My sister, MITA Co-founder Melissa Bennett, and I spoke together at a Williamsville School District Board of Education Meeting, in October 2021, in support of two gender-inclusive policies that were being voted on by the district’s BOE at the time. One was Policy 7554: Student Gender Identity, a policy aimed at inaugurating and declaring publicly and in writing the Williamsville School District’s promise to “[foster] a safe and supporting learning environment for all students, free from discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, gender, gender identity, gender non-conformity, and gender expression.” The policy also promises that the District “will assess and address the specific needs of individual students on a case-by-case basis.” The second policy, Policy 5634: Gender Neutral Single-Occupancy Bathrooms promises that the District is “committed to creating and maintaining an including education and work environment” and “will ensure that all single-occupancy bathroom facilities are designated as gender neutral.”
Continue reading “Jessica Lowell Mason and Melissa Bennett Speak at Williamsville Board of Education Meeting on District Gender Policies: October 2021”Glynnis Reed-Conway
“Why Do We Whisper Our Stories?”: Disability Frameworks and Multiply Marginalized Subjects
I start this essay with the question posed by Jennifer Eisenhauer (2010) in their article “Writing Dora: Creating Community Through Autobiographical Zines about Mental Illness”: Why do we whisper our stories? They propose this question in response to a student with a mental health disability who approached Eisenhauer after class, speaking of her hospitalization in hushed tones. Those hushed tones address the shame, invisibility, and silence suffered by neurodivergent people in the quiet, in the dark, in the back, unseen, and rarely heard in their own voices. I begin my writing with this quote because my own silences about my personal experiences as a neurodivergent person have come to their limit and I am now in the place where I choose to speak louder, to articulate more of my truth. Why do we whisper our stories? Because we are shamed by the normative, ablebodied world to the madnesses we inhabit.
Continue reading “Glynnis Reed-Conway”Kelly Price
“Did you two ever connect?” the message read. I was sitting in an ordinary restaurant with my ordinary family eating an ordinary meal, and “Ding!” went the phone. “Did you two ever connect?”
Continue reading “Kelly Price”Gwendolyn Harper
Sleep of Waking
I tire of sleeping
And yet all around are the somnolent
The unconscious
The dreaming
The listless and stirring
Continue reading “Gwendolyn Harper”Eliah Lüthi
Poems translated from German based on an audio-interpretation by Tanja Barbian, http://www.englisch-dolmetschen.de.
– I –
Many years ago, I told you:
I told you of wondering creatures
that wander, full of wonder
through my worlds.
Worlds, which make me wide
and draw my nights in magic lights.
Continue reading “Eliah Lüthi”Aimee Herman
exordium
When you aren’t there to witness something, all you have is imagination, mine was toxic.
Mine should have come with its own hazmat suit, recalled at birth. Continue reading “Aimee Herman”
Lemmy Renee
SAFE (BATH)ROOM
Riddle: “What is full of emptiness?”
RE: Roadblocks to Justice?
Leaked! Continue reading “Lemmy Renee”
Troi Anastasia Michael
Amazing that this far into our shared history, we still find ourselves quite often and rigidly locked into roles assigned by generations and conditions long-ago removed and irrelevant from our present daily life, in the following piece, Troi Anastasia Michael briefly speaks of their guided by music journey of self-discovery towards “Living Quietly Out Loud,” their own truth in a world reluctant yet ever-so slowly opening to the non-binary notion. Continue reading “Troi Anastasia Michael”