May 2024 - Organization Pending Newsroom - Upper Arlington, Ohio
Welcome to Organization Pending's Newsroom, May 2024: Pride: Portable Summer Learning Series edition. This month kicks off Organization Pending's three month Summer Learning Series, focusing on a variety of recommendations for summer and year-long learning.
Celebrate Pride Month in June with local Pride events, a local business recommendation, and queer TV shows discussion. Learn more about intersexuality and asexuality with three podcast recommendations, dive into two queer science memoirs, and take a look at a recent U.S. release covering "everything you need to know about being trans".
Don't miss the recommendations from last year's Looking to Pride, including interviews with six featured Community Recommendations!
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If you have an upcoming event, resource, or professional the community should know about, contact Organization Pending.
Queer Columbus: YouTube™ Episode Recommendation
You may have seen Alternative Auto Care on Organization Pending's Community Recommendations page, but have you heard Owner Chris Cozad's story behind Columbus' own "neighborhood, women-owned and operated, eco-friendly and LGBTQ welcoming auto repair facility"? Long-time friend of Cozad, Holly Fulger from the True Beauty Discovery YouTube™ channel, recently interviewed Cozad on her beginnings to the industry, how the industry has changed over time with the addition of computers to vehicles, and why Alternative Auto Care's mission is essential to our community.
Since 1983, Cozad and her team have offered "brake repair, routine preventative maintenance, cooling system services, electrical system repair, general auto repair services and diagnostics on all makes and models." What had started as a hobby for Cozad quickly became a realization that communities needed auto repair they could trust, and technicians that reflected the customers' values.
"When I moved to Columbus in the early 80's, I was unemployed and my friends kept calling me up and saying, 'Chris, my car won't start!' or 'My mom's car needs an oil change,' or whatever - just trying to a) give me a little income and b) protect themselves from being ripped off. The automotive industry has a terrible reputation. It's really not just women, but that certainly is the overarching reputation issue, I think, that the industry has."
As a customer of Alternative Auto Care myself, I'm grateful for the plain, honest talk about my vehicle and the options available to me, their willingness to explain when I have questions, and their ability to send me information and pictures via text and email (including reminders when routine services are due!).
Podcast Episode Recommendation: Queer TV Shows
"This might go off the rails, but we're just going to have fun."
The Reel Gay Movie Show, a "podcast featuring honest and 'straight' forward reviews of the latest movies, from a queer point of view," departed from their usual discussions on current movies to review their Fierce Five Queer TV Shows (and honorable mentions), discussing the progression of LGBTQIA+ representation on television - even within the shows themselves.
"It hasn't been that long that queer characters have been allowed to have their own stories on TV. [...] A lot of those early gay shows did, I mean, it was progressive to show a gay character so central to a story, but they had that thing where the gay character always had to experience violence - but that's because it was the reality of that time."
Forgetting to discuss the parameters of the fierce five lists allowed Mike and Ryan to interpret the assignment as queer-centered shows, shows featuring regular queer characters, or shows that have a large queer following. It's always exciting to hear them talk about some of my favorites, and hear a few recommendations to put on my to-watch list, and I appreciate their nuanced conversation about older shows that have remained queer cannon, but do have their issues through our lens from the future.
Want more? Check out Queer Movie Podcast!
Intersex and Asexual Podcast Episodes Recommendation
Maybe you're familiar with the LGBTQIA+ acronym, but how much do you know about the "I" and the "A"? Note: Organization Pending recognizes each letter in the LGBTQIA+ acronym may stand for more than one gender or sexual orientation label. Please visit PFLAG's National Glossary for more information and definitions on words used in the LGBTQIA+ community.
Gabe Dunn interviewed intersex activist and author Alicia Roth Weigel (she/they) on The Knew Guys podcast, continuing the conversation on Dunn's and Allison Raskin's Just Between Us podcast.
"Being intersex, to start off with, [...] it's kind of exactly what the word sounds like. I was born inter-sex, between the sexes. [...] What people are now starting to recognize is that sex is also a spectrum - so the physical sex traits that you're born with. So that would involve anything from chromosomes to hormones to genitalia to internal reproductive organs - and that also doesn't always fit a neat little binary of just the male and female that are usually the only two options available on a birth certificate. But what I like to also tell people is that the spectrum of sex is not only relevant to intersex people, it's relevant to everyone. [...] Facial hair, cup size - those are all sex traits, and that is also on a spectrum."
Roth Weigel focuses their The New Guys Being Intersex with Alicia Roth Weigel discussion on experiences and life-long consequences of unnecessary childhood medical procedures, the history of overmedicalization of intersex children overall, their educational work as an intersex activist and advocate, and their view on the intersections between the transgender and intersex communities.
Take a deeper dive with Just Between Us in Intersex Advocacy with Alicia Roth Weigel [start at time mark 9:05 for the interview], talking more specifically about their personal experiences as an intersex person, combatting misconceptions, why people might not want to visible in the larger community, identity choice in the queer community, and current issues still facing intersex youth today.
"Just like [how] sexuality is not binary, you're not just gay or straight, there's a whole beautiful world in between. And just like gender isn't binary - you're not just a man or woman, there's a whole host of genders that fall somewhere in between on that spectrum - sex is also not binary, so the physical sex traits that we're born with are also not binary. It's an umbrella term, so there are a lot of different ways to be intersex. [...] What a lot of people don't know is that we actually, all humans, start off looking really, really similar anatomically until around seven weeks of development in the womb."
For more information and support, please visit interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth.
"When I was thinking about it, what I would want from [a crush], what's the type of relationship - sex wasn't a huge part of it. But because I was always talking about who I had a crush on and who was hot and so on, my inner experience was different, but the words were the same and the behavior kind of looked the same too. I think that's what took me such a long time to be like, 'Oh, something about how I experience the world is different.'"
The We Can Do Hard Things podcast invited journalist, editor and author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen, to talk about Why Do We Have Sex?, starting with her own journey of exploration:
"That conversation [with my friend] made me think why was it that I was having sex with my partners, and enjoying it, and what was actually driving me - was it sexual attraction? And that's when I started, you know, kind of diving into the ace world, and realizing that my understanding of what sexual attraction is got totally tangled up with all of these other things that come bundled up with it. And once I realized that I don't experience that much sexual attraction - I'm somewhere on the ace spectrum - other parts of my life started making sense to me."
Chen, Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle discuss compulsory sexuality, reasons that people have sex, other forms of intimacy, "why your sexuality is a relationship between YOU and YOU," and a thought-provoking conversation on the use of the word asexual in relation to hermeneutical injustice - "exclusion from language creation", affecting many minority communities.
For more information and support, please visit the Asexual Visibility and Education Network.
Queer Science Memoirs: Books Recommendation
Sabrina Imbler is a writer and science journalist, using their knowledge as a filter to view their life through as a queer mixed-race person.
Examining sand strikers, cuttlefish, goldfish and more, Imbler's 2022 book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, draws parallels between those stories and their own. As a queer reader, I especially enjoyed Imbler's 2020 publication, Dyke (geology), an intersection of geology and queer beginnings.
"A dyke, according to geology, is a sheet of magma born in a fracture. Dykes are best understood as the veins of a volcano, coursing hot and varicose toward the surface to erupt. Because of this, dykes are always younger than the body of rock in which they've made their home. Born differently than the mother rock, they make their presence known in rebel coloration: black against white, striped against mottled, crystal against sand. Geologists consider dykes intrusive formations, in part because they were formed underground until exposed."
Imbler's mix of memoir and science kept bringing this reader back to the lesson that we truly aren't that different from other animals, and our world is more connected than we can see - including our own human impact on individual animals, species, and environments. I loved how interwoven their personal story and the science were, and can't wait to see what I get to learn about next, connecting my own stories with Imbler's and the Earth's.
YouTuber™ Book Recommendation
Jamie Raines' book, The T in LGBT: Everything You Need to Know About Being Trans, is out for release in the United States! Raines, better known as Jammidodger, is a trans YouTuber™ from the UK, educating the public on the lived experiences of a trans person, often drawing on his background as a psychologist to disprove anti-trans rhetoric. I especially appreciate Raines citing his sources during videos and his use of humor, making sure there's a balance and spectrum of lighthearted to serious on the channel - but always educational.
The Upper Arlington Public Library has this book available now - get in line with your library card today to read before deciding to add it permanently to your collection! Want to meet Raines? Check out the U.S. dates for his book tour!
Queer Columbus: LGBTQIA+ Local
Check out The Buckeye Flame's 2024 Ohio LGBTQ+ Pride Guide to find local Pride events organized by city or date, including Rainbow UA Pride on Sunday, June 9, 1-5pm at Sunny 95 Park and Amelita Mirolo Barn! Make sure to stop by Organization Pending's booth to say hello to Tabi (they/them), Owner/Operator of Organization Pending - enter the giveaway, and receive a discount on services for immediate use!
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