leadership announcement
Hello Gender Unbound community,
This is Drew Riley, the founder and former Executive Director of Gender Unbound. That’s right, former Executive Director. Gender Unbound has had a lot of changes over the last few years quietly without official updates.
Drew (left) and Jae (right) at the 2019 Gender Unbound Art Festival
After a hasty transition to virtual programming in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizing team decided to take an indefinite hiatus starting in 2021. The following year, I approached the Gender Unbound board with the news that my wife and I were moving out of Texas. The Gender Unbound board had a thoughtful conversation about what the organization’s future might be. We were still on hiatus, and many of our organizers had changed careers or gone back to school. So I went into this discussion prepared to potentially sunset Gender Unbound. I was delighted, proud, and amazed to hear that while so many of our futures were uncertain, our core organizers still wanted Gender Unbound to continue.
I asked Jae Lin if they would be the next Executive Director. Jae has been a part of organizing every Gender Unbound event from the very beginning. They were part of the discussion to name Gender Unbound, and even designed Gender Unbound’s logo with me. Jae is an excellent facilitator of community spaces, and they have become one of my closest friends and confidants. They are a natural choice to take over the reigns, and I couldn’t be more confident in a successor. I’m very honored that they accepted the role.
There are more updates to Gender Unbound to mention, but it only makes sense for it to come from Jae, who has been overseeing these changes. Jae, would you like to take it from here?
Jae (left) and Drew (right), 2023
Of course, Drew <3
Gender Unbound has been such a home for me. Planning the festival with Drew and our core crew was a huge part of coming into myself as a trans artist, a community organizer, and planting my roots in Austin. While I (and so much of Austin) was heartbroken to watch my best friend move away, it is special to be entrusted with such a huge part of her legacy.
I remember when, even before our hiatus, we were already throwing around ideas for how we might do things differently if we ever stopped doing the festival. Could we host smaller events throughout the year? Would that make room for even more variety and different ideas for ways to share connection and bask in the brilliance of trans and intersex artists? Now, we have some space to play in those daydreams.
In 2023, we hosted our first event since 2020─and our first event without Drew on the organizing team. On a Spring Sunday, we celebrated Trans Day of Visibility with a community picnic and art market; the weather was perfect, trans people were laughing and relaxing, and people brought the most tantalizing picnic spreads. Especially after a particularly hostile legislative session that year, it felt like such a balm for the community.
Come 2024, we hosted that beautiful TDOV Community Picnic & Art Market again, and we’re also thinking more seriously about the future of Gender Unbound. We’re already planning a series of events for the next two years, and we’re staying intentional about how we want to sustain our internal dynamics and cultures of organizing together. And, we decided to incorporate as an independent nonprofit, rather than a fiscally sponsored project. We started Unbound Communities (newly 501c3!), which will be Gender Unbound’s new home.
I’m so grateful to have an incredible team of trans and intersex organizers by my side to cultivate a culture of accountability and joy and sustainability in the ways we organize towards a future of trans and intersex liberation. This team is amazing─we were forged in the fires of volunteer-planning an international arts festival, after all─and I feel like we could do anything together.
Drew: I’m so excited about the new 501c3! The TDoV events have looked so amazing from afar. I love what you and the Gender Unbound organizers have been doing, and I can’t wait to see what y’all do next.
Jae: I’m glad and grateful you will be sitting on the board of Unbound Communities, helping to hold the vision for uplifting trans and intersex artists in central texas. Thank you so much for starting this and for trusting me with it.