Sex with Timaree

Philadelphia has, for 11 years, hosted the nation’s largest (and FREE) conference on health issues for transgender, genderqueer and otherwise gender variant people.  I’ve attended it every year for the last 5 years or so. This year I got the brilliant idea (from my producer) that we should record a podcast there.

So I set out to talk to anyone and everyone who was willing to talk to me. Some folks were excited to chime in, especially folks who were representing a company or product. Some attendees also were willing to chat about their experience at the Trans Health Conference, but others were reticent or downright not interested.

Luckily we got a nice cross-section of folks, some with very fun, casual feelings about being there and others who were brought to tears discussing what it meant to them. There are the ladies of Walgreens who talked about the great things their company does to better serve the LGBT community, the folks representing Cucci and the Brown Boi project, some young trans teens attending for the first time, the story of the oldest known trans person in the US, the aesthetician whose daughter’s girlfriend committed suicide due to bullying, the only company that makes transition products for both adults and transkids…. and much more.

I even got to talk to one of my personal heroes, Sex Smart Films auteur, Mark Schoen, who was there promoting his latest film, Trans.

And to add to the excitement (and give you context), this year’s conference took place on the same weekend and in the same venue as WizardCon, Philly’s comic convention.

And as one interviewee put it, “I was worried they’d be staring at us, like, ‘oh, those  weird trans people’ or whatever, but it turns out we’re the ones staring at them in their costumes.”

• Listen to the awesome series of interviews here or on iTunes, where you can subscribe to hear them first!
• More pictures below!