touch, different ways that we interact. But we also know that there's this other little interesting complication and that's people who are born intersex. That's when you take a look and you say, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. They're not gonna look like their dad when they grow up. And that's a huge, huge determining factor for the way we do gender, especially with young men, is to take a look at what they've got between their legs and say it's very important that what they've got looks like dad. Or they're gonna be confused. This is what we use with circumcision. If we don't circumcise this kid, they're not gonna look like their dad. And apparently when they're spending a lot of time together comparing their Johnson's, it will be problematic if one looks a little bit different than the other. There's a whole big question of consent that's happening there. And the primary answer, even up to about 15 years ago when there was a child born who had either a penis that was a little bit ambiguous or a micro penis and a micro penis actually had a ruler that's when an infant's penis is less than an inch. And without any knowledge of how it's gonna grow or change throughout their lifetime or when they hit puberty, the saying was it's easier to dig a hole than it is to build a pole. And they removed a lot of those small micro penises and constructed with vaginoplasty to make vaginas and to raise kids as girls. Because we made the assumption that they were gonna be a defective male. And to be a defective male would be unacceptable. That would be too hard for them. They would never have anyone who would love them. They would always feel uncomfortable in the locker room. Never gonna look like daddy. All kinds of problems. So you just go ahead and make the change. And a lot of people were into that idea because the whole nature versus nurture suggested that, hey, there's this pink-blue effect. If we just start really early and we raise somebody very effeminately, it's all gonna work out. They've got, they've got, now they have a vagina. We're dressing them up in pink. We're gonna teach them a lot of gender norms. It's gonna be fine. It never really worked out fine. What's the next layer back on our hardware aside from just what we see is gonna be chromosomes and genetics. It's not just as simple as XXXY. And actually when you start to look at XX or XY, it's a rough estimation. XX and XY never look that simple. They really do look like squiggles. They're really incomplete. And there's actually more information than even just XX or XY. There's even more chromosomes that get jumbled in. And there's a whole genetic sequence that with one little change, you're gonna have a lot of diversity that happens down the line. So there's a chromosomal level that you don't get to see. There's a genetic level. What are some different genetic traits? And what are the hormonal levels going to be? When we all start out in utero, we are all working with the same cells that begin to specialize. And it's really interesting to look at some of these pictures. And a lot of times you never see them in anatomy class, but we have analogous tissues. As it turns out, a male body is really not all that different from a female body. There is so much that is shared in common. And a lot of this just goes back to the way we're starting to develop. For instance, I mean, I should warn you, we're gonna be using some frank anatomy vocabulary. The taint. It has a seam. There is a seam you'll notice on somebody's body that starts from kind of the front of their genitals that moves back. And that's a tiny little seam. And if you've ever wondered, why is that there? Why is that there? Why is there that little line there? That's actually where the body has started to fuse when roughly six weeks into your development, there was a flood of hormones that said, this needs to come together and it starts to stitch up. So that little line that you see that can follow down the testicles and move back towards the anus, that's where something came together. Wasn't necessarily like that before. You can also still see that line is a little bit there on someone who has a female body as well because things are fusing there as well. This means that some of the tissues that we see on the body are gonna react the same way. Scrotal tissue is actually gonna be very similar to the tissue of the labia. So if you've ever wondered like, this is how things feel like when people touch me, but I would never, ever in my wildest dreams be able to imagine how it felt for somebody else because I have a completely different body. No, you don't. It's very, very analogous. And you can go back and look at that. So hardware starts to get complicated because we're working with the same cells, we're working with pretty much the same genetic sequence among all of us for as different as we look. We're all very, very, very quite similar when you look at the source code. So we have that, Devin is a big difference. But what about software? What's the software? We have all this hardware, but what does hardware do without some software behind it? And that software is a lot of the way we're upraised to be how to act in our gender, the way we present our gender, and what happens when there are complications there. So in terms of, you know, we talked a little bit about the pink and blue and the toys, but I wanna move back to gender presentation. And I'm gonna go ahead and use a bit of an example. I've got some hairy pets here. And these are a new thing for me. I started growing out my hair this summer. And the reason was, as I was out and about, it was a nice summer day in the Bay Area, one of the few that we had, and I was wearing a tank top. And I hadn't quite shaved and it was a little bit stubbly. And I was standing outside a bar and a random guy walked up and he said, you forgot to shave before you left. And I just kind of immediately started to tease me. And my gut instinct was to apologize. You know, I just kind of like, oh yeah, I know, I totally was gonna rush the house, just wanna get the bar to me and my friends. I didn't even do makeup. And I caught myself. Why am I apologizing for my body? Why am I apologizing for something that my body does normally? Why am I apologizing for the way I look? Who is this guy? Is he the gender police? What's, am I being arrested? What's happening? Am I being detained for deviating from my expected gender? And as soon as I had that moment and I caught myself, I said, you know, my gender is my own. My gender presentation is my own. And I am not under any obligation to present it in a way that makes somebody else comfortable. I can present it however I need to in order to get through this world. So I started to grow it out and it was interesting to see how things changed. For one, there's kind of this expectation that I hate men. I hate men because this means hating men. Well, that's weird. I don't quite understand that one. The other assumption is that I'm a feminist. That I'm like really into being a woman and I'm really into feminist causes, which we also associate with feminism. And the really interesting thing about that is I do not identify as a feminist. I don't. I stopped identifying as a feminist for a long list of reasons, but a lot of which being I don't think I'd ever captured what happens with the way we interact with the femme or the effeminate as a whole. There are boxes, gender boxes, that we all kind of live in. And we have to find our own maps to get out of these boxes. And that's when you can toss all this little brief. I did a quick like five minute gender sex hardware software spiel, but we're gonna pull that back and say what are those boxes look like? And if I say something like man, what are some of the things that we start to think about initially? We have no ideas. Which the hair, hairy, hairy, taking up space. Whether it's a beard, whether it's on the arms, whether it's everywhere. And so let's take the hair that goes kind of everywhere. It starts to occupy space. In general, being a man seems to have a lot of things that relate to taking up space. Like for instance, sitting down on public transit, you're gonna notice that the way people look is gonna change the way they take a seat. Who is taking a seat and sprawling? Who's being polite and taking up less space? Very little space. That's a box. That's a box that someone is in. So someone who looks a little bit more effeminate is gonna be in a slightly smaller box in that situation. And every context is gonna change the way things work. So we have hair, we have taking up space. What are some other things we associate with being masculine or a man? Size. Yeah, definitely. And a lot of that is related to things like testosterone. There's a lot of testosterone and that's what's gonna help make that size. It's gonna help make that hair. It's gonna make that voice that takes up a lot of space, that resonating voice. Testosterone does do a lot of these things. We could also say something like violence. Serial killers. When someone is holding their keys on their walk to the car and it's night, they're not worried about the drag queen coming up behind them and mugging them. You're not worried about the smaller woman. You tend to be more worried that it's gonna be a man who comes up behind you and mugs you. But we know that mugging can happen from all kinds of people for all different kinds of reasons, but we do have that base assumption. So even though someone can get up and say, being violent has nothing to do with being a man, we still kind of get that sense of distrust or uneasiness when it comes down to our personal safety, who's gonna be the one who does this? And is that fair or is that not fair? And here's the other question of that, is what do those expectations do to masculinity? How does the notion that you should be big, strong, tough, hairy, take up space, be strong, be ready to go, rape and pillage, to be a viking? Viking is man. That starts to be a box too. Because, and this is where my notions of feminism started to change, sexism impacts everybody. Sexism is a set of roles and expectations for how you're going to be. And if you fail to meet those expectations, there's gonna be some social lash back. So what happens to someone who is a man who is maybe a little bit effeminate, who maybe has a lisp, who dresses a little bit differently, who doesn't like to play sports? We notice they get picked on a lot, usually pretty early. That's a box. There's also that box is, how are you expected to meet people and be social? Who's supposed to initiate? We have a lot of ideas about who's supposed to initiate something and it should be the masculine that initiates this, whether it's a date, whether it's going to, you know, ask for a raise, things like that. We tend to expect assertion from something masculine and we tend to expect that it's gonna be, you know, more active for that, more receptive for something that's effeminate. That you wait till someone comes and talks to you. Again, that's smaller, slightly small box. So what happens when you start to break it down? What happens when you start to break those boxes? Well for one, you start to have people diversifying language. You start to learn that man and woman can't contain our experiences as humans. No word, no word, no matter how many neologisms we ever come up with here, we could vote for a whole new set of words and expectations and those words would never contain the experience any human has on earth. There is no one word that will ever do it. So breaking down gender may not necessarily be about changing the lexicon. It might be something a little bit more human to be present with somebody. But words do give us a framework to start to understand things. They start to move things to the front of our consciousness. So when we start to say, this person uses a gendered pronouns, aside from just going, don't say he, don't say she, don't say he, don't say she, you also have to let go of your expectations of what that person's going to do. And it actually takes a moment where you have to get to know them. You can't make those same assumptions. You can't make the assumption that they are going to initiate or that they are active. You have to actually find out. You have to start to ask about limits and boundaries. You actually have to negotiate your social engagement to an extent. And that's something that deep down I don't think we have a lot of practice doing because we do have a map that we drive across. We do have, you know, North, South, East and West, you know, those are simplifications that we use because without them it would be very hard to get around. You know, if we were being completely ambiguous and recognizing all the different maps and frames of preference, we might not ever be able to get someone from one place to another. They are very helpful. The problem is, when do we start to care more about the map or the language or the vocabulary than the person that it is referring to, the signifier and the signified. And we tend to get very fetishistic about our signifiers and we tend to forget about what's signified, which is a person. Another way to break it down is to take a look at the images that we see and pornography gets a lot of criticisms for that. And a lot of them are absolutely worthwhile. Absolutely very right on types of things that are being talked about. What happens to a man? What happens to a woman in the scene? And a lot of people talk about the degradation of women who are in a film and the same expectations they have. And this is where it starts to get tricky. Who gets paid more for a scene? A woman. A woman will have hit a lot more for a scene. Who do you see more of? You will see more of a woman. Men are actually beheaded. That's kind of the interesting thing about what we're saying about masculinity is that a man doesn't even have to be a person in the scene. He doesn't need a head, he doesn't need feet. He shows up, he does his thing and he leaves and the scene's really gonna be focused on the woman and her experience in the scene. Whether or not it's fake, it's still about what is her face doing? How is she reacting to all these things happening? There is not a lot of thought given to how a male in a scene is experiencing that scene, what their relationship to what's happening, what their relationship to their role is and they get paid less. And if you screw up once, you're never getting hired again. That's kind of the other thing. It's a lot harder to get work. It's a lot harder to hold on to work. There's actually a challenge. So I started out by talking about a lot of the advantages that men have with these boxes in terms of being able to occupy space, speak up, get promotions, but then those boxes become limitations again in another setting. And this is a setting where there gets to be an advantage if you have a receptive body or you have a passive role because that's what people are watching it for. Changes, the context will always change the privilege that you get and your box will always become limiting in a new circumstance. That doesn't mean it's great for women. And it also changes hiring standards on another level. How long do you get to work if you're a woman? That's where we get to flip it again. If you're a male in the industry, you're gonna be able to work for ostensibly as long as you can work. Doesn't matter how old you get. It doesn't really even matter how much your body changes. You can keep working. Once you've landed that role, you're in. If you've got a female body, chances are you're gonna be there for a couple of years before you leave. Given that I first started appearing in my first pictures and I've done very few in 2008, it's 2012 and I'm geriatric. I am 27 years old and people are like, why don't you're gonna be retiring? Retire, I'm 27. Not to mention the fact that retirement means something different because what am I going to be allowed to do when I leave? If you're a male in the industry, you get to go back to your life. You get it back by and large because people look at what you were doing in that scene as the active role, disembodied also. It's hard to recognize somebody without a head. And people tend to not be looking at the face at all. Gonna get to go back because we have expectations that someone who has a male body wants sex all the time. And it makes sense for them to be doing what they're doing. We look at a woman in a scene and we say, why is she there? Why would she want to be there? I get why he's there. He's getting paid to have sex, I understand that. Why is she there? Because she's getting paid to have sex, same reason. But we'd have a lot of ideas that it's damaged. She's damaged goods, she has drug addiction problems, she has psychological problems, she got hurt as a child. She wouldn't be here unless those big bad men were holding her there. She'd be running and screaming and escaping at the first chance he got. Starts to be limited again. That box got big, you can make a lot of money really quickly, then it got small real fast in a heartbeat just right when you wanna leave. Someone has to stay, their work changes, and a lot of it's because they age. Who is allowed to age in our culture and who is not allowed to age? Who do we want to just go away when they stop looking pretty and they stop being the peacock ostensibly? That was another big change to confront is how am I expected to be a woman on camera? What happens when this grew in? You don't see a lot of that, you don't get hired. That's an interesting one. When you start to change the way you present, who wants to see you changes? You're a little bit harder to figure out. If you're a gender queer performer, your scope of work is gonna be hard because people see you on camera and they don't know what's happening at all. They're a little bit confused. They don't really necessarily wanna see it. It takes more work. That's another great excuse I've seen. It takes more work to figure out why they're there, what they're doing, who they are. Are they atop, are they at bottom? What's happening? That's another big type of change. It's hard to break the rules. When you work in an industry that fetishizes all those rules. The way you get to exist in your space, the way you get to interact with other people is very, very different. I'm trying to break that down little by little by changing the access to resources that people have and to continue educating about gender. But first and foremost, to have a chance to start speaking is a big part. Social media is changing gender in a big way. Not just because we're having conversations that we haven't had before. And if someone could give me a heads up when I've got five minutes left, just yell at me or throw something like an avocado. Social media is changing the way we look at gender because we're changing narratives and we're starting to introduce New Lexicon into everything. Right now, if you look at Twitter or Tumblr or Pinterest or things like that, you're gonna hear a lot of voices, maybe not a huge number, definitely not the majority, but a lot of voices who are saying, my gender doesn't match what you expect of me. Either I don't dress the way you want, either I don't use the vocabulary that you want, or maybe I don't have the partners that you want. Thank you, I was spot on with that. And kind of breaking it down by sharing that and by also sharing their bodies in the process of it. If you go onto YouTube right now and you search genderqueer or transgender or intersex, there's a lot of people who are gonna open that door and show you what that's like. They're gonna show you what it means to say, this is the body I started with and I am achieving the vision I have for my own life and the vision I have for my interactions with others. And I'm gonna open that door and let you see it. I'm gonna let you see either the pain, the times when it was really great and it worked out, celebrating the times when someone got their pronouns right, when they were at school or work, challenging the hard times when they got fired. We don't tend to hire, it's not just even in pornography, we don't tend to hire people who are transgender in any job capacity. It forces a lot of homelessness and sex trafficking in many ways because if you can't get hired to work at a Starbucks because your gender's a little bit too confusing, where are you gonna work? That's the hard part, you take what you get and you open it up again. This is my body, I don't get work except for this work. Here's how it's changing. Here's my blog, here are my friends and here are the call-outs. That's the big thing that's happening is people confronting standards and saying don't use those pronouns to describe me. Use these pronouns and I'm gonna keep calling you out and I'm not gonna call you out politely because I've been going through my whole life and every type of microaggression throughout my day is telling me that I'm wrong and I'm broken and the call-out is about saying I am not wrong, I am not broken. The compass is not spinning out of control. The compass was never in control. There was never North, South, East or West, there was never male or female. Those are just standards we dropped on, the infinite diversity of the human experience and the infinite diversity of the human body. All that source code of our DNA, all that source code of our chromosomes, it's too immense for us to ever look at raw. We have to look at it in some kind of definable form and those are whether that's words or software or images, we put it into a framework that we can understand but that beautiful source code, that beautiful source code, that beautiful diversity that we cannot comprehend, that's what the call-out is about. It's really about sitting down and saying let's have a little bit of reverence and humility for just how beautiful and broad and how diverse we are, how there is no set of conditions we can say to find male or female. That those characteristics are every characteristic that everyone feels vulnerability, that everyone feels strong at sometimes. We all have the capacity to be the predator and we all have the capacity to be the prey and when we start to attach a lot of these ideas to who's the predator and who's the prey, we miss out on sharing our experiences. We've let our assumptions mean more than the person standing in front of us and that's what it means to break down the map to say I'm not going North, South, East or West, I'm going 360 degrees all at once. Thank you so much. Thank you.