Chapter 106: Alok Vaid-Menon battles binary boundaries and beauty biases

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Alok ("A-loke") Vaid-Menon was born in College Station, Texas in 1991 to parents from India and Malaysia.

When they were young they’d dress up in their mom and sister’s clothes and dance around the living room for all their extended family, including their Auntie Urvashi (a gender non-confirming lesbian of color and national activist). The entire room would clap and cheer them on over syrupy bowls of gulab jamon. But when they performed a similar Bollywood routine onstage at the school talent show at age six ... they got laughed at by the entire school. Thus began a shame-filled odyssey through pretending to live as a boy -- or, at least, male-presenting -- for many years. And it also began an astounding personal dialogue and examination around gender which they're helping to lead globally today.

Alok graduated summa cum laude from Stanford University with a Bachelors and Masters of Arts in feminest, gender, and sexuality studies. Stuffing their post-graduation work into boxes doesn't work but if forced to attach labels you might start with academic, author, artist, comic, poet, philosopher, or activist. Their work explores gender, trauma, and belonging and they call for body diversity, true gender neutrality, and our most basic tenets of self-determination. They advocate for a world of acceptance and love.

Alok is the bestselling author of Femme in Public (2017), Beyond the Gender Binary (2020), and more recently a poetry book called Your Wound/My Garden (2021).

I grew up the son of Indian immigrant parents in Canada with male and female binaries and the accompanying blue and pink clothes laid out in blue and pink nurseries. Gender divides only deepened with age and, looking back, I know they partially caused me to self-censor sides of myself. I remember painting my toenails and hiding them in my socks, secretly reading and loving The Babysitter Club books, and quitting figure skating once I was the only boy left in the class. Alok shared with me the history that dispels the relatively modern cultural story of the 'gender binary' and they taught me how, in India as just one example, colonialists three hundred years ago eliminated existing gender non-conformities in favor of distorted filterings and categorization.

Alok created #DeGenderFashion, a global movement to degender fashion, they have performed in over 40 countries around the world, and they headlined the 2021 New York Comedy Festival.

Alok and I talk: beauty standards, queer history, librarian pizza parties, trans-femininity, denim platform shoes, British colonization, bánh-mì sandwiches, self love, Alok’s three most formative books, and much, much more.

It was a joy spending time with Alok in Central Park in New York City.

Get comfortable on the bench between us and let's flip the page into Chapter 106 now…