Pride and Gender

—  Mrs. Isola was my second-grade teacher at P.S. 89 in Elmhurst, New York, borough of Queens. I have no real memories of her, just a class picture, which is pretty much the point: Whatever I was supposed to be learning in school at the age of seven, I was tuning it out. I blame only myself. What did I miss? I’m not exactly sure, but later on in childhood, I realized that although I could write perfectly well (see what I did there?), I was not necessarily on a first-name basis with all the parts of a sentence. And I’m not talking about advanced stuff, say, gerunds. I’m talking about some embarrassingly core concepts, for example, pronouns. None of us back then had any idea of the deeper meaning pronouns would someday convey. They were just words.

Pronouns are important to AC Dumlao, whose website is “callmethey.com.” AC, queer transgender and non-binary, is a rising star in the LGBTQ world. They are the program manager for the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, and heavily involved in the organization’s Name Change Project. In that role, AC has a front seat in what is sometimes the theatre of the absurd: brand marketing to the LGBTQ community, especially now, during Pride month. They’re encouraged, frustrated, but also optimistic. They’re paying attention—and so am I.

Radical Transformation

—  Once upon a time in America, there was an advertisement that soared far higher, intellectually, than it was ever meant to. At least with me. The brand? Taco Bell. I’d never even stepped foot in a Taco Bell (liar), but there it was, calling to me, promoting the 79-cent value menu. “Change.Is.Good.” I mean, I get what they were saying: You can’t grow if you're not willing to change. Indisputably. Almost tautologically. But this is big stuff. It’s kinda scary; how you handle change, whether you run from it or seek it out, the extent to which you embrace it, will, to a large degree, determine the course of your life. It’s your journey, n’est-ce pas? That's a lot on anyone’s plate. 

We first met Tea Uglow at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, during our ‘Is OUT(side) the new IN?’ panel, a collaboration on diversity, inclusion and female empowerment that we dubbed Google + She Says + C/BY/C = Rare (visit the event page). Tea is the creative director for Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney, Australia, and in that role, she thinks deeply about the nexus of technology and culture. She knows a thing or two about change—radical transformation—not just on a professional level but very much so on a personal one. I get the sense that they go together, her personal experiences informing her vocational view of the world. And while she is very clearly a profound thinker, radical transformation doesn’t seem to come for her as primarily an intellectual exercise, but more so as a function of great emotion, of tumult. Perhaps not always welcome, but always accepted. In a world fast moving toward Artificial Intelligence, that makes her human.