Ashley Mardell Educates the World on The ABCs of LGBT

With increased visibility of the various gender permutations on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, it can be difficult for a well-meaning ally to keep up. Wait—there’s a bigender AND a trigender? What does ‘agender’ even mean? And how is it that there’s MTF and FTM but ALSO MTM and FTF?

Thankfully, YouTuber Ashley Mardell is taking us all to school with her series, The ABCs of LGBT, where she teams up with other gender diversity experts, activists, and sex educators on YouTube to teach both cis/heterosexual allies and LGBTQ+ folks who might be in the process of learning who they are about the myriad gender expressions that exist. She released the first video in the series four months ago, and it’s become so popular that she decided to create more, so as to include the gender identities she couldn’t get to the first time. The ABCs of LGBT has become one of the biggest collaborative projects in the LGBT community along with the YouTube projects #ProudtoLove and #ProudtoPlay.

And as The Daily Dot mentions, it’s already making a difference in LGBTQ and ally communities with comments like this one:

“As a straight, cis male, I can’t really personally relate to anything non-binary, but I sure as hell love learning about it all. It’s all so interesting, and I’m glad that so many people are proud enough to be different from what’s considered ‘normal’ by society that they’re putting themselves out there to teach people like me, who know really nothing about all the different gender and sexuality identifications, about them. So thanks for that.”

Above is Part One of her 2-part series on gender. However, Mardell’s YouTube channel is chock full of videos about all sorts of issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community and deals with them in an appropriately intersectional way. Check them out! Because we all have something to learn.

And also, I’m totally digging her bow tie.

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Teresa Jusino

Teresa Jusino (she/her) is a native New Yorker and a proud Puerto Rican, Jewish, bisexual woman with ADHD. She's been writing professionally since 2010 and was a former TMS assistant editor from 2015-18. Now, she's back as a contributing writer. When not writing about pop culture, she's writing screenplays and is the creator of your future favorite genre show. Teresa lives in L.A. with her brilliant wife. Her other great loves include: Star Trek, The Last of Us, anything by Brian K. Vaughan, and her Level 5 android Paladin named Lal.

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