Serena Sonoma
Freelance Journalist
Freelance journalist who focuses on culture. SerenaSonoma1@gmail.com
PROJECTS
broadly.vice.com
A Pre-Op Trans Woman's Guide to Sex
Having sex while navigating gender dysphoria can be tough at times, but these approaches have helped me feel hot.
Teen Vogue
A Teen Allegedly Recorded Videos Up Girls' Skirts at School
Waukesha police said in a news release on Thursday, August 2, that Culver's employee, 18-year-old Scott Schwantes, had allegedly put cameras in the restaurant's employee bathroom.
Teen Vogue
Annie LeGere Law Allows Illinois Police to Carry EpiPens
On Tuesday, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed an ammendment to a law that will equip police officers with epinephrine auto-injection — more commonly known as the allergy attack antitdote, EpiPen.
intomore.com
'There's No Rulebook': Letters To Trans and Gender Nonconforming Youth From Those Who Have Been There
According to The Williams Institute, an estimated 150,000 youth identify as transgender or gender non-conforming. These statistics, however, underrepresent the vast majority of youth who are unreported and those who have not come out yet.
popsugar.com
4 Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People Reveal What Pose Has Meant to Them
I remember my family watching episodes of The Maury Povich Show's "Guess If You Can. . . Man or Woman" when I was a little kid, where transgender women were the butt of jokes. Audience members would yell "That's a man!" — among other homophobic and transphobic slurs — and although I didn't have the language to understand my gender identity as a child, it still played a role in repressing who I was. Growing up, the only visibility I witnessed being given to the transgender ...
Teen Vogue
Promised Spanish Law Could Change Legal Definition of Rape
Following outrage over the verdict in a controversial case, Spain has now promised the introduction of a new law defining rape as sex without consent.
Teen Vogue
Legislation Would Ban Gay and Trans Panic Defense
The murder of Matthew Shepard and Gwen Araujo are only two of many notorious cases in which gay and transgender "panic" defense have been attempted in court to defend their killers — but two Democratic lawmakers from Massachusetts are working to change that.
Teen Vogue
Ontario Reverts to Old Sex Ed Curriculum
In what some have called a conservative coup, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has decided to scrap the Canadian province's sex education curriculum that was first introduced in 2015, according to the Globe and Mail.
Teen Vogue
Study Shows Police Shootings Are Hurting Black People's Mental Health
A report published last month in the medical journal The Lancet has studied what many activists for racial justice have long emphasized: that police repeatedly shooting unarmed black people takes a toll on their mental health.
Teen Vogue
A Transgender Teen's Parents Are Appealing a Judge's Decision That He Can't Change His Name
The parents of a 15-year-old transgender teen in Ohio have appealed a Warren County probate judge’s decision to deny their son a legal name change.
Teen Vogue
#MeToo Joke Prompts Miss Massachusetts Contestant to Resign
Maude Gorman, a contestant at the Miss Massachusetts pageant, resigned from the competition after an emcee joked about the #MeToo movement.
Harper's Bazaar
How Black Trans Women Are Redefining Beauty Standards
To be deemed pretty in the transgender community means looking as cisgender as possible. Much like cisgender women, trans women are expected to cater to conventional standards of physical beauty; they're asked to be feminine and soft—to be able to blend in. The message being conveyed: exist as little as possible.
Pretty privilege and passing privilege are terms that most trans women are aware of. But when you are a black transgender woman, the conversation doesn’t end there. For centuries, id...
theestablishment.co
6 Perspectives On Being In A Monogamous-Polyamorous Relationship
These narratives are a snapshot, not a complete picture. But they help to provide contours to a narrative that’s too often blunted.
them.us
The High (and Often Deadly) Cost of Resistance for Black Queer and Trans People
“Be Strong. Stay Proud.” is the mantra heralded on the website for the Stonewall Columbus Pride Parade, an organization that claims to “stand ever firmly behind our LGBTQ community and all of our communities that demand inclusion, full enfranchisement and equality before the law,” according to its website.
But on June 17 of last year, with arms locked and mouths taped shut, four protestors fatefully challenged that.
Bustle
5 Black Trans Women in History Who Paved The Way For Me
Throughout its history, the movement for transgender rights has often been criticized for centering white people in its leadership and values. As much of history has gone, the impact of Black people within the trans community has too often been erased or simply ignored. But so much of the culture created by Black trans women and femmes has influenced so much of what we know today: Take ball culture for example, created in 1860s Harlem by trans and femmes of color, which gave way to voguing — ...