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

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