River Gallo

River Gallo

Place of birth	New Jersey
Nationality	American
Pronouns	they/them
Gender identity	genderqueer/genderfluid
Occupation	filmmaker, actor, model, activist
Known for	Ponyboi

River Gallo is a Salvadoran-American filmmaker, actor, model, and intersex rights activist. They wrote, directed, and acted in the 2019 short film Ponyboi, the first film to feature an openly intersex actor playing an intersex person.

Gallo is genderqueer/genderfluid and uses singular they pronouns.

Quotes

"In my undergrad, I'd always go through these swings where I was really flamboyant and just feeling myself. And then I'd have these moments where it was just like, no, I need to be more masculine or dress more conservatively. Now, knowing I'm intersex makes me feel sometimes feminine and sometimes masculine. I wake up and can be whoever I want to be that day. I feel like the feminine and masculine energetically lives inside of me equally. Being intersex has really taught me that it's OK to hold both of those things equally, to have them mean equal things to you, and that you don't have to try to be one or the other."

"There are intersex people who are not queer. They don't want to be part of the alphabet. They want to look at it entirely as a medical situation, and want to correct their bodies to the heteronormative paradigm. I have intersex friends who are heterosexual and cis-gendered. But to me, I think it’s missing the point when one wants to look at it completely in medicalised terms. There are some people that choose to be cis-gendered, and it works out for them completely, but for intersex people who are non-binary, for intersex people who are trans or queer, it is a human rights violation. Because other people are literally taking control and removing agency over decisions about our bodies that should be our own."

References

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article River Gallo, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).