Join host Martha Williams as she talks with Ava Pipitone, social entrepreneur (Host Home, Suyana Wearables) and futurist, about how Ava's journey to finding true embodiment has led them on a quest to re-think gender personally and societally.
Ava is an entrepreneur, futurist, and friend. They seek to embody peaceful evolution through completely hacking and redesigning their physical body, psychology, and ideology to integrate our new norm of constant adaptation.
Martha Williams:
Dear Culture Shifters. I'm Martha Williams, your host today. Thank you for joining us at the Culture Shift Podcast, where we work to shift the conversation to inspire a more balanced, peaceful, compassionate, and collaborative world. We believe culture shifts come from a profound change in how we relate to self others and our planet. We've spoken to a number of guests recently about diversity and inclusion, and about reimagining the workplace as a place where one is encouraged to bring their full spectrum of talents, knowledge, experience, and personhood, really their full humanity. With that we ask, what would it look like to live in a society where one's full embodiment was welcomed beyond the workplace? Well, you know, we don't live in that world yet, but we're interested in speaking to people who aren't afraid to bring it on and bring it all. Even with the persistence of a whole slew of isms, sexism, racism, classism, not to mention the usual phobia, suspects, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, et cetera.
Martha Williams:
Now these courageous individuals have chosen to negotiate through adversity and difference to not only claim their rightful place in society, but to thrive. This is why we're excited to introduce Ava Pipitone, a serial entrepreneur who works in gender advocacy and access, housing access, workplace democracy and healing wearables. So we met Ava at a Social Venture Circle holiday party, and the subject of gender and power came up immediately. And we've been in dialogue with Ava ever since then grappling with, of course my favorite topic, “how to shift culture!” We're not only struck by Ava's business acumen, but also by their embodiment, confidence, charisma and ambition. And we welcome Ava to the Culture Shift Podcast to talk about how their journey of self realization and embodiment has led to an inquiry on everything from structural injustice, in housing, to bridge building and queer communities, as well as inside their own family. And what a world without gender might look like everyone Ava Pipitone
Ava Pipitone:
Thank you, Martha, for having me.
Martha Williams:
So just so our audience is clear, Ava, you prefer to be addressed by the pronoun “they”, correct?
Ava Pipitone:
People call me a variety of pronouns every day, but whatever you use with love, I'll respond with love.
Martha Williams:
Wonderful. So there's so much to explore here, but I think let's just start by giving a quick overview of HostHome, which is of course, one of a myriad of projects you're working on.
Ava Pipitone:
I have a garden with various plants growing in my portfolio and the oldest and most promising of those is HostHome. HostHome is a system that overlays on top of any social service system that's happening in that city or state and social workers really determine who is placed. It's a platform that facilitates public private partnerships and affordable housing, and then interfaces with whatever software our local governments are using to deploy their affordable housing voucher systems, et cetera. So we interface with those platforms and bring them up to speed with the emerging players in commercial real estate, such as co-living and home-sharing, and it's a technological solution, but we are building it with an eye for my community. So I’m a transgender person, a non-binary person. So I've lived as many different genders in the world. And during that time where I was navigating that journey, you experience structural oppression.
Ava Pipitone:
It's just, things are a little bit harder to accomplish when you don't fit neatly in the two categories. So HostHome is designed for, with people like me in mind, because in designing that way, we've solved a whole host of subsequent structural barriers, looking at our, our social services. We have this assumption that gender should always matter and public accommodation and accessing care and the documents that touch your body and what HostHome is designing for and what I really bring through other projects as well, is that it's the opposite. That gender should never matter unless it's a special circumstance for it to do. So. I think it's really crucial to just note that if people who don't fit neatly in the two categories of gender experience a 78% chance of being attacked, harassed, kicked out or worse in a housing intervention. So if that's a group housing intervention, like a homeless shelter or a transitional house, or any kind of halfway house, that's a group oriented and design folks in my community and the gender expansive or transgender community will have a 78% chance of unfortunate outcome.
Ava Pipitone:
So it matters in cases of duress that are caused by design to structural inefficiencies that result in chronic or structural housing instability, or marginal housing status, any kind of intervention in that space, that's not designed with a mind for the people in that situation will exacerbate the problem it's trying to solve because it's not acknowledging that the system itself caused this group of people to end up here and you can't fit them back into the system, as it is. You have to change the whole system to accommodate. And this dialogue around public accommodation can be anchored into professor Heath Fogg Davis. He writes Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? and he is the leading theorist – and his whole thesis of gender should not matter. Public accommodations legislation should all be in effect gender ambivalent. And that would be the most effective systems to design.
Martha Williams:
So you're saying gender shouldn't matter.
Ava Pipitone:
Yeah. I would say gender never really matters unless you're proving a special circumstance for it to do so. And those circumstances can be valid, right? If you're speaking of like a survivorship or a healing space where it was a gendered experience, there's definitely room to build a space around people who have had certain lived experiences. And that I would just argue that gender might not be the best way to differentiate who has, or has not experienced the various things. And those cases might be useful to break things into groups based on experiences, which could fall along these traditional categories of gender. But it's not actionable to really assume that everybody has the same understandings of gender and the same linguistics around that. So if you just use gender as a placeholder for a much more specific meaning you'll fail to get the right people in the room.
Martha Williams:
So yes, I can see that gender, especially in the binary, it can be really overgeneralizing and inaccurate really, and maybe even inappropriate in certain contexts, but I'd argue that in some cases, wouldn't you say gender actually matters very much.
Ava Pipitone:
I feel like that question of like, when does gender matter is a little bit challenging to answer because of the ambiguity of what we mean when we use gendered words and especially like categorical systems around what gender is or is not. I studied philosophy and ethics, so if you're looking at Wittgenstein he talks about these indexicals on what a word means and what it doesn't mean. And the parentheses around like everything in these parentheses is this word. And the outside is no longer that definition. It's really hard to do that with words like man woman, and then taking that across culture. It's really, really hard to do that when you get into the other attributes that are assumed to fall within those parentheses.
Martha Williams:
No, absolutely. When you look at gender, especially male and female, there's a box around it. There are these parentheses to say, it's this way. And it's not necessarily considering what's outside this parentheses, all the possibilities it's in our language. And it's right there at the baseline of how we think. It sounds to me like you're talking about expanding the definition of gender. I can imagine that in a partnership based culture, perhaps before our current dominator culture was established, but anything in our modern world, we can look to?
Ava Pipitone:
I think what matters for people are experiences. So to look outside of the culture that we were brought up in, right, I'm talking about how we experienced gender versus how, how culture is that existed before the big Imperial powers had their scaled control mechanisms operational throughout the world. I always anchor people in on the kingdom of Thailand because they were never colonized. They have a robust categorization system of bodies, people and roles in society that breaks down into about 16 different categories. It's a white person talking, you know, I'm not of that culture. However, it's often done that we say that those are 16 different gender roles. I don't know if that's really true. They don't really use the language of gender to describe them, but there's 16 different categories that map onto behaviors. And that's, that is a robust system. That's in no way, a binary system that really reflects the complexity of personhood.
Ava Pipitone:
And if you go all over the world, you'll see parallel, complex and robust systems of categorization for roles in society. And they map over not just the embodied experiences of primary and secondary sex characteristics, but they also map onto everything from fashion to profession. And I get really interested in Indonesia where they have these five genders and they even have a, a neutral gender in the center, which is used for arbitration and like legal matters if they're not in the judicial function specifically. And it just resonates with me as I studied ethics and philosophy and am a non-binary person. And I see that this path that I've gone on was actually codified in some cultures around the world and to think about we're making new culture here in the United States, and we're only 400 plus years old into this experiment. We're in the adolescence, but we're also have this opportunity where now we can own that this is happening and own that this differentiation is a beautiful part of culture building. And now these conversations are pivotal in like, what are the roles we want to codify in? Where did the binary work and not work? And how do we go from here?
Martha Williams:
It's very exciting. And I want to bring this conversation around to the fact that you have actually this new venture HostHome and that the government is seeing this actually as an opportunity to address some of the systemic issues resulting in how we traditionally think and approach gender. They see your venture, your structural reawakening, and reorganizing as something that's potentially really exciting. So how did you get here?
Ava Pipitone:
It's like driving a car in a fog. You can see five feet in front of you and just go five feet in front of you. And that's the best you can do. The long term strategies, the hockey stick graph that shows an exponential ROI. That's probably never going to happen. So if I were to like advocate for utopia around how we deal with gender and categorizing each other and have a public accommodation space, it would be utopic. And it would probably never be really inclusive of all the new data we get every five feet walk. So we need to just keep walking five feet forward. And my compass is around maximizing this flow and autonomy and minimizing constriction or friction. So in that the keyword of autonomy, we should all have autonomy over our bodies over the language and legislation that touches our bodies. That is like a key compass. When we encounter each other, we're often unaware of how deeply our language actually penetrates into another person's space.
Martha Williams:
Right? And I understand this foggy drive has led to an interesting new development related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tell us about it.
Ava Pipitone:
HostHome is ambitious. We want to deploy software for social workers to place their clients and this whole emerging set of supply and housing, and have that be integrated into seamlessly into the public support and housing support. And that's, that's a pretty ambitious project. Definitely has traction at HUD Housing and Urban Development, federally, and the various state agencies. That work, slow going, long time horizon and definitely exciting conversation, but ambitious. Now COVID happens. COVID global pandemic and we have people testing positive, true positives. They need true quarantine, not just at home quarantine. They need true quarantine, especially if there are any other people in their house. It's very risky. So they reached out to HostHome through an organization called the COVID Alliance. It's a very new, very large organization of public private actors, folks out of MIT, folks at United Nations epidemiology just coming in, people are just, we're going to get this done.
Ava Pipitone:
They're thinking about credentialing and identification across various platforms, but thinking about rapidly interfacing all of these legacy technology platforms that different States deploy in social services, tethering them all through a single credential and thinking that to a true positive test so that someone who is actually experiencing Covid can receive goods and services that they need such as housing and social services, wellness, mental health, and medical. Receive it first access goods and services now, and then the systems will catch up on the backend to ensure that funding flows where it needs to do.
Martha Williams:
Beautiful.
Ava Pipitone:
Yeah. Yeah. It's called the COVID Alliance, the founder, a friend Ryan Naughton and he and I met at a super connector called the Summit. I had this intuitive hit to reach out to him around a roadblock I was experiencing in the business and that intuitive hit proved, right. And one thing led to another. And now I'm in meetings with folks.
Martha Williams:
I think that this kind of actually leads really seamlessly into the topic of embodiment because you trusted your intuition to reach out. And I'm sure you were probably fully present, engaged, embodied. You met Ryan. And honestly, that's why we connected because for me as an ex dancer, ex athlete director presence is a key form of intelligence in and of itself. I'm sure your embodiment is why a lot of your network has kind of blossomed and grown. So talk a little bit about how embodiment plays into all of this.
Ava Pipitone:
When you go to the front lines of what's happening on the planet, that's where the real embodied healers are. That's where the people who are deeply deeply heart-centered are operating. I spent a lot of time there. I led an organization called the Baltimore Transgender Alliance was advocating for legislation and change and in Maryland and the BMV area. And through all that, I accessed healing constantly. And my main modality is movement. It was a somatic release of whatever embodied traumas and microtraumas that I would acquire in that work. I would then literally dance out. And, you know, there's just this flailing Ava for many years as an activist. But when I really stepped down from the Baltimore transgender Alliance and moved back into a calmer space, I started realizing that, you know, I can access a state of play and the dance doesn't need to be so chaotic.
Ava Pipitone:
And I encountered a thing called Five Rhythms, which actually brings different waves of the musical score from staccato to deep rhythm. And the DJ is giving you instructions, speaking to you about how to read one another and how to judge the energy of another person. And as you approach them to just see, is this, this like two microphones when they get next to each other, making a high pitch, screeching noise, or is this a harmonious melody that's emerging based on your energies interacting when you connect so deeply to yourself and to the other, it's exponential that you're going inward and you're reintegrating and healing. And that creates a gravity that pulls in others and learning how to do that art. You talk about embodiment. I feel like I'm unlocking this inner wisdom and I'm not just in human connection and how to bond with one another and communicate what it is that you're experiencing during your healing, but also how to navigate when I'm not on the dance floor.
Ava Pipitone:
So it's very clear when you get into your head and you get nervous and it's like, Oh, should I go near that person? Oh, will I regret what I did a minute ago? That was..no, no, in the past of the future, you're in your head, you're in the executive assistant brain. The heart is really the core. It's the quantum computer. This is where you want to be. And that's not in the future, the past that's in the present. So taking this feeling of when I'm in flow and then going into a business decision or a strategic decision with my time over my various business decisions, I can seek that same feeling. And I have language for this. It's called coherence. So when I find out what is that state of people call it flow. I like to use coherent, just a little more medical and data oriented.
Ava Pipitone:
So this state of coherence where you're actually your heart rhythm is in harmony with your cerebral state or your NEMS, your neuro electromagnetic frequencies are aligned with your EKG is your heart rate. And that produces a state of coherence, especially in emotional states, such as love, peace and all these things. People call it the states of flow. So when I am in that state, I can trust that I'm on the right path. And when I'm weighing options, I can feel that that's not the right option for me. I can feel that option A and option B. I can feel like in a very embodied way, like, does option A want to dance with me right now? No, they don't, there's option B. Option B is like a full body. Like, yes, like I feel that like we're in the same energy right there. And it brings this really embodied somatic experience of on the dance floor in the five rhythms connection, not connection discernment. And it brings it into these, you know, tactical and strategic decision making processes in my business. And honestly, like I imagine many entrepreneurs these days who are having success, speak up this with different language. They'll just say they follow their gut or they follow their intuition. I'm a little more verbose.
Martha Williams:
I love it, Ava. And can absolutely relate to what you're speaking to. And I also, I see you as a bridge builder and the embodied learning you speak of seems crucial to being able to build bridges. Can you speak to how bridge building has played out for you and perhaps your entrepreneurial journey, but definitely in your gender journey?
Ava Pipitone:
The language of bridge-building is for me, shows up as the intergenerational bridge building work, we're no longer having dinners with our gay aunties and our trans siblings. Like we're not reaching back to give thanks to the people that came before us. And we're not reaching back to kind of check our theories off of the wisdom of the past. And so that's kind of bi-directional like creation of lack of trust between generations and it's accelerating the divide. You can see that manifest in the tools that we organize, but we also see it in linguistic technology. Like we're using words to describe how we do sexuality and how we do gender that are rooted in things like sensation. And that are just letting go of that language of the past, around like what, like a lesbian was, right, or what a Butch and a femme was like, we're not honoring those things that came before us.
Ava Pipitone:
And in some cases, the young queers will actually like create friction, resist those languages and we say it's yucking someone's yum. So if someone has a huge yum and really worked for their yum and their yum is like, I'm an, a star carrying Butch lesbian. And like, I like fought for that, I'm in that celebration. And then young queer, like 18 year old comes along and says like non binary gender is over. You're so stuck in the mud, like we're on the same team. We need to acknowledge that we want this authenticity, this autonomy and this, the spaciousness for each other. Why do we have to yuck each other's yum?
Martha Williams:
Very good question. I think that's happening, you know, not just in the gender conversation, but kind of everywhere. Intergenerational yucking of yum has been around for a long time. It's like, you know, the pompousness of youth butts up against the set ways of preceding generations. But that said, there's also a lot of energy in youth, right? There's a lot of energy and new ideas, but there is a call to elders to make those bridges and to weave strong nets so that we have a stronger society that said, right. You told us specifically about an experience with Twin Oaks, which I think speaks to this pretty directly. We'd love you to share that with our audiences.
Ava Pipitone:
So I had the honor of being called into Twin Oaks, women's gathering last year in the summer. And for those who don't know Twin Oaks is, it's an intentional community. One of the oldest ones in our country, it's legally a monastery and they value domestic labor and factory labor equivalently as their method of action for equalizing the more historical differences in those spaces around gender. So they're progressive in many ways in that space. There's another festival that was known as Mitch festival, which was a, it was exclusionary to folks of trans experience specifically if someone was born an assigned male based on their genitals at birth, but then was living as a woman that would be a trans woman. They were not allowed in that festival. And this really circles back to the linguistic failings of using gender, we really mean is more embodied experience.
Ava Pipitone:
And this festival Michfest struggled with that on the very last year where they actually ran it, they had some success with intergenerational workshops. But the festival ultimately imploded and the Twin Oaks women's gathering did not want that same fate. So they said, Hey, you know, we don't know, and we know there are many things that we don't know, we don't know, let's talk about it. And they reached out, I was honored by the call and we worked together for several months to craft a series of workshops to do this work of intergenerational conversation around queer theory in relation to some of the older thought in the space and how we could have learnings from one another and more communication, deeper communication. And in that inform people who wanted to be there, but maybe understood now that the space is not for them, right?
Ava Pipitone:
Or understood now that this space is most specifically where previously they thought it was that. I will say one of the main takeaways from our time, we did an age line where we had everyone in the event, an approximation of age order, fold the line in half and talk to someone who was drastically different from you in experience and in language really have a heart to heart around how they experienced their embodiment and their expression of gender. As I go through their life and find synergy it was a very, very fruitful conversation, all the pods that were happening. But the ultimate takeaway that I think for the trans community is if those women's spaces are like very strong, like pyramids, very strong and stable and resilient, the trans community is still kind of congealing and consenting on language. And that community isn't yet as stable in its structure.
Ava Pipitone:
So it's more of a tower and that tower was somewhat leaning over onto the pyramid of the women's spaces and the women's spaces were like, we can hold this weight for a little while, but it's kind of heavy. We don't want to break. So what we want to articulate and construct ourselves as moving forward is to stable communities. And we can have a sky bridge between the two pyramids and we can interact with one another. In that way. There's a lot of newly identifying as trans folks who don't have relationships with their elders and are unconscious of their impact on space. And they're really in the trans community. We need leadership to mentor newcomers, to this identity journey, to hold their hands and really explain like you're completely autonomous and free, and you have impact on spaces. It's like as though there was a toddler with no parent running around and someone has to change their diaper, like whose kid is this? That'd be a very new trans person in these women's spaces, relatively causing havoc. Cause their socialization and embodiment is, is jarring the intention of the space. So that was a huge conversation that we level set on.
Martha Williams:
I want to just kind of do a little bit of a turn here, cause I know you're calling in from your childhood home where you and your siblings have been sequestered together during this pandemic. And I know that from speaking to you that there's a lot of difference inside of your family. So I just want to hear from you about how you navigate that difference.
Ava Pipitone:
I believe we choose the family we're born into and for a whole host of reasons. I'm beginning to see clearly why I chose to be born to this family. I have peaceful conversations with people on all sides of our binary political spectrum from ultra leftist to ultra rightest. And like that is very rare for someone to have the experience of that. So my family here, I have a sister who is the PhD literary theory, and you know, she studied at Oxford and very intelligent, very liberal leaning. And then I have another sister is an entrepreneur. She's visited a few times during quarantine and she was my ally and supporter for the family. When I first started the physical journey of changing how my body looks and feels and shows up in the world, she was the main person like helping the family get it. But my brother is a military veteran, very socially and fiscally conservative and votes accordingly and simultaneously has love, but shows it in very different ways.
Ava Pipitone:
And then my parents are, you know, my dad is super emotionally intelligent and runs a heating and air conditioning company. And my mom is very intellectual and ran a lab at Hopkins, doing animal research, but we are as diverse a camp as possible here. And when we all come together for dinner, it's what threads are not going to trigger everybody. I've done a lot of healing on the experiences I've had in my life. I can maintain peace and be the learner in conversation. My father has wisdom. My mother has wisdom and my brother has wisdom and their lived experiences have teachings and golden nuggets in them. And let's receive those from one another and let's just be mindful of our delivery. And that's the hallmark of the dinner table is how can we deliver our experiences and our stories peacefully. So I think your question of like, how has that been is really, I would just anchor it there – like we have been spiraling towards peace , you know, doing our very best.
Martha Williams:
What was the turning point for you?
Ava Pipitone:
Well, every conversation fed to my brother's experiences, Afghanistan will just come up in some way all the time. And that would be like the irrefutable piece of evidence in every conversation as to like their point being stronger. So when I was focusing my contributions on like, who would do the dishes and or who would help with cleaning, like these domestic tasks, that then we would bond and it would be a peaceful moment in this collaboration. And then they would say like, Hey, wow, that was actually really nice. Like I missed this and I'd be like, yeah, same. Why don't we have that? And they'd be like, I don't know. Because we're cause we're always talking about war because they're always arguing. And then they would be like, okay, I didn't realize that. And I would get through whenever we'd experience the actual piece and then they would notice it.
Ava Pipitone:
And I would say, yeah, we have been working towards this. And then they would ask like, what's in the way of that. And I would name it and they would receive it. And I always say, I was the only person doing that. My sisters were doing that in their ways, but like, it's really, we had to get to a synergy. The turning points were those moments of synergy with everything dishes too, like when we would clean together or when we would, you know, it's spring, so we have to clean up, sticks out in the yard and things. There's like domestic tasks that all of are my adult siblings who are also quarantined here away from their houses and their, their husbands and wives. It's a very strange turn of events that resulted in this like very strange, like three siblings in our thirties with our own houses stuck in our parents' house. But we have the blessing of having found peace.
Martha Williams:
Oh, that's so beautiful. That sort of inner transformation reverberating into outer. And I just want to say, thank you so much for sharing all the various textures of your experience. And I want to ask you one final question. If gender were working well, what do you imagine our world would look like? What would be different?
Ava Pipitone:
Honestly, I think a coercive gender assignment is over the gender and sex that like a doctor assigned to you does not dictate your life and will not anymore. I think gender working well as gender is creative expression. Gender is in our alignment. When, if you look at someone like me and you feel any ounce of discomfort, have you asked yourself questions that I necessarily have to get to the point where I am right now? I have had to ask myself a series of hard questions. Would I like to try this? How does this feel? Would I like to try that how's that feel? I have done a lot of work to find an alignment and an inner grounding and a depth of connection with myself and who I am, and then expresses outward as what you're experiencing now. And when you meet someone like me, you are faced with that, have you done your thinking to an equivalent depth or more?
Ava Pipitone:
And I say that that's an opportunity for, I hope to catalyze this introspection and others such that they can all find this inner stability and you find that stability in yourself and then you compare it to whatever linguistic and social categories you see in your culture. You don't use them during your inner work. You do the inner work internal. So gender functioning, well it's like everyone is in the creative process of creating themselves and gender doesn't matter until we need to interface with a system that still has that coding. Everybody should be creating themselves based on what feels that feels this strong embodied. Yes, everybody should be created themselves. What feels the, like I am the stack of my identity concepts, all operating internally towards some expression of something as near and dear to my heart and purpose on the planet. That's gender operating. Well, it's synergistic, it enhances your contribution and your delivery of your contribution.
Martha Williams:
Ava, how can people find you?
Ava Pipitone:
Avapip.com (https://www.avapip.com/). That's a V a and P as in purple, P as in purple, AvaPip.com is really my lead page for everything. I have a tab on there that has links to HostHome and Suyana. And Suyana is a wearable device design firm where we bring marriage between the human and device ecosystems - devices that help us ground. I'm happy to add some commentary to whatever you're creating, AvaPip.com.
Martha Williams:
Ava, I'm very grateful for our conversation and I'm grateful for the breadth of your knowledge and all the contemplation you've done. And for you sharing that with us today, I think we all have a lot to think about, and I very much look forward to continuing this conversation with you, Ava.
Ava Pipitone:
Oh, of course, Martha, this is super fun for me. There's so much more that we didn't even touch so happy to keep the dialogue going and definitely our friendship.
Martha Williams:
Thank you so much for joining us today on our interview with Ava Pipitone on the Culture Shift Podcast, where we dig into critical conversation with those who are shifting culture by defying the status quo. The transcript and links related to this podcast, as well as other episodes are available at cultureshiftagency.com (https://www.cultureshiftagency.com/).
© 2020 Culture Shift Agency, Inc.