In this episode we bring you news of the LGBTQI Communitites struggles. Naomi Brussel and John Riley also bring us an extended interview about Intersex issues. Intersex is a group of conditions in which there is a discrepancy between the external genitals and the internal genitals (the testes and ovaries). The older term for this condition is hermaphroditism.  In the past two weeks, several events have brought the issues related to intersex people and their rights into the news. The United States State Department has issued its first passport using the X gender marker to Dana Zzyym (pronounced Zim) who had fought a six year legal battle to change the State Department's gender marker policy. And the Biden administration held a white house round table on intersex awareness day, October 27th, and issued a statement through its department of education. Protecting the rights of intersex students. The organization, Interact Advocates for Intersex Youth in conjunction with Harvard law school for the LGBTQ and Advocacy Clinic, there, launched an intersex advocacy toolkit. And one of the people responsible for driving various numbers of these events is Kimberly Zieselman, who is with us today.  Zieselman is the executive director of Interact Advocates. She is an intersex woman and has more than 20 years of experience in advocacy and nonprofit management. After graduating from Suffolk University law school, she served as a policy analyst for the Massachusetts joint House and Senate Committee on Healthcare, and then worked in government relations and advocacy for a variety of healthcare related nonprofits, including Boston Children's Hospital.

She led the group Interact through a successful strategic planning process about six years ago and rebranded and reorganized the organization in 2016 to reflect its core mission around intersex youth and the importance of raising intersex visibility, as well as using law and policy initiatives to protect intersex children's rights. She talked with Out-FM co-hosts Naomi Brussel and John Riley about some basic issues that Interact deals with, how rightwing legislatures on one hand demonize gender affirming surgery for trans youth and on the other affirm the right of parents and medical providers to do surgeries on intersex babies and toddlers