Beth Greenfield

To mark the International Day of the Woman on March 8 and Women’s History Month, Yahoo Lifestyle is exploring notions of feminism and the women’s movement through a diverse series of profiles — from transgender activist Ashlee Marie Preston to conservative campus leader Karin Agness Lips — that aim to reach across many aisles. 

Yahoo Lifestyle was lucky enough to spend much of Women’s History Month speaking with some amazing individuals — activists, mothers, actors, and influencers among them. And one thing we asked them all is about the term feminism — what it means to them, and if there is room for more than one definition within the context of today’s women’s movement. Here’s what 12 game-changers had to say.

Padma Lakshmi, Top Chef host

“I don’t think there’s room, actually, for more than one definition. I think there’s one definition and it’s very plain: If you’re a feminist, you believe that all people, including women — half the population — deserve to be treated equally. We deserve equality under the law, in our culture, in our marriages, as parents, and as professionals. We have a long way to go. We’ve come some way, but we have a long, long way to go. … But if you believe that everybody deserves the same rights, then you’re a feminist. It’s that simple. It’s not hating men; it has nothing to do with that. I love men — I love men — I love women, I wear bikinis, I wear lipstick, I have a lot of lipstick, I wear high heels, I am a feminist. I don’t think that I could love someone who wasn’t a feminist, because I wouldn’t respect them. Because I would feel like they don’t respect me. Because if you say, ‘I’m not a feminist,’ then that means you’re bigoted in some way — that you think I’m less because of my gender, or that I deserve less than someone who’s a man. And I think that person is crazy.”

Asia Kate Dillon, Billions and Orange Is the New Black actor

“Feminism feels to me like an acknowledgment of the ‘fem’ … the fem-ness — the feminine energy as just as powerful and integral toward life as masculine energy, and the idea that everything that we’ve been taught, traditionally, about the ways in which feminine energy is somehow less than or weaker or not as capable. It’s just about subverting all those ideas and saying, actually, we all are capable of experiencing the feminine and the masculine but also the investigation of what those words actually mean – what is feminine? What is masculine? Other than the traditions of a social contract that was created before we were born — that we never signed — that we’re asked to adhere to.”

Tamika Mallory, Women’s March cofounder

“I’m still trying to figure out what feminism is to me. There are broad definitions that have been historically used to describe the term, but I’m still working to define it for me and my generation, because the word itself — yes, it is a word — I believe has manifested itself in a real movement. It’s a breathing and living thing, and in order for that to be so, it has to actually represent the issues and concerns that I carry with me, and that is not always so. Some folks who claim feminism may not be concerned with the things that matter to me. But then there are other people who claim feminism, and they are part of the body of people who are interested in how black and brown people are impacted by oppression and other very significant issues. So it does have different meanings for different people. But how it manifests itself collectively is something I think we, specifically Women’s March, are still trying to define and still trying to figure out.”

Trace Lysette, transgender activist and Transparent actor

“I think that the key, going forward, is intersectional feminism —inclusionary feminism versus conservative old-school feminism, or white elitist feminism. Being a feminist is to be compassionate, and compassion doesn’t stop at just cis white women — it should permeate into all different walks of humanity. If you’re not with that, you’re going to get left behind.”

Marley Dias, 13-year-old author and activist, head of #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign

“I believe that feminism needs to teach more girls about how to make institutional changes and how to further engage men and boys into being our allies. … I don’t see my generation at the forefront [of #MeToo and Time’s Up], the way older women are. I don’t see where they are making a place for us to continue, refine, and expand the work they have started. Young girls like me may not understand all the issues, but we are the ones who will be left to deal with anything they have not dealt with; we must be taken seriously.”

Melissa Harris Perry, professor and former MSNBC commentator

“For me feminism is a question, and the question is: What truths are missing here? So it is not a particular set of policy prescriptions or position on any set of ideas; it’s a question that we’re asking ourselves all the time. We are always limited in our own understandings, and so no matter how woke you are, you’re always asleep to something else. We have some blind spots in our periphery. [I remind my students] that they should probably not eliminate everybody that asks a stupid-ass question in class, because … just because they don’t have all their truths doesn’t mean that they’re not on the path to them. So just keep asking, as feminists: What truth is missing?”

Lorelei Lee, sex worker and activist

“For me, feminism means recognizing that misogynist underside of so many of the systems in which we live. But it also means recognizing the ways that misogyny intersects with other forms of oppression. So I think that a definition of feminism that isn’t intersectional, to use a frequently misunderstood word, is a failed definition of feminism. I think it fails to uphold the ideal that it pretends to support. If you claim to agree with gender equality, you can’t actually uphold that without recognizing the ways that gender discrimination intersects with so many other forms of discrimination. Obviously, two of the very big areas in which that happens is exclusion of sex workers and exclusion of transgender people from feminist discourse.”

Kimberly Drew, Metropolitan Museum of Art social media manager and “Museum Mammy”

“For so many people, it can mean so many exclusionary things, and it is a term/phrase that needs to be constantly interrogated. It’s maturing every day. Every year we are learning new ways in which there is a hole in it and we’ve got to fix it and not just put a Band-Aid on it. … It’s not perfect. It will never be perfect, but it doesn’t have to hurt. We have to keep flexible and in flux because all of these identities are constantly on a spectrum and all of these oppressions are constantly on a spectrum — there are always new ways in which people get cut out.”

Kassy Dillon, founder of the Lone Conservative

“It’s supposed to mean equality and helping women get to a status where they’re equal. In modern day terms, it’s changed, or the connotation has changed, where there’s this standard for the feminist movement and what you must believe. I don’t like the term feminism. Women are not a monolith and have different viewpoints.”

Ashlee Marie Preston, writer and activist, Revry host

“I would say, ultimately, that feminism that doesn’t acknowledge the experiences of women of color, immigrant women, disabled women, or trans women is faux feminism. Sometimes we forget that there are identities that carry more privilege within the women’s movement, and often what happens is the experiences of women of color and trans women tend to be put to the back, and there’s a lot of myopia. And any time you don’t consider the experiences of all women, it’s coming from a self-serving place. … I feel that it’s impossible to be an ultraconservative feminist, because you’re supporting people that are working against your own interests. So when I see white women who are Trump supporters, who say they’re feminists, it blows my mind. … Feminism is about improving the quality of life for all women. And if you’re not actively dismantling racism, or discrimination based on class and economic position, then you are part of the problem — and you’re benefiting fromm the oppression of other women. Therefore, you cannot be a feminist.”

Karin Agness Lips, founder of the Network for Enlightened Women and the Independent Women’s Forum

“Right now, one of the problems with feminism is that it lacks a universally agreed-upon meaning. If you would gather a group of leaders in the women’s empowerment movement, the definition would vary dramatically. The problem with modern-day feminism is that it lacks that universally agreed-upon definition, and it’s been co-opted by political liberals and progressives as a vehicle to pass their political agenda. The feminism I’d love to talk about is opportunity feminism, which seeks to maximize women’s opportunities to build the fulfilling and meaningful lives they want to build. When I speak on campuses, I talk about opportunity feminism focusing on the opportunities our policies should be promoting.”

Tarana Burke, Just Be Inc. activist and #MeToo creator

There’s always room. I never try to tell people anything that personally impacts their lives. Right? For me, it is about gender equity, and it’s just about us having the same things as men. Because I think there are things that exist in the world that are associated with men that are just toxic in general. For instance, when people talk about pay equity, we’re really talking about white women having the same amount of pay as white men. When pay equity happens, what happens to the women of color? Pay equality rather. But when you talk about equity, you’re talking about an equitable distribution of resources and things like that and so my feminism is a feminism that reaches all of the marginalized communities, includes all of their voices and centers on their needs, which is hard because it’s a lot of different needs from a lot of different people. But my feminism is one that is committed to that work. That’s how I look at it. I try to work from that gaze.”

Virgie Tovar, author and body-positive activist and influencer

“For me, it’s fundamentally about the belief that every single woman has the right to thrive, and that’s a different definition for every single person. Like, for me, my right to thrive is my right to have sex whenever and with whomever I want, to have relationships on the terms that work for both of us, and for me to be able to sit by a pool and have a Chihuahua and speak my mind without cultural repercussions. It means the right to actually do the things that authentically nourish me, and for the culture to support — or at least not actively hinder — that endeavor. We’re living in a reality in which women’s right to thrive and women’s right to freedom are deeply hindered by patriarchy, and there’s not an active investment in women in our culture right now. What we see is a woman is more likely to be sexually assaulted than to live a life on her own terms, that’s the reality … as for conservative women, if you are actively exercising politics and voting on politics that hinder women’s autonomy, you are not a feminist. It’s just that simple.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• March for Our Lives and gay activism: ‘They’re definitely linked for me,’ says Emma González
• The most pressing question of Women’s History Month: What is feminism in 2018?
• ‘Stormy Daniels and I have a lot in common’: Sex-worker mom and the dehumanization of an adult-film star

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.

To mark the International Day of the Woman on March 8 and Women’s History Month, Yahoo Lifestyle is exploring notions of feminism and the women’s movement through a diverse series of profiles — from transgender activist Ashlee Marie Preston to conservative campus leader Karin Agness Lips — that aim to reach across many aisles. 

Virgie Tovar is sitting by the pool of her Tucson, Arizona hotel. She’s wearing a one-piece covered in a print of $100 bills, though she often opts for a “fatkini,” which, she says, “makes me feel sexy, and like I’m disrupting the narrative of what respectably educated women can wear.”

Tovar is speaking to Yahoo Lifestyle by phone as she lounges, in the midst of a road trip through California, Arizona, and New Mexico with the fellow writers and influencers of Sister Spit: QTPOC (Queer and Trans People of Color), a revolutionary traveling open mic now in its 21^st year.

The writer and body-pride activist, known by legions of faithful readers for her impassioned essays, has become a champion of fat pride. Her Instagram feed — followed by 33.8K fans and counting — is full of kitschy, celebratory pics of herself posing cheekily in brightly-colored swimsuits and crop tops, as well as eating — donuts, ice cream, pomegranates, BBQ, you name it — and just straight-up living, with gusto and pride. That the approach is both revolutionary and feminist is an idea the 34-year-old Mexicana explores a bit in a recent Ravishly essay, and more deeply in her forthcoming book, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Aug., Feminist Press), and about which she chats easily as she’s sitting by the desert pool.

“One of the reasons for me that fat is a feminist issue is because women getting to choose what their body looks like, and not spending their life becoming the cultured expectation of themselves, is a feminist act,” Tovar says. “Any act of women expressing autonomy is, in my opinion, a feminist act. Women expressing desire is a feminist act, particularly around food.”

It may at first seem like a reach. But, Tovar explains, “Why does culture love little girls and hate women so much? It’s because when she expresses sexual desire, she becomes a woman, and she is no longer under the protective wing of the culture.” She sees evidence of the shift over and over again — particularly in sexual assault cases, when, if there was any possibility that the girl expressed any desire, she’s no longer protected by the police. “They’re like, ‘girls need to take care of themselves.’”

And the connection, as she sees it, is that “sexual desire is obviously connected to hunger [in that] women are being asked to exercise self-control and discipline around all these different kinds of desires in order to be considered good, worthy people.”

It’s a pressure that women feel even — if not especially — from other women, Tovar notes, adding that it’s something she’s learned a lot about from the participants in her annual empowering Babecamp, which aims to help women “break up with diet culture.”

desert selfie a must

A post shared by Virgie Tovar (@virgietovar) on Mar 5, 2018 at 6:29pm PST

When she started asking women where they were experiencing the most fatphobia, Tovar says she was “absolutely certain” they would say from men, specifically from their relationships. “But it’s the workplace,” she found says she was told. “And they weren’t experiencing it as someone calling them a name or something really aggressive… rather, it was the constant, never-ending diet chatter, and what they experienced as ‘food surveying,’ where everyone notices every time you’re eating, and tells you you’re being ‘good’ if you’re eating a salad. Which is super patronizing and very invasive.”

So the office, Tovar explains, “has become this venue of fatphobia, but it’s this softer fatphobia — not this aggressive, epithet-hurling experience.”

Much of it isn’t even meant to be hurtful, but because “women use diet talk as a way to create intimacy… They’ve been taught this is a safe discussion topic they can share in order to create friendship.”

But it’s not a new phenomenon, Tovar says. “It’s a way in which women can communicate that they are non-threatening with one another. It’s a subtle way of saying, ‘I’m playing the game, too. I’m not a threat. I’m not interested in destabilizing the culture.’ That’s, like, super insidious and weird and creepy,” she says. “But if you kind of accept that dieting is symbolic behavior, which I do, then it’s obvious that linguistics would play a role in maintaining that submissive position.”

“I actually feel like, when we’re talking about fatness and men, we’re still talking about feminism. Because fundamentally, when women are fat, they’re violating the cultural rule around what is expected of women, which is that we are small, and that we don’t take up a lot of space, both metaphorically and physically,” she explains. “When men are experience fatphobia, they’re being punished for having a feminized body. In the book, I say the most common anxiety for fat men is about feminization — there’s anxiety about growing breasts, about higher estrogen levels.”

And then there’s the mess of issues that comes up around fatness in regards to men and women together, and sex and romance.

“These [Babecamp] women — and this is a hetero scenario — understand that a man who expects them to be thin by any means necessary is probably an asshole. They intellectually know this. But inside, in their bodies, they’ve been taught all they have to do is be thin and they can have love,” she says. So unpacking and dismantling that lifelong belief can be tricky.

“Diet culture is really good at positioning dieting as something as simple as learning how to brush your teeth: All you have to do is learn how to control a fundamental human instinct for the rest of your life,” Tovar notes wryly. “Who can’t do that?”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• Why ‘Museum Mammy’ believes the feminist movement ‘will never be perfect’
• The most pressing question of Women’s History Month: What is feminism in 2018?
• Conservative millennial Kassy Dillon: ‘I don’t like the term ‘feminist’”

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.

To mark the International Day of the Woman on March 8 and Women’s History Month, Yahoo Lifestyle is exploring notions of feminism and the women’s movement through a diverse series of profiles — from transgender activist Ashlee Marie Preston to conservative campus leader Karin Agness Lips — that aim to reach across many aisles. 

Ever since she first burst into national view as an MSNBC commentator, and then host of her own show in 2012, Melissa Harris-Perry has been telling it like it is.

But the esteemed professor of African-American studies and political science — at the University of Chicago, followed by Princeton University, Tulane University, and now Wake Forest University, where she is also the executive director of the Pro Humanitate Institute and founder of the Anna Julia Cooper Center — has been speaking and writing frankly about race relations and human rights for much of her life.

It was in a way unavoidable, considering the groundbreaking Southern family Harris-Perry, 44, comes from: Her father was the first dean of African-American affairs at the University of Virginia, and his twin brother was the first chair of aeronautic engineering at MIT, and their legendary status infused the family with the fierce believe that being black in this country was not a reason to be held back.

Today, MHP, as she’s known, is teaching, writing, leading, and parenting (she has three daughters) younger generations to be strong thinkers and leaders, with feminism at the core of all her messaging. She recently spoke with Yahoo Lifestyle in honor of Women’s History Month, touching on topics from the Women’s March and its recent controversy to raising a rebellious teen.

Yahoo Lifestyle: Ahead of the March for Our Lives, you wrote for Elle, where you are editor-at-large, about who is and who is not allowed to be angry in our culture. The Parkland students have done a great job at bringing students from across the country, including Chicago, into this anti-gun-violence movement. How else can we change the narrative?

MHP: The kids are great. The students from Parkland themselves, I think, are highly aware of the ways in which they operate and are clearly deploying their race and economic privilege to… acknowledge and recognize that their peers who were less able to do so. We can go back to Rosa Parks, and the idea of how Rosa Parks’ role in our memory is so different from [that of] Claudette Colvin… the unmarried pregnant African-American girl who had also resisted Jim Crow segregation just a month before, and been arrested on the bus, but didn’t have the training of being an activist and just wasn’t reputable in the same ways.

I saw you address the crowd at Power to the Polls, the Women’s March Las Vegas event in January. You said, “Saying thank you to black women is not a damn hashtag.” What did you mean?

Part of what I was doing was telling my personal family story. My family has long thought of itself as originating itself from my father and his twin brother, highly accomplished men. I’d recently gone back and was reading this late 1950s Ebony article [now framed] that reported on my dad and his twin brother and called them “the genius twins of Richmond, Virginia.” This time I noticed in the story, more carefully, my grandmother. And there’s one [part] in which they’re talking about my dad and his brother going off to this academic summer program, and how my grandmother, who was a really brilliant seamstress… knew, because the boys were going to this summer program, that they weren’t going to work that summer, so there wasn’t going to be coal to heat the house that winter. It was the first time it has truly occurred to me how much that story is not really my dad’s story or my uncle’s story — it’s really my grandmother’s story. And as much as they were geniuses, how could they possibly be geniuses unless they came from a genius — one literally willing to be cold in the winter so that they could go to school? It floored me. I couldn’t speak.

Thanks @TimesTalks for the opportunity to moderate this amazing conversation with @OsopePatrisse and #AngelaDavis. I’ll never forget it. pic.twitter.com/BDMzfgV3xF

— Melissa Harris-Perry (@MHarrisPerry) February 21, 2018

We don’t really know how to recover the genius of a black woman who died never being degreed or rich or any of these particular things that we call success, but nonetheless made every other single thing possible. So what I want to do is when we say “thank you, black women,” what we’re actually doing is having a reclamation of their genius, and thinking about how to make public policy that would’ve made life easier for Grandma Rosa just so that her sons could learn.

What’s your take on the recent controversy surrounding Women’s March founder Tamika Mallory, and her refusal to denounce the anti-Semitic, homophobic statements of Louis Farrakhan?

My sense is she has a personal connection to Minister Farrakhan, that that personal connection is about a deep loyalty that extends way farther back to a community —like, decades deeper than the Women’s March — and that in many ways, the Women’s March and her leadership takes advantage of her sets of ties… So my sense is that the most dangerous anti-Semite in the country currently lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And to have any concern about Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism is weird.

Like, Louis fu**ing Farrakhan? Are you serious? Because Louis Farrakhan is empowered to do what? He runs an organization that controls what resources? And creates what policy? And owns property where? I mean, it’s weird. The President of the United States has questioned the humanity — like are they human — of Jewish people. The President of the United States. So I’m super-duper focused on that. And that various people walking around the planet are racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, is like shrug-my-shoulders true. I mean I’m a black woman. Most people I’ve worked around, worked for, worked near, have opinions about me that are typically pretty fu**ing horrifying. Like, I grew up in the South in the 1970s with a white mother and a black father. I don’t thought-police people. From my perspective it’s like, “OK, sure.”

We saw Barack Obama break ties with his minister, Jeremiah Wright, following controversy during his campaign…

We said, “Oh my god, Jeremiah Wright said racist words, in our opinion, and you must now break your ties with your minister!” And as far as I know, that family has never had a church home again. That’s rough. I mean, I’m sure they’ve gone to church as an official matter… but they don’t have a church home, which in the black community is actually a big fu**ing deal. So they broke their relationship with their minister, but at least they got elected to office twice. As far as I know, no one is offering that to Tamika Mallory. And she’s being asked to denounce this by people who, as far as I know, have never denounced their racism, sexism, their homophobia. That’s strange, no. So it’s not that complicated to me. I wouldn’t [apologize] either. No. We get to all pick our own relationships.

The thing I’m always worried about in the world is power, and how power is wielded in ways that cause inequity. So if you can show me that Minister Farrakhan has taken his position and used his position to create inequity and inequality for Jewish people, then I will denounce that tomorrow. But holding horrifying opinions seems to me to be a protected right under our constitution — so protected, that I even think it’s OK for our president to hold them. And our president uses his horrifying opinions to then enact them into policy. If he believes that Mexicans are rapists and then withdraws DACA, that’s a problem. So I’m always much more interested in racism, sexism, homophobia when they are manifest as a matter of inequity in public policy.

Your daughters are 4 and 16. How do you balance teaching them about all the injustices in this world without terrifying them with reality?

They’re sort of funny and different in this way, and my big girl, who’s 16, is like not what most people would probably expect. [Laughing] You probably think, “Oh MHP, 16-year-old daughter, I’m sure she’s, like, burning down the streets!” No, she’s more like your first black Republican first lady! A little bit. Not completely, but more like that than burning it down in the streets. She’s been in about three years of very, very strong rebellion. So what does rebellion against MHP look like? I’m real sex-positive and feminist and progressive, so my kid is like, “My god, sex is dirty, and drugs are bad!”

She goes to an all-girls’ high school [and the day after Trump was elected] they were all in tears, and Parker being Parker looks at the young women in her class and says, “Pull yourselves together, he’s your president now, be respectful!” [Laughing] And I was like, “Oh my goodness, no!”

But my kids are just like fish swimming in the waters of social justice and race talk and feminism conversations, and it is just what we do and talk about and think about in the house. So in that sense it’s not scary, because it just is. So I think, because the news is fodder for conversation and because we try not to either talk over their heads or make things like ‘Oh that’s just for adults and kids shouldn’t know about it,’ what I hope is that it feels empowering in whatever way she wants to feel empowered. So when we do have political disagreements, which we sometimes do, what she knows is that there’s no thing that she could say or do or believe that would keep her outside the circle of our family and of our love.

With the 4-year-old, she’s actually the most woke child on the planet. She somehow is, like, from Wakanda! [Laughs] I don’t really know how it’s possible, but even though she’s only 4 she goes first to the black kids on the playground, and loves her people from the core of her soul. It’s not that she knows what politics are, but she does seem to have a preference for blackness and always has. It will be interesting to see what all that turns into, but man, I think that kid might actually be Alicia Garza who I had by accident. She just showed up that way. I always say: You’re a sociologist until you have children, and then it’s your nemesis, because you realize they come however they come. And you can crush that experience or you can nurture them, but they show up how they show up. I like them both a lot, and I can’t wait to see who they turn into.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• Why ‘Museum Mammy’ believes the feminist movement ‘will never be perfect’
• The most pressing question of Women’s History Month: What is feminism in 2018?
• Conservative millennial Kassy Dillon: ‘I don’t like the term ‘feminist’”

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.

As thousands of protestors funneled along Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington D.C. for the March for Our Lives on Saturday, carrying signs and children and the weight of fear and grief over gun violence, there was another, small revolution taking place at the edge of the march route, in tiny Pershing Park. That’s where about 100 activists from the New York City–based group Gays Against Guns (GAG) had set up camp for the day, transforming the bleak concrete corner with a huge rainbow banner and pink Mylar strips that billowed in the breeze.

Also part of the staging was some much-needed levity: a pink-carpeted runway, with folks in drag encouraging passersby to show the NRA, in RuPaul parlance, how to “sashy away.” Later, a large group struck a more somber tone by wearing all white, having their faces covered with veils, and each carrying the photo, name, and short bio of a person who had lost their life to gun violence. The silent procession of “human beings” stopped march-goers in their tracks.

Surrounding the activists throughout the day were colorfully spray-painted signs, declaring “Not in my school,” “Stop trans murder,” “NRA be gone, before we drop the House on you” (a pitch-perfect Wizard of Oz reference), and the piece de resistance: “Skinhead lesbian.”

It was, of course, the reclamation of an insult hurled by a Maine legislative candidate towards the magnetic leader of this movement: Emma Gonzalez, the buzzed-headed student who emerged onto the national stage just three days after the deadly Feb. 14 shooting at her Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

That’s when Gonzalez’s riveting, 11-minute “we call BS” speech went viral, energizing a segment of the nation that’d had enough of gun violence, and catapulting a crew of similarly smart, tenacious Parkland students into an instant media spotlight.

People soon tweeted that Gonzalez should run for president. The 18-year-old noted that she already is president — of her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). She then told the Washington Post that she identifies as bisexual, and suddenly her fierce badassery just made that much more sense for a whole lot of people, particularly fellow LGBTQ folks and queer activists for whom self-identity and a willingness to stand up for justice has long been inextricably linked.

“We have always been on the defensive as a community. So, it’s a natural fit. We have been fighting for our rights for decades, likely eons,” Cathy Marino-Thomas, a GAG organizer and longtime activist in the fight for Marriage Equality, tells Yahoo Lifestyle, referring to battles over AIDS funding, marriage equality, the right to adopt, the right to not be fired from work, and a range of other hard-won civil rights. “I think that we are a community less afraid to stand up because, in many ways, we have less to lose and everything to gain. Historically, no one has ever stood up for the gays.  We’ve had to stand up for ourselves, often against extraordinary opposition.”

Of course no one would deem this current anti-gun movement a singly gay issue — not even GAG, for whom the two narratives are tightly entwined. But there are deep and undeniable connections, made both collectively — such as by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest national LGBTQ-rights organization, which had a massive presence at the D.C. march led in party by Queer Eye co-host Karame Brown, himself a graduate of Parkland’s Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School — and also made individually.

That goes for Gonzalez, who tells Yahoo Lifestyle in the days leading up to Saturday’s march that she indeed sees a connection between her sexuality and her drive to lead the movement. “They’re definitely linked for me personally. If I wasn’t so open about who I was I never would’ve been able to do this,” she says. “In ninth grade, I was in a creative writing class where I could actually really effectively communicate what I was feeling, and it especially helped me come to terms with who I was. That definitely was when I really understood who I am, and when I came to terms with it, and when I told most people.”

Being open, Gonzalez says, “Helped me understand that everybody, no matter who they are and what they look like, is going through a lot of different things.” And being her school’s GSA president for three years has fostered her activist skills.

“It’s really helped me get used to shifting plans very quickly, planning in advance, and also being flexible… understanding that maybe you organize a club meeting with this one person in mind and they just don’t come because they aren’t coming to school, and you can’t get upset,” she says. “Because most of the kids in GSA either have depression or they’re dealing with a lot of stuff at home, and it’s like, I can understand that. And there are so many people in the country who are dealing with that, in relation to gun violence. You have no idea. You don’t know how many people you talk to on a daily basis that have actually been shot before, or have lost someone through gun violence. With GSA it’s the same. Everything’s incredibly far-reaching and widespread.”

Gonzalez recalls meeting Gays Against Guns representatives who had come to Parkland to show their support on the day her high school reopened after the shooting. “Yaass!” she says at the mention of the group, noting that she’d felt lucky for the haul of signs and fliers and buttons they gave her that day. But she reaches back further through gay history when she names her latest inspiration: transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, which is widely known as the start of the gay-rights movement.

“There’s this clip of her getting up onstage at one of the Stonewall Pride Rallies, a couple years [after the uprising], and she gets up there and everybody boos her because she’s trans. But she’s like, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re gay. I’m trans. We’re part of this. Like, I got you here. How many times have a had to fight for you? And you’re booing me because I’m trans?’” the teen says. “First of all, it was so unfair, unjustified, undignified, like, I was so infuriated by seeing that. But then there’s just knowing that there will always be people that hate you, and that they’re always going to be wrong. So it’s good to use that, and remember that whatever you’re doing, if it’s making people that mad, then it’s probably a good thing.”

***

Gonzalez, of course, is far from the only power behind the youth-led anti-gun movement and March for Our Lives; in the week leading up to the marches, she and the rest of the Parkland crew did a whirlwind media tour, landing, among other places, on the cover of Time, in the studio of The Rachel Maddow Show, and in a Teen Vogue series that included a story in its sister LGBTQ publication, Them, which announced in its headline, “Queer Teenage Girls are Leading the Gun Control Movement.”

Though it may have been a slight exaggeration (only Gonzalez and classmate Sarah Chadwick have identified themselves as being part of the LGBTQ family), there is certainly a shared ethos within the youth-led resistance that makes it ring true. And as non-queer Parkland student Jaclyn Corin noted in that story, “As things get more acceptable in society, like legalizing gay marriage and stuff like that, it shows us that a change from the beginning that seemed so far away can actually happen in the same lifetime. So that gives us hope. We’re kind of modeling this like the LGBT movement because in retrospect, it’s the same. We’re working towards a common goal as a lot [of] people and it’s not party-oriented. That’s marriage, and this is lives.”

To longtime activist Evan Wolfson, whose Freedom to Marry campaign won the fight for national marriage equality in 2015 after a decades-long effort, that’s an apt parallel.

“It’s all taken from the Freedom to Marry playbook, where despite people saying that gay people can’t marry — the courts saying that, the culture saying that, even gay people saying that to ourselves — we didn’t take that no for an answer, and by not taking no for an answer we turned the answer into yes,” Wolfson tells Yahoo Lifestyle the day before the March for Our Lives, which he had planned to join in New York City. “It’s what’s so inspiring about these young people and what they’re doing… They believe they can create change, and are inspiring millions more with that belief.”

Wolfson now travels around the world to consult with activists on issues from anti-violence and immigration reform to environmental protection and animal rights. He notes that, when it comes to activists finding the fire in their bellies, “You can’t reduce something to just one identity, whether it be black or white or gay or non-gay or Jewish or Christian. Minorities have had an experience of exclusion, oppression, having to form solidarity and work for change… but we all have our something, and we have to draw on that something to make the world better.”

For Gays Against Guns, that something is two-fold: queerness and, not unrelatedly, being on the defensive when it comes to violence. As the group states on its website and in literature it passes out at protests, the LGBT community is disproportionately affected by gun violence: firstly, because most gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides and LGBTQ people are overrepresented among suicide victims (92 percent of transgender adults have attempted suicide by age 25); secondly, because LGBTQ people are the most likely minority to be the victim of a hate crime.

That really hit home with everyone on June 12, 2016, when the Pulse gay nightclub massacre in Orlando left 49 people dead in what was the most lethal mass shooting ever in America (though it was later surpassed by that of Las Vegas).

Gays Against Guns formed in response to that tragedy, with individuals from a newly outraged generation joining with seasoned activists, some of whom were ACT UP organizers in the early days of the AIDS crisis, and who brought to the group their attention-grabbing direct-action skills — “die-ins,” chillingly clever chants, and sit-in-the streets civil-disobedience moves that often came with the goal of getting arrested. A week after its formation, GAG had a huge and heart-stopping presence in the New York City Pride March, with a contingent more than 750 strong changing “Stop the NRA!” and staging die-ins all along Fifth Avenue; since then it has held direct-action protests and had a continued, education-based presence at gun shows around the country.

“I think an intrinsic part of queerness is to have a certain feeling of being outside, and when you harness that, it’s very powerful,” says Kevin Herzog, a founding member of GAG, which now has local chapters in a growing number of cities and towns across the country, and someone who lived through the early AIDS crisis, losing many friends in the process. “When you’re dying, you’ll do anything,” he says on Saturday in D.C., referring to the basic connection between the early days of AIDS activism and the urgency behind today’s anti-gun movement. “It became apparent that no one was going to help us, so we had to help ourselves.”

As for Gonzalez’s being queer, “It’s not incidental,” he says. “Some people are astonished that these kids were able to start this movement. But when you place it in a queer context? I’m not astonished at all.”

GAG co-founder Hal Moskowitz, who was a co-founder of the early AIDS organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), says, “I see some of me in [the Parkland activists]. I see that drive that says, ‘F**k you, you’re going to listen to me, and I’m going to say it until you do.” Student David Hogg, who continuously acknowledges his place of privilege and speaks about the “children and people of color whose voices are not being heard,” has been particularly impressive, he adds.

Indeed, with Parkland, a largely white, affluent community known for its safety, the teens leading this cause have been particularly mindful of doing everything in their power to shift the narrative, from interview talking points to including students of color and from poorer communities in various ways. Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, a gay-rights group, took note of that effort recently.

“I applaud the students for using the enormous platform they have to call out how racism and homophobia impact the response to gun violence. They see clearly the enormous difference in how Tallahassee responded to Parkland compared to Pulse,” Smith noted in a statement. “Legislators who had to be shamed into permitting a moment of silence for the 49 killed in Orlando quickly allocated funds for a memorial and passed legislation, flawed and incomplete though it is. When the GSA students including Emma spoke at our Gala in Miami, she made sure to lift up Pulse. [And] the students have gone to Chicago to meet with other students who have been organizing against gun violence for years to combine efforts.”

Brandon Wolf, who led the HRC contingent along with Queer Eye’s Brown in D.C. on Saturday, was at Pulse when the shots rang out; his two friends Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero, were killed. The experience, he says, turned him into an activist overnight. “I think the reason there’s this natural marriage of the LGBTQ community and a fight against this epidemic of gun violence is because there’s a very real fear from a young age as a gay person and specifically gay people of color that you will be targeted, harmed or even worse because of who you are,” Wolfe, 29, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “So there’s this natural sense of, we’ve got to protect ourselves and each other from that violence, and I think gay people know it better than anyone else what it feels like to live in fear all the time.”

He adds, “I think as a young person, I went through so much, dealing with family and community and the process of coming out and all of that. And I think makes you an advocate, because you’ve been fighting for your own health and wellbeing since you were young.”

Now, as a whole new generation of young people grows up having to fight for their health and wellbeing in regards to gun violence, they are finding their own ways to get their voices hear and their demands met — with techniques both learned and instinctual.

“I think one thing we can learn from older generations of activists, which I’ve shared with the Parkland students, is the power of patience,” Wolf says. “We can let the older generation be a testament to the fact that hard work means we may not get it the first time around, but eventually we’ll get it. So to not get discouraged that the Florida legislature doesn’t care today, because the real change will be made when we vote them out for people who will make a change.”

On the other side, says Gonzalez, is what her generation might teach the older ones (in addition to the power of social media, of course).

“One of the main things to be learned is that a lot of people kind of get pushed into an agenda, like Republican or Democrat. But the best way to get things done is to appeal to both sides, and listen, which is what we’ve been doing,” she says. “And this is not to knock anyone else, but what we’ve been really focused on is inclusion, and trying to really combine these communities spread around the United States. We’ve been trying to get everyone on the same page, to figure out what everybody’s asking for, and see if we can, as a giant movement, ask for that together.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• The best photos from March for Our Lives around the world
  Emma Gonzalez’s March for Our Lives speech lasted as long as the Parkland Shooting
  Trump administration removes pages on LGBTQ women’s health from government website

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.

As thousands of protestors funneled along Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington D.C. for the March for Our Lives on Saturday, carrying signs and children and the weight of fear and grief over gun violence, there was another, small revolution taking place at the edge of the march route, in tiny Pershing Park. That’s where about 100 activists from the New York City–based group Gays Against Guns (GAG) had set up camp for the day, transforming the bleak concrete corner with a huge rainbow banner and pink Mylar strips that billowed in the breeze.

Also part of the staging was some much-needed levity: a pink-carpeted runway, with folks in drag encouraging passersby to show the NRA, in RuPaul parlance, how to “sashy away.” Later, a large group struck a more somber tone by wearing all white, having their faces covered with veils, and each carrying the photo, name, and short bio of a person who had lost their life to gun violence. The silent procession of “human beings” stopped march-goers in their tracks.

Surrounding the activists throughout the day were colorfully spray-painted signs, declaring “Not in my school,” “Stop trans murder,” “NRA be gone, before we drop the House on you” (a pitch-perfect Wizard of Oz reference), and the piece de resistance: “Skinhead lesbian.”

It was, of course, the reclamation of an insult hurled by a Maine legislative candidate towards the magnetic leader of this movement: Emma Gonzalez, the buzzed-headed student who emerged onto the national stage just three days after the deadly Feb. 14 shooting at her Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

That’s when Gonzalez’s riveting, 11-minute “we call BS” speech went viral, energizing a segment of the nation that’d had enough of gun violence, and catapulting a crew of similarly smart, tenacious Parkland students into an instant media spotlight.

People soon tweeted that Gonzalez should run for president. The 18-year-old noted that she already is president — of her school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). She then told the Washington Post that she identifies as bisexual, and suddenly her fierce badassery just made that much more sense for a whole lot of people, particularly fellow LGBTQ folks and queer activists for whom self-identity and a willingness to stand up for justice has long been inextricably linked.

“We have always been on the defensive as a community. So, it’s a natural fit. We have been fighting for our rights for decades, likely eons,” Cathy Marino-Thomas, a GAG organizer and longtime activist in the fight for Marriage Equality, tells Yahoo Lifestyle, referring to battles over AIDS funding, marriage equality, the right to adopt, the right to not be fired from work, and a range of other hard-won civil rights. “I think that we are a community less afraid to stand up because, in many ways, we have less to lose and everything to gain. Historically, no one has ever stood up for the gays.  We’ve had to stand up for ourselves, often against extraordinary opposition.”

Of course no one would deem this current anti-gun movement a singly gay issue — not even GAG, for whom the two narratives are tightly entwined. But there are deep and undeniable connections, made both collectively — such as by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest national LGBTQ-rights organization, which had a massive presence at the D.C. march led in party by Queer Eye co-host Karame Brown, himself a graduate of Parkland’s Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School — and also made individually.

That goes for Gonzalez, who tells Yahoo Lifestyle in the days leading up to Saturday’s march that she indeed sees a connection between her sexuality and her drive to lead the movement. “They’re definitely linked for me personally. If I wasn’t so open about who I was I never would’ve been able to do this,” she says. “In ninth grade, I was in a creative writing class where I could actually really effectively communicate what I was feeling, and it especially helped me come to terms with who I was. That definitely was when I really understood who I am, and when I came to terms with it, and when I told most people.”

Being open, Gonzalez says, “Helped me understand that everybody, no matter who they are and what they look like, is going through a lot of different things.” And being her school’s GSA president for three years has fostered her activist skills.

“It’s really helped me get used to shifting plans very quickly, planning in advance, and also being flexible… understanding that maybe you organize a club meeting with this one person in mind and they just don’t come because they aren’t coming to school, and you can’t get upset,” she says. “Because most of the kids in GSA either have depression or they’re dealing with a lot of stuff at home, and it’s like, I can understand that. And there are so many people in the country who are dealing with that, in relation to gun violence. You have no idea. You don’t know how many people you talk to on a daily basis that have actually been shot before, or have lost someone through gun violence. With GSA it’s the same. Everything’s incredibly far-reaching and widespread.”

Gonzalez recalls meeting Gays Against Guns representatives who had come to Parkland to show their support on the day her high school reopened after the shooting. “Yaass!” she says at the mention of the group, noting that she’d felt lucky for the haul of signs and fliers and buttons they gave her that day. But she reaches back further through gay history when she names her latest inspiration: transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, which is widely known as the start of the gay-rights movement.

“There’s this clip of her getting up onstage at one of the Stonewall Pride Rallies, a couple years [after the uprising], and she gets up there and everybody boos her because she’s trans. But she’s like, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re gay. I’m trans. We’re part of this. Like, I got you here. How many times have a had to fight for you? And you’re booing me because I’m trans?’” the teen says. “First of all, it was so unfair, unjustified, undignified, like, I was so infuriated by seeing that. But then there’s just knowing that there will always be people that hate you, and that they’re always going to be wrong. So it’s good to use that, and remember that whatever you’re doing, if it’s making people that mad, then it’s probably a good thing.”

***

Gonzalez, of course, is far from the only power behind the youth-led anti-gun movement and March for Our Lives; in the week leading up to the marches, she and the rest of the Parkland crew did a whirlwind media tour, landing, among other places, on the cover of Time, in the studio of The Rachel Maddow Show, and in a Teen Vogue series that included a story in its sister LGBTQ publication, Them, which announced in its headline, “Queer Teenage Girls are Leading the Gun Control Movement.”

Though it may have been a slight exaggeration (only Gonzalez and classmate Sarah Chadwick have identified themselves as being part of the LGBTQ family), there is certainly a shared ethos within the youth-led resistance that makes it ring true. And as non-queer Parkland student Jaclyn Corin noted in that story, “As things get more acceptable in society, like legalizing gay marriage and stuff like that, it shows us that a change from the beginning that seemed so far away can actually happen in the same lifetime. So that gives us hope. We’re kind of modeling this like the LGBT movement because in retrospect, it’s the same. We’re working towards a common goal as a lot [of] people and it’s not party-oriented. That’s marriage, and this is lives.”

To longtime activist Evan Wolfson, whose Freedom to Marry campaign won the fight for national marriage equality in 2015 after a decades-long effort, that’s an apt parallel.

“It’s all taken from the Freedom to Marry playbook, where despite people saying that gay people can’t marry — the courts saying that, the culture saying that, even gay people saying that to ourselves — we didn’t take that no for an answer, and by not taking no for an answer we turned the answer into yes,” Wolfson tells Yahoo Lifestyle the day before the March for Our Lives, which he had planned to join in New York City. “It’s what’s so inspiring about these young people and what they’re doing… They believe they can create change, and are inspiring millions more with that belief.”

Wolfson now travels around the world to consult with activists on issues from anti-violence and immigration reform to environmental protection and animal rights. He notes that, when it comes to activists finding the fire in their bellies, “You can’t reduce something to just one identity, whether it be black or white or gay or non-gay or Jewish or Christian. Minorities have had an experience of exclusion, oppression, having to form solidarity and work for change… but we all have our something, and we have to draw on that something to make the world better.”

For Gays Against Guns, that something is two-fold: queerness and, not unrelatedly, being on the defensive when it comes to violence. As the group states on its website and in literature it passes out at protests, the LGBT community is disproportionately affected by gun violence: firstly, because most gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides and LGBTQ people are overrepresented among suicide victims (92 percent of transgender adults have attempted suicide by age 25); secondly, because LGBTQ people are the most likely minority to be the victim of a hate crime.

That really hit home with everyone on June 12, 2016, when the Pulse gay nightclub massacre in Orlando left 49 people dead in what was the most lethal mass shooting ever in America (though it was later surpassed by that of Las Vegas).

Gays Against Guns formed in response to that tragedy, with individuals from a newly outraged generation joining with seasoned activists, some of whom were ACT UP organizers in the early days of the AIDS crisis, and who brought to the group their attention-grabbing direct-action skills — “die-ins,” chillingly clever chants, and sit-in-the streets civil-disobedience moves that often came with the goal of getting arrested. A week after its formation, GAG had a huge and heart-stopping presence in the New York City Pride March, with a contingent more than 750 strong changing “Stop the NRA!” and staging die-ins all along Fifth Avenue; since then it has held direct-action protests and had a continued, education-based presence at gun shows around the country.

“I think an intrinsic part of queerness is to have a certain feeling of being outside, and when you harness that, it’s very powerful,” says Kevin Herzog, a founding member of GAG, which now has local chapters in a growing number of cities and towns across the country, and someone who lived through the early AIDS crisis, losing many friends in the process. “When you’re dying, you’ll do anything,” he says on Saturday in D.C., referring to the basic connection between the early days of AIDS activism and the urgency behind today’s anti-gun movement. “It became apparent that no one was going to help us, so we had to help ourselves.”

As for Gonzalez’s being queer, “It’s not incidental,” he says. “Some people are astonished that these kids were able to start this movement. But when you place it in a queer context? I’m not astonished at all.”

GAG co-founder Hal Moskowitz, who was a co-founder of the early AIDS organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), says, “I see some of me in [the Parkland activists]. I see that drive that says, ‘F**k you, you’re going to listen to me, and I’m going to say it until you do.” Student David Hogg, who continuously acknowledges his place of privilege and speaks about the “children and people of color whose voices are not being heard,” has been particularly impressive, he adds.

Indeed, with Parkland, a largely white, affluent community known for its safety, the teens leading this cause have been particularly mindful of doing everything in their power to shift the narrative, from interview talking points to including students of color and from poorer communities in various ways. Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, a gay-rights group, took note of that effort recently.

“I applaud the students for using the enormous platform they have to call out how racism and homophobia impact the response to gun violence. They see clearly the enormous difference in how Tallahassee responded to Parkland compared to Pulse,” Smith noted in a statement. “Legislators who had to be shamed into permitting a moment of silence for the 49 killed in Orlando quickly allocated funds for a memorial and passed legislation, flawed and incomplete though it is. When the GSA students including Emma spoke at our Gala in Miami, she made sure to lift up Pulse. [And] the students have gone to Chicago to meet with other students who have been organizing against gun violence for years to combine efforts.”

Brandon Wolf, who led the HRC contingent along with Queer Eye’s Brown in D.C. on Saturday, was at Pulse when the shots rang out; his two friends Drew Leinonen and Juan Guerrero, were killed. The experience, he says, turned him into an activist overnight. “I think the reason there’s this natural marriage of the LGBTQ community and a fight against this epidemic of gun violence is because there’s a very real fear from a young age as a gay person and specifically gay people of color that you will be targeted, harmed or even worse because of who you are,” Wolfe, 29, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “So there’s this natural sense of, we’ve got to protect ourselves and each other from that violence, and I think gay people know it better than anyone else what it feels like to live in fear all the time.”

He adds, “I think as a young person, I went through so much, dealing with family and community and the process of coming out and all of that. And I think makes you an advocate, because you’ve been fighting for your own health and wellbeing since you were young.”

Now, as a whole new generation of young people grows up having to fight for their health and wellbeing in regards to gun violence, they are finding their own ways to get their voices hear and their demands met — with techniques both learned and instinctual.

“I think one thing we can learn from older generations of activists, which I’ve shared with the Parkland students, is the power of patience,” Wolf says. “We can let the older generation be a testament to the fact that hard work means we may not get it the first time around, but eventually we’ll get it. So to not get discouraged that the Florida legislature doesn’t care today, because the real change will be made when we vote them out for people who will make a change.”

On the other side, says Gonzalez, is what her generation might teach the older ones (in addition to the power of social media, of course).

“One of the main things to be learned is that a lot of people kind of get pushed into an agenda, like Republican or Democrat. But the best way to get things done is to appeal to both sides, and listen, which is what we’ve been doing,” she says. “And this is not to knock anyone else, but what we’ve been really focused on is inclusion, and trying to really combine these communities spread around the United States. We’ve been trying to get everyone on the same page, to figure out what everybody’s asking for, and see if we can, as a giant movement, ask for that together.”

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

• The best photos from March for Our Lives around the world
  Emma Gonzalez’s March for Our Lives speech lasted as long as the Parkland Shooting
  Trump administration removes pages on LGBTQ women’s health from government website

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.

Asia Kate Dillon is a fierce actor with arresting eyes and a buzz cut, known for breakout roles including a Nazi skinhead inmate in Orange is the New Black and, currently, a calculating hedge-fund intern on Showtime’s Billions. But what the 33-year-old gets asked about perhaps most frequently is gender identity: Dillon’s is “non-binary,” with the preferred pronoun of “they.”

Still, frequent explaining is not something they mind one bit.

“I’m really grateful for that,” Dillon tells Yahoo Lifestyle at New York City’s Build Studios (part of Yahoo’s parent company, Oath), where they had dropped by for a live studio interview. “I mean, I spent so many years not understanding my own gender identity, not having the language to talk about it, and not feeling safe in many environments to talk about it. And so now, having the opportunity to talk about it and have it printed is extraordinary for me, and it doesn’t get tiring.”

One particularly notable moment of explanation was when Dillon was a guest on The Ellen Show, noting about being non-binary, “It’s a term used by some people, myself included, who experience their gender identity as falling somewhere outside the boxes of man and/or woman… Female is a sex, and sex is between our legs, and gender identity is between our ears.”

Dillon’s Billionaire character of Taylor identifies as non-binary as well — a point that caused them to weep with joy upon first reading the script. “If there had been someone like Taylor on TV when I was young, it would’ve meant a great deal,” they say. Below, some highlights from our quick but deep conversation.

Why is it important to you to identify as non-binary rather than to just expand the definition of what “woman” can mean?

It’s important to me because it is me. That is my experience of myself, and so I’m just living my life as me. Non-binary gender-nonconforming and trans people have always been around, just as long as any other type of person. So in that sense, I think expanding the definition of what a woman is is great — for people who identify as women and want to work at expanding that definition for themselves and the world at large. That’s not where I’m coming from and so that’s why it’s important to me.

So have you felt excluded, then, by the women’s movement, and specifically the Women’s March?

The short answer is yes. I think a lot of the women’s movement is perpetuating the synonymous use of “woman” and “vagina,” and not all women have vaginas, not all people with vaginas are women. And the pussy hats — not all pussies are pink, but that association is totally exclusive, and not just of non-binary people, but of transwomen and people of color. And so the future, to me, is inclusive, and it’s intersectional, certainly. And if it’s not intersectional then it’s not feminism, really. So I do feel left out of conversations that continue to align femininity and womanhood with uteruses and vaginas. I think that’s an archaic alignment, and I’m excited for a future in which we don’t do that.

Let’s talk about your buzz cut: When did you first do it and why, and what does it feel like for you?

The very first time I buzzed my head I was 21 — I’d had short hair since I was 14 —I just remember it was like two in the morning and I just was like, I really want to do it, I want to see what I look like and what my head shape is. And I remember taking the clippers that my roommate had at the time and just going for it. And it was incredibly freeing… and ultimately, I felt like there was nothing to hide behind, it was like, here’s my face, here’s what I look like, and the world is going to really see me now.

Since then, I’ve had all different kinds of styles and colors, and for Orange Is the New Black I played a skinhead, so it worked for that. And then when I was cast as Taylor, it felt like the shorter buzz just felt right for the character, honestly, so that’s why I’ve maintained it. I’m so grateful that neither Brandy nor Taylor wear any makeup — although they do cover my neck tattoo for Taylor — but it’s a real easy time in the [hair and makeup] chair for me.

How challenging was it for you to play Brandy, the pretty scary white supremacist skinhead character on Orange Is the New Black?

I was really grateful to be playing a white antagonist in a Black Lives Matter storyline, because you need white antagonists to tell those stories. And I’m certainly happy as a light-skinned white person to play an anti-hero onscreen, because we have so many examples of white people as heroes. Is it hard and challenging to play a character like that? Certainly. Although as an actor, I’m never judging the character that I’m playing, because that’s not helpful. My job was to show up on set, put on the costume, play the character, and then take off the costume and leave the character at work. So that’s what I did.

In my real life, I’m a Black Lives Matter social justice activist, and so it was incredibly interesting to me to play somebody coming from the totally opposite side, whose beliefs are as deeply entrenched — as deeply felt, and given as much gravity, as I give my beliefs. And I think just knowing that, understanding that, allows a possible road towards a way in which to approach conversation with a person who is coming from a totally different perspective, but who is holding it in the same place within themselves that you hold your beliefs.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: 

• Your kids are nervous about school shootings — here’s what to say
• Teen banned from prom at Christian school for wearing a dress with mesh cut-outs
• People are freaking out about Britney Spears’ face: ‘Such a shame’ 

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.

To mark the International Day of the Woman on March 8 and Women’s History Month, Yahoo Lifestyle is exploring notions of feminism and the women’s movement through a diverse series of profiles — from transgender activist Ashlee Marie Preston to conservative campus leader Karin Agness Lips — that aim to reach across many aisles. 

Lorelei Lee, a California-based adult-film star, has a bone to pick with the media about its handling of the Stormy Daniels affair.

“It is literally every day I hear someone else use ‘porn star’ as a pejorative, or say how disgraceful it is that the president had an affair with a porn star, that this reflects badly on our country,” Lee, a longtime writer and sex-worker activist, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I saw someone write that this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the United States, which is amazing to me — like, look around you!”

What’s more, says Lee, “Stormy Daniels is suing the president — a person who has created so many oppressive, horrifying policies. People should be celebrating that. People should be backing her up. She is suing him for the right to speak freely. She is offering to give him back money he paid her. I do not understand why people are not holding her up as a hero of the opposition.”

Instead, the way the unfolding story has been handled in the media, Lee laments, “means that sex workers are hearing jokes about how we aren’t full people, about how we are a punch line. So my experience of this whole thing is just a constant reminder that we’re dehumanized every day.”

It’s what has fueled the fire within Lee, 37, who has worked in various facets of the sex industry since she was 19, but who has filled much of her time lately with activist work.

In January, she and fellow sex workers showed up en masse at the Women’s March Power to the Polls event in Las Vegas to make sure their voices were not left out of the feminist space; Lee held up a sign that read, “Stop making sex workers scapegoats for the patriarchy,” and stood at an information table to chat with curious and oft-confused passersby about the issue of sex workers’ rights.

“I felt as welcome as in any mainstream space,” she recounts. “But there were a lot of people there who really didn’t understand who we were or what we were representing. I had someone come up to me at the table and look at our ‘Sex Work is Work’ T-shirts and say, ‘Oh, that’s so sad,’ and I said, ‘What’s sad?’ and she said, ‘Sex slavery.’” Lee went on to explain that she was with a group of consensual sex workers who oppose any form of non-consent and exploitation.

“It took her a few minutes, and she was definitely very defensive, and said, ‘Oh, we’ve had a misunderstanding,’” Lee says with a laugh. “That is the understatement of the century. But for me, being in those spaces and having the opportunity to directly confront that misunderstanding is, I think, the most productive work that you can do sometimes.”

@Regranned from @maitressem – Just two sex workers planning world domination. With this woman by my side it feels like I can do anything. #hexthepatriarchy @womensmarch @womensmarchnv @missloreleilee – #regrann

A post shared by Lorelei Lee (@missloreleilee) on Jan 20, 2018 at 9:36pm PST

Since then, she’s been largely consumed with fighting misunderstanding on another front — by vociferously opposing a pair of proposed bills in the House and Senate, FOSTA and SESTA (Fight/Stop Online Sex Trafficking Act), respectively. Each seeks to weaken legal protections that currently protect website owners and operators from criminal and civil liability for hosting content posted by third-party users, and they “conflate consensual sex work and trafficking,” she says.

If the bills reach their goal of being combined and codified, Lee explains, they will not only fail to stop trafficking, but will threaten vital safety measures for sex workers: the ability to screen clients online rather than in person, the ability to share information on violent or disrespectful clients on what are known as “bad date” lists, and the ability to share information about exploitive club owners or clients.

“Sex workers don’t get protection from police, and we frequently don’t have familial resources or other forms of social support that other people might turn to in times of crisis,” Lee says. “What we have is each other, so our ability to share information online includes allowing us to post to these platforms,” and the law changes will mean “censoring this information sharing that is vital to sex workers’ safety.”

Many of the groups involved do not understand the impact or the possible violence that would likely come from the passage of the bills, she says — including celebrities who have lent their voices to the pro-SESTA/FOSTA cause, such as Seth Meyers and Amy Schumer. Others simply want to end the sex trade entirely, she believes.

#paws4pros #dogsfordecriminalization #benicetosexworkers

A post shared by Lorelei Lee (@missloreleilee) on Feb 18, 2018 at 5:28am PST

The whole situation, she understands, is confusing for people — why an intelligent, self-possessed woman like Lee, and like so many others, would do sex work. And what much of the confusion comes down to — around her personal choices, the pending legislation, the Women’s March interaction, and so much more— is people not understanding that sex trafficking/slavery and consensual adult sex work are different, Lee says.

“The difference is so simple, and the difference is one word: consent,” she says. “But I think one of the reasons people have such a hard time understanding it is because people have a really hard time understanding consent in our culture, which is something that as a nation we’ve been grappling with.”

Lee breaks it down, acknowledging the camp that believes there’s no such thing as consensual sex work, because of the “economic coercion” factor.

“They say the choice to do sex work is inherently compromised because of financial incentive — and I’m willing to say that all labor is exploitative under capitalism, I have no disagreement with that,” she says. “But I also think it’s extremely important to recognize that poor people still have agency. Having spent most of my life as a poor, working person, it is deeply offensive to me for someone to tell me that my ability to choose what I do with my body is compromised by not having money.

That argument — about whether sex work can ever be inherently consensual — is what has caused conflict for many in the feminist movement about whether or not to embrace sex workers over the years, including in the planning of recent Women’s March events.

Other issues that get to Lee lately include: the #MeToo movement bypassing sex workers (“but that’s a longer conversation,” she says), and, on a positive note, the fact that Time’s Up organizers did reach out to her recently to see how those in her field could be included, which is a “big step,” she says.

But Lee bristles at the question she says she’s most often asked (including by this writer): “How is sex work feminist?” She calls it a “misconstruing of the question.”

As she explains it: “I am a feminist. I am also a sex worker. Sex work in itself isn’t anything — it isn’t a political ideology, it’s work, and it happens in all different contexts… I think it’s really important to break that down, because as a sex worker, you get asked over and over again, ‘Is sex work feminist or ant-feminist’ or ‘Are you in coalition with the patriarchy?’ And that can be really damaging, because it’s neither. You can be a feminist and you can believe in gender equality and also be a sex worker who works under exploitative conditions. You’ve got to pay your bills.”

Workers should not be held responsible for the politics of their employers, Lee adds, although there are ways to harness things within one’s power. “So working in exploitative conditions,” she says. “A lot of sex workers have come together and worked concertedly among themselves to try and improve those conditions — and that’s a feminist action.”

Lee’s thoughts have been hard won by many years in the sex trade — a career which has taken various shapes, from stripping and being a professional dominatrix to directing and acting in pornography (including, many times, in what she calls “beautiful films that showed a version of sexuality that you don’t see in mainstream film or, really, anywhere…”).

“It’s complicated to answer the question about why I started doing sex work, because there are multiple ways to tell the story,” she explains. “I was poor, I grew up on public assistance, and that is a huge part of why I started.” Other factors: She had a boyfriend who sent her on her first shoot; she was a “young queer person” with her first crush on a woman, who was an erotic dancer, who told Lee she felt “transformed and powerful onstage.” Plus, she needed money, particularly when it came time to put herself through college at New York University (a payment plan that briefly made Lee tabloid fodder).

“People always ask if it’s empowering or disempowering, and you can’t separate that from the fact that having money is empowering in a capitalist culture,” she says, noting that she has zero college debt. “Being able to pay your bills is empowering.”

All along, she has made it her business to not only stand up for equality, but to write about her work (in beautiful prose) and to speak out about it — including in a couple of documentaries.

“I’ve experienced feelings of isolation and powerlessness and vulnerability and faced so much stigma… and then this thing that started to make my life better was finding other sex workers who were amazing people, finding solidarity,” she says. “I think if I can do anything to give back to that community, I will have made my life worthwhile.”

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Women’s March cofounder Tamika Mallory — who has become a lightning rod of controversy since attending an incendiary speech given by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan in February — was out and about in New York City on Wednesday, stopping by various school walkouts to lend her support.

“You all are the missing link!” Mallory, speaking through a megaphone, told a group of more than 200 students from Grace Church School who had gathered in Washington Square Park for a peaceful morning protest. She said she’d been fighting gun violence for 17 years, ever since the father of her son was shot and killed, and told the students, “Right now you have the attention of America and the attention of the world. Don’t stop. Keep pushing.”

Mallory’s presence made sense, as the Women’s March youth contingent was the planning force behind the Mar. 14 nationwide school walkout, marking the one month that had passed since the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

So proud of our young people! @womensmarchyouth #ENOUGH

A post shared by Tamika D. Mallory (@tamikadmallory) on Mar 14, 2018 at 8:20am PDT

But regarding the Farrakhan controversy that’s been trailing her, Mallory told Yahoo Lifestyle, she has been laying low and processing the situation — watching it play out in the media, and speaking to and writing for just a handful of publications.

“I’ve been taking a lot of time to sort of remove myself from the issue, and to really read these things from an objective standpoint, versus being so immersed in it,” she said. “But what’s more important, particularly as a leader, is to be able to read and digest and really understand some of the underlying issues that some folks are talking about.”

LISTEN then research. #libya #libyaslavetrade @louisfarrakhan

A post shared by Tamika D. Mallory (@tamikadmallory) on Nov 30, 2017 at 9:57pm PST

Mallory added, “I’ve already stated multiple times that my work with the Nation of Islam has been very related to gun-violence work. This is work that I’ve been doing for a very long time and they have been involved in it.”

Still, when asked why she will not couch her support of Farrakhan with a clear and direct denouncement of his anti-Jewish and anti-LGBT statements — a repeated theme that has earned Farrakhan a long and scathing bio on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website — she offered Yahoo Lifestyle a brief explanation before ending the discussion: “That’s not my language,” she said. “Read the Kingian Nonviolence principles and you’ll understand.”

The philosophy of Kingian Nonviolence — an approach to conflict reconciliation laid out by Martin Luther King Jr. and codified into six principles by his longtime partner in activism, Bernard Lafayette — is actually a foundation of the Women’s March organization, according to its website. And Wednesday was not Mallory’s first mention of the philosophy in the wake of the Farrakhan controversy. As she told the Atlantic recently, “I study in a tradition, the Kingian nonviolent tradition. I go into prisons and group homes and I don’t come out saying, ‘I just left the criminals or the killers.’ That’s not my language. That’s not something I do. I don’t speak in that way. In the tradition that I come out of, we attack the forces of evil, but not people.”

So what are the principles, exactly? And how might they possibly explain Mallory’s refusal to condemn man whose hate-laced speech is not exactly nonviolent?

In an attempt to more fully understand where the feminist activist may be coming from, Yahoo Lifestyle spoke with Victoria Christgau — who does not know Mallory and certainly “cannot get inside Tamika Mallory’s head,” but who is a Kingian Nonviolence expert and advocate, and the executive director of the Hartford-based Connecticut Center for Nonviolence, which she co-founded with Lafayette. Here’s what she had to say about the philosophy.

What is Kingian Nonviolence?

It’s a framework to understand and manage conflict, and a set of principles to help you apply to the conflicts in life on every level — personal as well as institutional — and it addresses the root cause of problems, not just the aftermath of the root cause.

In Martin Luther King Jr.’s autobiography you have reference to it, but this road map was laid out by Bernard Lafayette. He worked with Martin Luther King directly, who told him, ‘We have to institutionalize and nationalize non-violence.’ Bernard Lafayette brought this training into being, and taught it in Atlanta at the King Center.

How many people get trained in this philosophy, and who are they?

There are thousands of people trained. We don’t have an actual tracked number, because many of us work through independent centers, but thousands trained in this country and around the world, such as in Palestine and Nigeria. There is a large movement in Rhode Island, and at the East Point Peace Academy in California they teach Kingian Nonviolence in prisons. We throw out a wide open net and have worked with everyone from professors to law enforcement people, a lot of teachers, social workers, and people who were formerly incarcerated — young people too, high school students who become trainers of other youth.

Mallory’s refusal to denounce Farrakhan and its relation to Kingian Nonviolence seems to most clearly relate to principle No. 3: “Attack forces of evil, not persons doing evil: The nonviolent approach helps one analyze the fundamental conditions, policies and practices of the conflict rather than reacting to one’s opponents or their personalities.” Can you walk us through that idea?

You want to get to the root of the concern. If she just attacks Louis Farrakhan, then she’s attacking another person and calling him something that may not be the total of his character. We want to, as Kingian practitioners, look at the entire picture, the whole picture, and we also weigh things out. Martin Luther King understood philosophers and the way Georg Hegel looked at things — the dialectical thinking, the truth lies in the whole.

So rather than just throw somebody out because of one perception of what they are, you would look for what’s good in them — you would look for what’s also true, because you can’t just throw it all away. The truth lies in the whole. And what Farrakahn has done with the Nation of Islam, sending young men into neighborhoods to help escort kids to school… those are some very positive things to do rather than leave them to rot in their communities… He is supporting black identity and black strength, there’s some really good work there, so you wouldn’t just throw him out entirely.

But how do you balance the non-attack of evildoers with what should then be the active attack of evil itself?

You would not stand with that which is racist, because Martin Luther King called the “triple evils,” in Kingian language, racism, poverty (such as materialism), and militarism (power over, or overpowering). In this, any racist rhetoric has to be examined. And then you’d want to get at the root of the problem of why does this person have so much racism? Why is this person behaving this way?

We know two wrongs don’t make a right — but we have a president in power who is just saying one horrific thing after the next about so many groups of people, and claiming so much hatred, and he’s still not ousted, he’s still in power. Why would we so vehemently go after the black leader?

I would say that half the country, at least, is vehemently going after the president… But how does a Kingian rectify their support of someone who is a proponent one of the philosophy’s “triple evils”?

I think you’re article ought to be left with that question. There’s no answer for that. I don’t have an answer for that, because I don’t know her. She’s grappling, probably, with where she stands on some of these issues. But certainly by moving the Women’s March along, she’s doing great things for our country.

I think we’re human beings, we’re flawed. We are sometimes pulled in opposites, and the idea is to eventually align your words and your actions, and perhaps over time she will start to develop more of that alignment… I understand that there’s a desire for independence and leadership, and Farrakhan is probably one of the only ones who’s stood up to leadership over and over again. It’s unfortunate that it’s couched with ugliness, too, because not everything he says is horrible. And that’s the bottom line, and maybe what she’s saying.

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Padma Lakshmi responded this week to critics of her decision to wear Planned Parenthood pins on the recent season finale of Top Chef.

“Everyone has a right to their own opinion, and I’d like to make it clear that I wore Planned Parenthood because I was expressing my opinion, not the opinion of my network or my show,” she said during an interview at Build (a part of the Oath media brand, as is Yahoo) on Monday. “I’ve been supporting Planned Parenthood for a long time, I’ve donated to them, I’ve given them my time, I know [president] Cecile Richards really well, I was with them at the Women’s March. It was my honor to be able to do that.”

Lakshmi, who stopped by the New York City studio to chat about the March 15 launch of her MAC Capsule Collection (see the full video below) and her ideas on topics from beauty to feminism, said she “had a handful” of the pins, and asked the show’s other judges — Tom Colicchio, Gail Simmons, and Graham Elliot — if they would each wear one, too. “Immediately, without blinking, all of them said, ‘Yes, I’d love to,’” and while the guest judges wanted to wear them, too, she didn’t have enough to go around.

But anyway, she said, “I didn’t want to put them on the spot. Because I do believe that everyone has a right to their own opinion.”

I’ve been supporting @PPFA for a long, long time and want to thank @BravoTopChef for letting me showcase them tonight. #PlannedParenthood #TopChef

— Padma Lakshmi (@PadmaLakshmi) March 9, 2018

In fact, the single mom, 47, noted, “I was actually in love with a person who was pro-life — it happens — and I respected his opinion and he respected mine, and we could discuss those things. I think we’ve gotten very polarized, and so I’m interested in talking to those people who don’t agree with me. I’m happy to hang out and have a beer with the people who do agree with me, but I’m preaching to the choir. I think we need to really listen to each other more. I think there’s a lot of talking on TV. There’s not a lot of listening.”

Lakshmi also addressed another recent Twitter tiff, in which an immigration activist called her out for wearing a low-cut top on the Top Chef season finale. “It’s 2018 — do we really need @PadmaLakshmi boobs all open and squished up on TV??” wrote Shirley Leyro, setting off a storm of defenses from Lakshmi’s loyal fans.

It’s 2018 – do we really need @PadmaLakshmi boobs all open and squished up on TV?? @tomcolicchio #TopChef2018

— Shirley Leyro (@Shir_Lo) March 2, 2018

As for why society is still wondering whether women can show some skin and still be feminists?

“I don’t know,” Lakshmi said. “I really don’t know. And it’s a thing that I struggle with, because I want to look beautiful, and I want to look sexy, [especially] if I’ve taken the trouble to work out as much as I do… I feel comfortable, and goddammit, I may not look this way someday so I want to document it when I do!”

She said she believed that women could of course dress in any manner they choose and still be feminists. “I think society likes to put people in boxes. So when she made that comment, I was like, ‘So what? Why can’t I?’” Another comment disturbed her further when it assumed that Lakshmi clearly “has no control over content.”

And putting aside your discomfort with my boobs, as an @ACLU ambassador I want to applaud your work on immigration Shirley. This is way more important than any silly piffle about my boobs. Love a good “activist scholar”. ❤️ https://t.co/IJ8Dgt80US

— Padma Lakshmi (@PadmaLakshmi) March 2, 2018

“I was like, actually, I do. I’m an executive producer of my show, and I don’t have control over a lot of stuff, but I do certainly over my own person and what I wear,” Lakshmi said. “Also my boobs probably were squished up, because I’m consuming like 8,000 calories a day! And that was toward the end of shooting, [when] I gain 15 pounds. We have dresses in three sizes.”

Finally, shared Lakshmi — after letting her “really loyal fans” jump to her defense for a while — she responded in a non-defensive way because she didn’t want the discussion to spiral out of control.

“I know I have been snapped at online, or a little thing I said innocently turns into an internet brushfire, so I went back and… I went to her site and looked at a blog she wrote. She’s a professor, and she’s an immigration activist… I just wanted to extinguish that brushfire… I could tell that this person was a really good person, and she just kind of said something.”

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Following his termination for alleged misconduct from the treatment center he founded 35 years ago, renowned trauma researcher, author, and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk is speaking out in vigorous self-defense — just as many of his colleagues, friends, and admirers are voicing support on his behalf.

“No allegations have been made,” van der Kolk, author of the New York Times-bestselling The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma and founder of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Mass., tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “It’s an outrageous story — nobody’s come forward, and I’ve never been accused of improprieties by anybody… and now there are these insinuations about how ‘he’s a sexist,’ intimations that I’m a sexual abuser, which is of course devastating not only for me but for the tens of thousands of people who believe in me.”

Last week, the Boston Globe reported that van der Kolk was fired by the Trauma Center’s umbrella organization, the Justice Resource Center (JRI), in January, following the removal of the center’s executive director, Joseph Spinazzola, over alleged mistreatment of female coworkers.

Van der Kolk’s firing, according to JRI president Andy Pond, was based on allegations by staffers that the psychiatrist had “created a hostile work environment” and behaved in a way that “could be characterized as bullying.” Pond told Yahoo Lifestyle that he was unable to share specifics of the allegations because the accusers had asked that the details be kept private.

In response to his termination, van der Kolk has filed a lawsuit against JRI, as well as Pond and JRI executive vice president Kari Beserra, naming eleven counts of action, including breach of contract, misrepresentation, and defamation.

One of the main issues of the lawsuit, a copy of which was provided to Yahoo Lifestyle, is the Trauma Center’s autonomy, as based on the memorandum of understanding that the Trauma Center and JRI entered into when the administrative relationship began between the organizations in 2005. The contract (a copy of which is attached to the lawsuit), specifies that the Trauma Center is an independent organization, and that all funds and grants generated by the Trauma Center belong to the Trauma Center; but according to the lawsuit, JRI is currently holding more than $2.5 million hostage from the Trauma Center.

Pond tells Yahoo Lifestyle that the claim regarding those funds is “false,” and that the entire lawsuit is “without merit.” He reiterates his belief that “the Trauma Center at JRI is not an independent organization. It is a part of JRI and Bessel was a part time employee of JRI.

Van der Kolk says it’s possible that Pond’s decision was financially motivated. “He took all those funds… they are now basically stolen by JRI and all these funders are out of their money,” he says. But a “more gentle” theory of motive, he says, is that the allegations against Spinazzola had been known for a while, and that Pond “was the direct supervisor of this guy, and that he felt so embarrassed by his lack of action for so long that he needed to find someone else to put it on. So I think he found me.”

The lawsuit also claims that the implication of the MOU was that van der Kerk would be employed “for life,” and that it was up to the Trauma Center to terminate its own employees. “That’s a dispute,” van der Kolk says, and is “between lawyers.”

“The weird thing is,” he shares, “I always liked [Pond], and when I walked into his office I said, ‘hi, how are you doing,’ and his face froze and he says, ‘I’m firing you.’ We had no prior discussions ever about anything, and I said, ‘This is crazy, there’s as much reason to fire you as fire me, I’ve never done anything.’ And that’s it — no warning, no investigation, no discussion, like, ‘hey, I’ve heard these things about you.’ Nothing.”

While van der Kolk was traveling and unable to speak much about the situation when news broke last week, he posted a response on Facebook over the weekend — calling the story a “very public character assassination of me” — which has since received more than 560 shares, 825 reactions, and 240 comments, the vast majority of them supportive of the trauma expert.

“That is not to say that I cannot be impatient at times, and I have been known to he harsh — that’s something that I’ve been working on in my own therapeutic endeavors & will continue to do,” he added. “I actually think that kindness is our greatest virtue. I am deeply touched by the overwhelming support that I have received from around the world (in fact, it was really good to hear from so many old friends). We are working on reconstituting the Trauma Center by July 2018, with almost our entire current staff slated to join. We already have at least one (very lovely) location that is ready to receive us.”

In his post, van der Kolk also shared the email that he sent to his Trauma Center colleagues regarding the news of his termination, which read, in part, “As you can imagine, I am devastated reading the allegations in the Boston Globe that I have been bullying and denigrating my colleagues at the Trauma Center. I am also aware that such accusations cannot be entirely pulled out thin air, and that some of you must have felt bullied and denigrated by be, though, as far as I remember, none of you have ever confronted me with such misbehavior. If I have inadvertently denigrated or bullied any of you, I would like to know about it, apologize and make amends.”

Many of his supporters commended him for having changed their lives, noting that they were saddened and sorry to hear of his firing but relieved to learn of his side of the story. (“I have never felt so loved as I have in these last few days, the support is overwhelming,” van der Kolk says in response to the outpouring, noting also that “being contaminated” by the allegations has led to organizations distancing themselves from him and the Trauma Center.)

A handful of Facebook commenters took the psychiatrist to task for not owning up to alleged shortfalls, with at least one responding to his comment about never having been confronted. “Well when you’re in a position of power, it’s likely that those you’re bullying have less power and may be rendered unable to confront,” she noted. “It’s not the job of the victim to confront their bully in the work place. It’s the job of management to remove the bully.”

Van der Kolk agrees with that take on power imbalance. “That is a reality. I’ve grown up in the medical world, and people have said all kinds of things, like, ‘If you ever do this again I’ll fire you,’ and ‘I will not promote you unless you do this.’ …You just suck it up. Certainly, when I first started the trauma center a long time ago and came from that world I thought that was sort of OK. But very quickly my colleagues said, ‘No, we don’t do it that way. So I learned I should not adopt the model I was trained in in medicine.”

Regarding comments he hears about his ability to be “harsh,” he says, “I wrote about this journey in my book. All of us need to go through the journey of self-examination.”

Further, van der Kolk notes, “It’s interesting — I saw a movie of Ingmar Bergman directing Fanny and Alexander, and Bergman has a little bit of the same background as I do. He was so gentle with his actors, and I thought, if Bergman can do it, I can do it, too. I thought, I’m going to be as gentle as Bergman. That became my aspiration, actually.”

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