speaker-0 (00:14.434)
Hey y'all, you're tuned into Assigned Sex Unarchived. I'm your non-binary cousin, Shaun Dawson, and this is a safe space where we're honest about what it means to show up as Black, trans, and genderqueer. Today I'm sitting down with Nandi K, my agender, polyamorous, podcast-producing partner in crime, and the creative director who helps bring so much of my vision to life. We're talking about how our eight-year relationship works, what non-monogamy looks like for us, and how friendship and creativity stay at the center of what we build together. Let's get into it.

speaker-0 (00:50.168)
Do you remember how we met?

speaker-1 (00:52.882)
Oh my God, can I tell this story? I love telling this story, yes. Of course I remember how we met. It's my favorite story to tell. Yeah, it was OKCupid.

speaker-0 (01:00.11)
Do you remember the app?

speaker-0 (01:04.568)
Was OKCupid a weed app?

speaker-1 (01:08.746)
No, that was some other app you were on. That was like, weed and dating app.

speaker-0 (01:15.086)
I was on this weird app and I keep trying to figure out what app it was but I remember that it was definitely like, I think it was supposed to be a dating app and it was like 420 friendly but I don't think anyone ever used it for dating and I just remember always meeting the weed man and then one day the weed man started acting weird and he was like, what's up? And I was like, what's up? And he was like.

speaker-1 (01:40.814)
Eww.

speaker-0 (01:42.926)
He was like, you want to go out? I was like, no. And then I was telling somebody, they was like, that's a, that's a weed app. It's like a dating, like a 420. I was like,

speaker-1 (01:51.886)
I just came to dance, that's it.

speaker-1 (02:04.046)
We both obviously swiped right on each other because everybody had the swipe mechanism. Because this is post tender. And we talked and then you never replied to my messages. I was like, wow, that's crazy. We both swiped right on each other. So it seems weird that now you won't respond to my messages. Fast forward, a time later, I've forgotten about you. I have a girlfriend. We're out at a corporate holiday party. I have to pee. I go to the was a barcade. It was a Barcade®, because it was a bar arcade. And I went to the bathroom, I saw this fine person. I was like, oh my God, this person is really fine. I was a little drunk. I stared at the fine person. And then I went into the bathroom. When I came out, they were gone. I was like, wow, they were fine. Me and my girlfriend got in an Uber to go back home.

speaker-0 (02:33.836)
What was it? It was an arcade.

speaker-1 (02:59.486)
I open my phone, lo and behold, who is it? Who is it? Shaun on the app, was that you at the bar? Well, well, well.

speaker-0 (03:12.75)
Yeah, that's what happened. And then we started like hanging out and then we never stopped hanging out. Yeah. That's how it happened. Yeah, when I had read, like I swiped on you, but then I looked at your profile and I was like, oh this is crazy. They're like a lot. This might be too much.

speaker-1 (03:35.572)
Mind you, my profile said, like, no white people. I'm sure it did. Also, that was the main thing.

speaker-0 (03:38.774)
It said more than that.

speaker-0 (03:44.78)
You know how you be like, even like how I be on this Her app and I be like, oh I met somebody, like somebody like swiped on me and then I looked and they were like a poet and they did like waist beads. And then they like.. You didn't do none of that but it was a lot of other weird like you seemed like what's the word umm a crash out.

speaker-1 (04:00.534)
But I didn't know none of that.

speaker-1 (04:09.388)
Yeah say something disrespectful. Wow. That's so wild because I've never been a crash out.

speaker-0 (04:16.022)
No, but that was what you were giving off.

speaker-1 (04:19.95)
No, that's what you got. That doesn't mean that's what I was giving off. Just because that's what, I feel like that has more to do with you. That's probably true. you would think that I'm a crash out. In comparison to you, I am. But it doesn't take that much. I'm just confrontational. Okay. And that's not a crash out.

speaker-0 (04:27.95)

speaker-1 (04:46.054)
Oh wow. Silence. Noted. Noted. Noted. Noted. I thought you didn't like me. We have to also talk about that part where we went out a few times and I was like, we're just going to be friends. I even told my girlfriend that because I was you just wasn't giving the vibes of someone who was like, romantically interested. So we probably went out two or three times.

And even then it didn't necessarily click to me until you started acting crazy. And then I was like, oh okay.

speaker-0 (05:24.687)
What is the vibes that people usually give when they like you, like the first time they meet you?

speaker-1 (05:29.358)
Well, normally when people like you, they say they like you. like, try to do things with you. They like, talk to you. Not that much, not as much as I'm used to. You have to understand. I'm used to people falling in love with me immediately. At this time, I'm used to everyone falling in love with me in the first two or three days. So I was like, what the hell is going on?

speaker-0 (05:41.514)
I wasn't talking to you.

speaker-0 (05:51.073)
Oh I see. That's dangerous.

speaker-1 (05:59.032)
But I was cool with that because I was like, that's fine, we could just be friends. Like we don't have to be, just because we met on a dating app doesn't mean like, cause I met a very good friend of mine also on a dating app and we're just friends. So I was like, okay, that's fine. But then you sent me a picture in a sports spot and I said, oh wait. And then after that we like met up and then my girlfriend broke up with me.

speaker-0 (06:21.102)
That must mean I like you.

speaker-1 (06:27.532)
We kept hanging out after that. But it was like after we hung out that first time and I always tell people this because you was playing gospel on Pandora and I was like, who is this listening to gospel? I like gospel. Okay.

speaker-0 (06:43.586)
We should tell people how long we've been together.

speaker-1 (06:45.791)
yeah, how long have we been together, Shaun?

speaker-0 (06:48.78)
Eight years. That's a long time.

speaker-1 (06:49.964)
Yeah, we've been together for eight years. It's a long time. It's my longest relationship.

speaker-0 (06:55.502)
It's my longest relationship too.

speaker-1 (06:57.784)
So what do you think is the reason why we're still together? Because you didn't even like me at first. So you went from not even liking me being like this person is a crash out and now we've been together for eight years. So why do you think that is?

speaker-0 (07:14.414)
I think it's because I can be my 100 % true self. Like I don't have to hide anything. You can see all of the terrible parts of me, the good parts of me, my family, my raggedyness, yeah, it's a lot. But I don't have to hide anything. I can just be my 100 % true self.

speaker-1 (07:36.93)
Yeah, I would say that. I will also say like I've just also like become a better version of myself too. Not only can I be myself like the good, bad and ugly, but I like the person I am more since we've been together. Just as me, not like who am I like with you as like a couple, but I like me independently as like a single person.

speaker-0 (08:04.876)
Before you met me, have you always been agender? When did that come along?

speaker-1 (08:13.53)
Oh God, no, but I think it was like right a couple years before I met you, maybe a year before, where I kind of was like, wait, I was dating this like trans masc person and I didn't really know any trans people at the time. I hadn't had any like trans people in my life. And so I think that was the first time I ever.

thought, there's something else besides being like a man or a woman. And then the more I started thinking about it, the more I was like, so I went through a few labels. went like non-binary femme, gender non-conforming femme. Now I'm like agender trans, yeah. Yeah, it's a journey.

speaker-0 (09:06.606)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (09:08.396)
Yeah, but I remember I asked you your pronouns one of the first times we went out and you were kind of like whatever and I was like, no, like what do you prefer? So when did you think you started thinking about that?

speaker-0 (09:21.622)
Um I kind of feel like now I'm kind of maybe back in that same spot where you met me at where I think I felt the same way there. It's like, feel like with gender, I don't have to announce it and it's flexible. Like if you see me like this, or if you like look at me and you see she, that's fine. If you see they, that's fine too. Like I don't feel pulled to like correct it like either way becauseboth are true, depending on how you see me.

speaker-1 (09:54.326)
Yeah, I think that's how I felt when I was identifying as non-binary femme or gender non-conforming femme. But it's actually about how I see myself and how I see myself is I don't see myself as a gender at all. I've never felt like I was a gender. I used to say, the only time I felt like a woman was when I needed a man to pick up a heavy box for me.

I haven't had a man to pick up a heavy box for me in so long. And I've been getting along just fine. Yeah, but now I be picking you up.

speaker-0 (10:28.206)
I be picking up your heavy boxes.

speaker-0 (10:34.318)
One time.

speaker-1 (10:36.307)
Okay, it can be more times. I can do the tossing.

speaker-0 (10:55.424)
Okay, so it's time for a little Black trans and genderqueer history. Today we're centering the story of Miss Major Griffin Gracie. Miss Major was born on the South Side of Chicago sometime in the 1940s to a Black family that was churchgoing, working class, and not at all prepared for a child who knew from early on that she was a girl. She grew up sneaking into her mother's and grandmother's clothes, getting in trouble for it, and still doing it anyway.

As a teenager and young adult, she started finding her way into queer and trans worlds in Chicago and then in New York, doing sex work and hustling, basically surviving in a country that treated black trans women as disposable. The cops were on her. The streets were dangerous and housing, work and health care were non-existent. Survival came with a cost. She did what a lot of girls like her had to do. She found hormones however she could. She built community with other street queens and she learned to read the world like it was out to get her.

Then we get to the part people love to flatten into a single sentence, Stonewall. Miss Major was in New York in 1969, part of that ecosystem of trans women, drag queens, sex workers, and street kids who were already fighting the police long before anybody started calling it history. When the uprising jumped off at the Stonewall Inn, she was there because that's where her people were.

Not because she was trying to get her name into a textbook. Later, she says she wasn't thinking about making a movement. She was just trying to stay alive in a world that kept telling her she wasn't supposed to exist. The state did what the state always does to black trans women living at the edge. It locked her up. After Stonewall, she was arrested on a robbery charge and sent into men's prisons and psychiatric hospitals, including Attica and Danny Moore in New York where guards tried to break her down with humiliation and violence. They shaved her hair and eyebrows, stripped her naked, and used the prison system the way it's always been used against Black people, as a weapon. Inside, she met Frank Big Black Smith, one of the leaders connected to the Attica Rebellion, who pushed her to study Black history, politics, and the prison industrial complex. And that's where something shifted for her.

When she came out of prison in the mid-1970s, the world definitely hadn't gotten kinder, but it had gotten sicker. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was starting to rip through queer communities, especially Black and Brown trans women and sex workers. Ms. Major moved through New York, San Diego, and eventually San Francisco, doing what she always did, looking after her girls. She worked with HIV AIDS organizations from community churches like City of Refuge to the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center.

And when people couldn't or wouldn't come inside for services, she took the services to them. She helped run one of the first needle exchanges out of a van, passing out clean syringes and information in the streets because theory doesn't mean anything if your people are dying. By the 2000s, Ms. Major had basically become everybody's mama. She took that on formally when she joined the transgender gender variant Intersex Justice Project, eventually becoming its executive director.

The work there was specific, supporting trans, gender variant, and intersex people in prison and jails, especially Black trans women warehoused in men's facilities and brutalized by guards and other incarcerated people. She visited folks inside, coordinated legal and social services, and carried testimony about prison abuses all the way to the California legislature and even to the United Nations. What made her dangerous in the best way is that she wasn't here for respectability politics.

Ms. Major always told the truth about having being a sex worker, about being locked up, about doing what she had to do to live. And she refused to let the movement throw people like her under the bus to look presentable. When anti-trans legislation started escalating in the South, Ms. Major did what black women have been doing forever. She built a house. Literally. She founded the House of gg, the Griffin Gracie Educational and Historical Center, a retreat for black trans women and trans folks of color to rest, heal and get politically grounded. The mission wasn't just safety. It was transformation. It became a space for people to recover from generations of transphobia, racism, poverty and violence created with their experiences and needs at the heart of it. So when we talk about Miss Major Griffin Gracie, we're talking about a black trans woman who turned survival into strategy and strategy into the blueprint. She was a street queen, a prison survivor, an AIDS era caregiver, an organizer, a founder, and a movement mother who helped reshape what justice could look like for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated trans people.

speaker-0 (16:02.402)
Let's talk about your origin story with being poly.

speaker-1 (16:07.334)
Oh my God. Well, I'm not going to give a long story. You can listen to that on my podcast called RightQuick. But I had a terrible crash course. I just I don't want to tell the whole story because like it was bad. But it's just if they want to hear the whole thing in detail, that's fine. But like a short story, I was engaged to a person who then came back from a conference and said, I'm polyamorous. And I said,

Hmm. Okay, maybe we should go to therapy and then they got a girlfriend right away and so then we ended up breaking up because they abandoned me at a music festival to go take care of their other girlfriends pets. Yeah, it was a terrible crash course, but under in that experience I realized that I was actually polyamorous and I found like language for things that I had been doing before that I didn't have language for. How did you end up being
non-monogamous polyamorous?

speaker-0 (17:09.218)
Well, I was in the military for a long time. I was a military hoe at first. Then when I got out, um I don't know, like I wasn't doing relationships for a long time. But when I did, after like a year or two, like I would hit a wall emotionally, like I would just like clock out. And I thought that maybe something was wrong with me. I was just like, this isn't, this ain't it.

speaker-1 (17:10.689)
Oh, So being a hoe.

speaker-0 (17:39.63)
But I found that I do like, I like partnership, I like commitment. I just don't think forever with one person is realistic for me. So I feel like being poly lets me live, like love honestly, instead of trying to squeeze myself into something smaller.

speaker-1 (17:49.634)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (18:00.056)
What a nice diplomatic answer. So, uh did you write that down? Wow that's straight from your brain, that's beautiful. Wow, you're writer. You're a writer.

speaker-0 (18:04.494)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-0 (18:19.726)
What does poly mean for you?

speaker-1 (18:24.118)
I mean, for me, it means like the opportunity to explore a connection when it happens. I don't date no more though. I kind of have given up on dating because I just feel like for me and being like non-monogamous and I'm more of a relationship anarchist where like I...

just wanna have relationships and all my relationships are different, which they are. But also more space for my platonic relationships and partnerships, because really for me, what made non-monogamy click is like, Oh I don't get jealous when my friends get new friends. And I'm like, what is it about those partnerships that make them so secure?

And so yeah, that's it's more about that. Like I'm like, yeah, connection can exist in all types of ways. And I don't think that one connection should cut me off from another.

speaker-0 (19:25.347)
Do you feel like friendship is always at the center of it?

speaker-1 (19:30.882)
It is now for me. I don't think that wasn't always the case. I would even say when we first met, I wasn't necessarily fully like doing that in practice, even though it was in my head. But that's what's really important to me now. Like it takes two years to be my friend. So I think I should have the same kind of carefulness when it comes to like romantic relationships.

speaker-0 (19:57.775)
What's the name of that what's the name of that series that we're reading by C.M. Barnes?

speaker-1 (20:04.936)
the Winston Hills series? Is that what it is? Yeah, that's what it's called, but it has a- all the books have a different name, but it's called- the series is Winston Hills, a Winston Hills novel.

speaker-0 (20:17.282)
Yeah, the smuttiest smut smut.

speaker-1 (20:19.584)
Yes.Oh my God. I've been loving reading the smuts. I've been loving us sharing the smut reading. I've been loving us reading in bed together like a seasoned, older couple. It's very cute.

speaker-0 (20:33.474)
How do you feel like that book made poly look?

speaker-1 (20:37.462)
Man, it made it look amazing. It made it look so much better than it is in real life. Like, finding like, the main unbelievable part is that it was a couple who met another couple and they all liked each other. That other part, the rich part, that's, I'm like, I actually abstract that out because we know that's not the case. Like, we know that the rich part is not the case.

speaker-0 (20:42.286)
Right.

speaker-0 (20:52.79)
And they were all rich.

speaker-0 (21:05.366)
Or maybe all the rich people are hanging out. We just don't know about it.

speaker-1 (21:08.238)
No, because we're Black and like I feel like rich is different for Blacks. Like. But they're like wealthy, they're not just rich, like they're like multimillionaires, right? They're gifting each other millions of dollars.

speaker-0 (21:33.804)
Yeah, I would say that was the only thing that I found just wildly unrealistic for me. The rich part

speaker-1 (21:39.306)
The rich part? No, it's the couples finding another couple they like. A couple finding one person they like is hard enough.

speaker-0 (21:50.68)
That's real.

speaker-1 (21:52.0)
Right, I'm like, thinking about all the times we tried to search.

speaker-0 (21:55.852)
We have a very, I think we have different types.

speaker-1 (21:57.998)
Because you don't care about people as human beings. I know you're gonna to cut this out. I know you're gonna cut this out, but I'm gonna say it anyway. I don't just base it on if I wanna sleep with people. So like, yes, you have to be fine. And also you need to seem like you're about something. And I think you just think about if people are fine.

speaker-0 (22:26.082)
What do mean? I'm definitely. That is absolutely not true and I can't believe you out here lying on me like that on my own podcast.

speaker-1 (22:31.522)
I bet it's very easy for you to say that with your camera off. Let's talk about what like polyamory and non-monogamy has looked like in practice for us, because I think people have like an idea. And speaking of these books, yeah, people have an idea of what polyamory is like, which they think you just like go on dates all the time, fuck people all the time. They mostly think you fuck people all the time.

speaker-0 (23:00.108)
Mhmm. They think you fuck people all the time.

speaker-1 (23:01.654)
And it's not like that. How does it look for you boo?

speaker-0 (23:10.104)
For me, I feel like I'm free to explore anything. Like if I was interested in someone, I could be like, okay, like, let's see, like, what's up? But I don't know if it's because I'm like older or if it's like, it's the, like the pandemic fucked everything up. But usually when I'm like interested in someone and I have an interest, like it's gone within like two or three weeks. Like it doesn't like.

It doesn't go anywhere else after. I'm like, no, because that's too complicated. Like you got too much going on. I'm not willing to take on all that you got going on.

speaker-1 (23:48.834)
Damn. Do you think, I was gonna say I'm kind of similar, but it's more like I don't wanna just get into a romantic relationship.

speaker-0 (24:01.846)
Yeah, for me it's the same. First of all, we gotta be friends. That's the foundation of any relationship with me anyway. It's just like, can we be friends? Are you somebody that I can hang out with and feel like I ain't gotta do a lot of shit? We can just sit down and do nothing and we cool.

speaker-1 (24:19.266)
A lot of people are like in a rush to see it. And that's been my experience. I got off the apps because I told you about that girl who was like, I'm not looking for more friends. And I was like, okay, I hope you find what you're looking for.

speaker-0 (24:34.455)
She didn't find nothing.

speaker-1 (24:35.096)
We don't know each other. But I think one thing I really like is like how we are not the only people that like lean on each other.

speaker-0 (24:50.07)
I do want to talk about you being my creative director.

speaker-1 (24:54.654)
Yeah, I'm a producer on this podcast. We work together, I think really well, even though you don't like listening the first time.

speaker-0 (25:03.082)
I don't. I don't like listening to nobody the first time. It's like you don't know what you're talking about, nigga.

speaker-1 (25:07.762)
Because you have all your goddamn degrees. You got so many degrees so nobody can tell you nothing, but I'd be right. And what matters is, and I've always said this, I may not be right today. I may not be right tomorrow. But I will be right.

speaker-0 (25:29.454)
You do.

speaker-0 (25:36.942)
Alright y'all, that's all I got for today. If you want to connect with Nandi, you can find them on Instagram, Facebook, and Blue Sky @nandikayyy. If this episode dragged you a little bit, or if it hugged you a little bit, please share it with someone you love. You can find me, your non-binary cousin, Sean Dawson, on all platforms at IMS Dawson. Y'all be safe out there.