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I’M NOT SURE I’d be who I am today if I hadn’t come to Atlanta in 2011. I was born in Boston, went to Harvard and lived in Cambridge. I grew up on the south side of Boston, a Catholic town, in a very traditional Christian family. I remember the first time I saw a person who was male-assigned at birth wearing dangling earrings and lipstick in Midtown Atlanta around 2012–13, and thinking to myself, oh my goodness, that’s a person that’s allowed to exist. People can express their gender in these ways.
Atlanta is a huge basin that drains a large area from the Ozarks to Florida to New Orleans. And because of that, Atlanta becomes kind of like Chicago insofar as it’s a beacon city where queer young folks go because it’s a place where they think it will be safe. Moving to Atlanta from Boston, I realized that there was such beautiful queerness in this city, such avid social justice organizing, because we have to struggle to stay alive in this region, in a region where women’s bodies are being legislated every day, where trans folks can’t identify as safely or freely. Living in the South, you have this sense that everyone is a co-conspirator in pursuing justice for all people. The South has been and continues to be an essential part of my identity and how I operate within the world. It’s become a really inspiring place to live and work.
[At Emory], I chose a lab that was focused on cell therapy. Basically, [I work to find] ways to use the body’s own immune system to become more tolerant, rather than using drugs to make the recipient become tolerant. Because those drugs have toxic side effects. When we can just use the cells of our own immune system, we can actually effect a much more holistic cure. It’s fun how the tolerance metaphors flow from that work. We were doing, at the time, bone marrow transplantation to cure sickle cell disease. When we do cell therapy to cure sickle cell, it’s a transplant of cells from one person to another. And the recipient, the person who has sickle cell that we’re trying to cure, the way that we cure that...