interdisciplinary perspectives on intersex

Keynote speaker

Daniela Crocetti is a Senior Research Fellow at Huddersfield as part of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant project on Intersex, Human Rights and Citizenship. Daniela completed their PhD in 2011 at the University of Bologna in Italy on Intersex medicalization, collaborating with AISIA (Associazione Italiana Sindrome da Insensibilità agli Androgeni), the Italian AIS (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) support association. Daniela has also researched and published on the social history of the gendered components of the body (such as hormones and chromosomes), genetic laboratory practice, health activism and chronic and/or congenital patient mobilization. With funding from the Intersex Fund, Daniela and Italian Intersex activist Claudia Balsamo created the informational website www.intersexesiste.com in order to provide respectful and easily understandable Italian language information on Intersex and DSD to a general public.

Keynote speaker

One of the most significant roles in my career is in the shaping of the multidisciplinary team for people with differences in chromosomal, gonadal and anatomical sex development. I have helped to produce evidence to highlight some of the negative aspects of traditional medical management. As a co-founder of the European Network for the Psychosocial Studies of Intersex/Diverse Sex Development (www.europsi.org) and Critical Sexology Seminar (www.criticalsexology.org.uk), I have been active in building bridges between communities of health professionals, scholars and service users, dialogue between whom is critical for realising ethically and psychosocially informed approaches to medically benign genital differences.

Keynote speaker 

Valentino Vecchietti is an independent academic, an intersex human rights activist, a writer, and a public speaker.  They have presented at Intersex Human Rights Conferences in the UK and internationally.  They spoke at two of the 2018 Transitional States events, and their article Intersex Existence and Patient Autonomy is published in the catalogue.

They provide consultation on projects which seek to include intersex people, amongst which: LGBT Organizations, The Office For National Statics, Government Equalities, and in the arts for film and theatre.   They work with universities to produce projects and research regarding intersex human rights.  In collaboration with psychotherapist Jane Czyzselska, they provide workshops and seminars for the psychotherapy and psychological professions to better understand and work ethically alongside clients with intersex variations.  They are contributing to the 2018 Women on the Coach seminars for Confer.  They are interested in intersectional identities, and this is reflected in their online scrolling comic In-Out: Gender Through The Brexit Lens, which looks at the divisive politics of binary, as well as their own experience of growing up in the UK in a working class, immigrant, family.

Photo credit: Del LaGrace Volcano

Keynote speaker

Del LaGrace Volcano is a gender-variant visual artist whose work is designed to disrupt norm compliant socio-cultural binaries using visceral pleasure and political provocation as primary strategies of resistance. Volcano is considered one of the world’s leading HBT-QI cultural producers working for social justice and full human rights for all.

"As a gender variant visual artist, I access ‘technologies of gender’ in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across"

www.dellagracevolcano.com  

Conference organiser 

Megan is a PhD candidate and associate lecturer in the College of Arts, University of Lincoln. Megan’s research project is a medical humanities thesis on the subject of narrative representations of intersex individuals. Megan explores intersex narratives in a range of texts including medical texts, patient case histories, fiction, life-writing, televisual series and the media with the aim of establishing how intersex representations and cultural in/visibility has changed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Megan has a keen interest in public engagement, interdisciplinary research and collaboration to further develop intersex knowledge, visibility and acceptance in academia and beyond.