“My mom was put immediately in this super shitty situation, that the world put her in, no one else put her in,” Tobia said.
“This is sort of what I think most of us face, because it’s on the one hand you can affirm your child and then take them outside and immediately they’re going to be bullied and harassed by everybody and set them up to have basically the worst Halloween ever. Or, you can be like, ‘Nah I’m going to shut you down now in the interest of your protection.’ It’s a terrible position people are forced into.”
Thursday night, the UNC Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA) hosted “Glitter. Power. Love: A (re)Introduction to Gender.”
Led by Tobia — a genderqueer advocate and artist — the workshop aimed to explain the who, what, where, when, why and how of the genderqueer movement.
Aaron Lovett, UNC SAGA president, created the event after getting feedback, especially from the LGBTQ community, that students wanted to see more representation of genderqueer, trans and nonbinary people speak about their activism work.
“Essentially, I saw that people wanted to engage in that dialogue,” Lovett said. “I thought that it was an important topic to bring to light on campus so I decided a good way to do that would be to bring one of the most prominent writers, speakers, advocates on that topic to campus and right now that person is certainly Jacob Tobia.”
After sharing several stories from their childhood, Tobia dove into the more conceptual material concerning trans, genderqueer and nonbinary people.
“Gender is not just one or the other,” Tobia said. “It is a broad spectrum of a lot of different things.”
