Gender, Race and Identity

Robyn Ochs is an educator, speaker, grassroots activist, writer, and editor of Bi Women Quarterly. She has served on the board of MassEquality, and on the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth. She was named by Teen Vogue as one of “9 Bisexual Women Who are Making History,” and she was chosen to represent Massachusetts on the Advocate’s “50 States, 50 Heroes” […]

  Ellie,[1] a young trans woman from Central America, sits across a small table from me in blue men’s scrubs, hair cut short and eyes downcast. It’s taken hours to shuffle her from the solitary confinement unit to this cold, windowless room, where I am to help her prepare her pro se asylum case. She’s […]

  In my senior year of high school, I spent months gathering everything I could find on LGBTQ+ history for a research presentation. As the day approached, I panicked. It wasn’t that I feared my classmates would explicitly belittle me during the presentation, but rather a feeling of isolation. No one had ever spoken about […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. This blurring of boundaries in all forms is what makes Southeast Asia, as a whole, “queer.” And this is our gift that we can share with the world. For we were queer before the word existed. Abstract Many queer Asian Americans […]

INTERVIEW OF J.R. KUO This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Our parents, immigrants, they left the country because they want a better life for themselves and for their kids. They have been in survival mode. Their whole life they don’t have the luxury to talk about mental […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. [Comprehensive immigration reform] directly affects our families and our communities. Let’s take this opportunity to engage our political leaders and let them know how much we care about reuniting families.   Abstract In 2019, National Federation for Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) offers […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Perhaps most importantly, individual and institutional conversations that aim to radically shift the culture around mental health in the AAPI community will be the greatest avenue for change. Abstract Mental health stigma, a lack of access to culturally competent clinicians and […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. This piece originally appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. The invisibility of Asian American Buddhists is compounded by the challenge of coherently defining such a diverse group…there are multiple competing definitions of “Asian American,” “Buddhist,” and “young adult.” […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Among AAPIs who use services, the severity of their mental illness and the length of suffering is longer. The shame and stigma of mental illness continues to be a major deterrent to seeking care. Language barriers and the lack of bilingual […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. It is also harmful and unproductive to pit one marginalized group against another, particularly given the context of anti-Blackness that often pervades Asian American communities. Introduction There is a complete absence of the voices of Black and Asian individuals on the […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Since queerness is still a taboo topic in the Asian American community, the marginalization and invisibility of both queer and Asian American identities in schools and in their community call for a third space where queer Asian American youth can be […]

This piece was published in the 29th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Across all of these subgroups, individuals from these three subgroups describe a common narrative that “Asian” usually refers to East Asians – resulting in feelings of marginalization and invisibility within the Asian American umbrella. While the Civil Rights Movement of the […]