Alicia Roth Weigel
Alicia Roth Weigel is an activist and author working to improve the landscape for marginalized populations in the South and worldwide through her firm Intrepida Strategy. A human rights commissioner for the City of Austin and award-winning intersex advocate, her work is featured in Focus Features’s film Every Body—directed by Julie Cohen of the documentary RBG—and the memoir Inverse Cowgirl, published by HarperCollins. Alicia is passionate about promoting embodied autonomy through building culturally competent healthcare programs, legislating the advancement of gender equity and fostering a more socially and economically sustainable economy. While currently focused on consulting, she has also run political campaigns, launched NGOs, brokered public-private partnerships and raised funds to accelerate social change.
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Intersexcellence: Thriving Beyond the Binary
Intersex people comprise nearly 2% of the world’s population, but exist largely in the shadows—marginalized by that “H-word” or physically conformed to fit a M/F box on a birth certificate via surgeries and hormones without their consent. Intersexcellence chronicles how activists like Alicia have survived and thrived beyond the binary, resisting erasure and hustling to raise visibility of their identities so that future generations of intersex children can see, and achieve, success. (Background: According to Planned Parenthood, intersex is a general term for a variety of conditions where a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit typical definitions of male or female bodies.)
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Beyond Boxes: The Intersex Case for Intersectionality
Gender is fluid and sexuality is a spectrum, but the false binary of biological sex remains. While 150 million Intersex individuals worldwide stand as evidence to the contrary, they are often “normalized” in their youth by un-consented surgeries and stigmatized into silence thereafter. Whether by “bathroom bills” or medically-condoned genital mutilation, humans will continue to be forced into boxes that don’t exist until the Intersex movement has its moment. Gender equity activist Alicia Weigel shares her own experience as an Intersex individual and a call-to-action for more intersectional advocacy within the LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights communities.
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Embodiment in an Age of Disconnection
Many of us have been stripped of autonomy over our bodies, in healthcare or civil rights contexts; all of us exist in systems that condition us to disassociate from our own bodies in order to survive. Whether to heal from injustice or simply to live in a way that’s more in touch with our wants and needs, Alicia Roth Weigel outlines how we can learn to thrive in an age of disconnection through embodiment practices—and how we can help others thrive via strategic advocacy.
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"On the Basis of Sex”
The Civil Rights Act guarantees protection from sex-based discrimination in the United States but how exactly do we define sex? Sexuality is fluid and gender is not entirely binary… As it turns out, sex exists on a spectrum too. Alicia Roth Weigel (star of Focus Features’ Emmy-nominated film Every Body, led by the same director of the acclaimed documentary RBG) provides a comprehensive analysis of sex and gender, strengthening and uniting the current movements for gender equity and LGBTQIA+ equality.
See Alicia Roth Weigel in action.
Intersectional Intersex Advocate
Alicia Roth Weigel is an author and activist, working to improve healthcare and facilitate embodied autonomy through her firm Intrepida Strategy.
She is best known for her advocacy for the rights of intersex people like her, from pushing municipalities to condemn nonconsensual surgeries on intersex children to launching the nation’s first-ever dedicated intersex health program for adult patients in Kind Clinics throughout Texas. Alicia’s leadership in the intersex movement is featured in a film directed by Julie Cohen (of the RBG documentary), Every Body, and a book published by Harper Collins, Inverse Cowgirl. It has also garnered her various White House invitations and numerous awards, including recent inclusion in Out Magazine’s “Out 100” and the Austin Under 40.
Alicia serves on the City of Austin’s Human Rights Commission, the Community Advisory Board for Texas Health Action and the Health Equity Policy Council for Central Health—a taxing entity that provides healthcare to low income Central Texans. In these roles, she she has helped draft and pass policy to reduce sexual assault and human trafficking, mandate paid sick leave and abortion funding, and target other social determinants of health at the local, state and federal levels.
Her former work as employee #1 at Deeds Not Words—founded by the filibustering feminist icon Wendy Davis—led to the adoption of various state-level laws and city ordinances. In this role, Alicia traveled the country to speak on panels and at conferences, to lead corporate workshops in gender equity (Google, Facebook, etc.) and to train hundreds of high school and college students in legislative advocacy. She has also run various political campaigns at the municipal to federal levels, to increase representation of marginalized communities in public office and to expand healthcare access in Texas and Georgia.
Prior to moving to Texas, Alicia held various roles in international marketing at grassroots organizations and for-profit businesses in Brazil, Angola, South Africa, and throughout the US. She holds a B.A. from Cornell University, where she studied Development Economics and Latin American Studies. Above all, Alicia is committed to fostering intersectional advocacy toward body autonomy and culturally-competent healthcare for all human beings.
She has written for the New York Times and Time Magazine, has been interviewed by NPR’s Terry Gross and the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart and been featured in the Daily Mail, Forbes and more. Alicia lives in Austin, Texas with her chihuahua Chiquita.
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Trump’s ‘Biological Truth’ Executive Order is Not Based in Biology or TruthFor most Americans, the past few days have felt like a whirlwind; for intersex Americans like myself, the past week has been one of unimaginable whiplash
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“Intersex is a beautiful thing”: Despite having surgery forced upon her, this activist found healing"Inverse Cowgirl" Alicia Roth Weigel discusses her memoir and how she's fostering intersex-competent health care
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‘Inverse Cowgirl’: My Life as an Intersex, Intersectional Activist in the Lone Star StateMany intersex individuals underwent surgeries in our youth to force our bodies to fit the gender binary.
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Intersex Rights Activist Alicia Weigel on New Her Book “Inverse Cowgirl”Activist Alicia Weigel is a member of the intersex community, individuals born with both male and female reproductive organs. Weigel joins "CBS Mornings" to discuss her new book "Inverse Cowgirl."
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The Intersex Community Is Fighting for Every BodyWhen I first moved to Texas in 2016, I never expected it’d be here that I’d come out as intersex.
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‘Every Body,’ an Intersex Doc From ‘RBG’ Director Julie Cohen, to Get a Focus Release (EXCLUSIVE)In June, Focus Features will release Oscar-nominated director Julie Cohen’s “Every Body,” a documentary about three intersex individuals.
