For Morgana Bailey, it was nerve-wracking enough to step on the TED stage and reveal that she is a lesbian — a fact she’d kept hidden for 16 years. But walking into a viewing party to watch the talk with her co-workers? That brought a whole new level of anxiety. “I live in a very […]
Geena Rocero did a pretty bold thing at TED2014: She came out. The transgender fashion model chose Vancouver to reveal to the world that she was assigned male at birth. “I am here exposed … to help others live without shame and terror,” she says in today’s talk. The trans community has had a spotlight […]
When creative scientist Kate Stone gave her talk at TED2013, her biggest worry was whether her paper DJ decks would work onstage. Something she didn’t think twice about: being “outed” as transgender. She didn’t want to detract from her work, and figured that her gender identity was her own personal business. But now, one year later, […]
The extraordinary and eloquent Andrew Solomon closes TED2014 with a talk that brought the theater to its feet. Popular wisdom, begins Solomon, is that we find meaning, that it is an external truth to seek. But after a lifetime as a student of adversity, he has found that meaning, in fact, is forged. Solomon recalls […]
“The world makes you something that you’re not — but you know inside what you are.” Model and activist Geena Rocero opens her powerful talk in the first session on Wednesday, March 19, at TED2014. Rocero, poised in sky-high black patent heels, shows photos from throughout her modeling career: bold, bikini-ed, confident. Her career as […]
November 4, 2008, the night Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, was a monumental victory for the American civil rights movement. For documentary filmmaker Yoruba Richen, who should have been over the moon, the night tore her apart. Nearly 150 years after the end of slavery in America, as Obama was being […]
In a major setback last week for the LGBT community, an Indian Supreme Court ruling upheld Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — a 153-year-old law criminalizing gay sex. This act overturned a 2009 Delhi High Court ruling that this should not apply to consensual acts and, essentially, recriminalized homosexuality. While the Indian government […]