Speakers & Presenters
Finding Inspiration in Every Turn
Further information about the amazing speakers we have lined up
Coming Soon
Coming soon
Prudence Walker- Kaihautū Tika Hauātanga Disability Rights Commissioner
Coming soon
Taine Polkinghorne- Human Rights Commission
Coming Soon
Dr. Claire Breen Professor Claire Breen (BCL. LLM. PhD)
Coming Soon
Mathilde Redamare -Intersex Aotearoa Team Lead & Peer Support Lead
Coming Soon
Jay Bailey -Intersex Aotearoa Ambassador
Coming Soon
Mx A.J O'dea - MC Extroadinare
(pronouns: They/Them or He Him)
AJ O’Dea is a museum host and tour guide at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, where they share stories about Aotearoa’s cultural and natural history with visitors from around the world. They are also an artist and an intersex advocate involved with Intersex Peer Support Australia and Intersex Aotearoa, working to increase understanding and visibility for intersex communities in Aotearoa.
AJ has a passion for storytelling and education and in their free time, they enjoy running Dungeons & Dragons, language learning, playing video games or exploring the outdoors.
Dr. Rogena Sterling (PhD, LLM, LLB) Chair- Intersex Aotearoa
Speaker
Intersex Personhood
Dr. Cynthia Mulit. Ph.D, LPC, NCC, BC-TMH
Counselor Educator
Speaker
How Do You Explain What It Means to Be Intersex? A Teaching Tool. Intersex communities possess beautiful diversity. Yet that complexity produces a challenge for educators and activists. How can we rapidly convey a coherent intersex specific story? How do we honor sub-community disagreements and the overlapping issues with other LGBTQ+ movements without being buried in them? As a counselor educator, the presenter first turned to models. In her dissertation, she developed an intersex specific identity development model to organize psychological themes culled from interviews of U.S. intersex elders. She now addresses the larger social contexts in which intersex individuals develop their personal identities. This session presents a teaching tool in progress, a series of diagrams titled Intersex People: Exist and Are Human Beings, including sub-categories, Intersex-Biology, Intersex-Communities, Intersex-Identity Development, Intersex-Culture, Spirituality, and History, Intersex-Human Rights, and Intersex-Leaders and Contributions. The teaching tool is designed to (a) depict that intersex individuals are not erased by Western politics and medicalization, and (b) highlight the unique intersex identity challenge. Intersex people are told by a binary sex philosophy that they do not exist when they most certainly do.
