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UNC SAGA brings genderqueer activist Jacob Tobia to campus

UNC SAGA held a talk with gender activist Jacob Tobia in Chapman Hall on Thursday night.
UNC SAGA held a talk with gender activist Jacob Tobia in Chapman Hall on Thursday night.

“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.”

Tobia stressed that trans and gender-nonconforming people are at a moment of incredible vulnerability and face many struggles because of that.

“With visibility also comes a lot of vulnerability,” Tobia said.

Kevin Adington knew about Tobia because they went to the same high school.

“I mainly wanted to come to the event to hear (Tobia) speak again and to see how their own experiences changed over time, because I remember when they didn’t use the pronouns they/them, and I remember when they weren’t as confident as they are today,” Adington said. “So seeing them kind of blow up on social media and the media at large has been fantastic, so I wanted to see that.”

Tobia closed with a message denouncing the current gender model.

“It’s not just about genderqueer and nonbinary people, because as we briefly discussed earlier, this model isn’t just bad for trans and gender-nonconforming people, it’s actually bad for everybody,” they said.

“Every single person in this room has been burned by the gender binary.”

university@dailytarheel.com

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