Anne Tamar-Mattis was born on June 28, 1969 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. At age 5, her family moved to Carbondale, Illinois, a town of around 25,000 that had many racial divisions and no openly queer people. As Anne was coming to terms with her queerness around the time she was graduating high school, she was determined to leave. 

Anne attended Brown University and got involved in the student LGBTQ+ organization and AIDS activism. She then moved to the Bay Area and dove right into the queer scene. She lived in Sunset House in Oakland with Susan Stryker and Kim Toevs, who introduced her to trans history and politics. Anne worked for about 7 years with LYRIC, an organization serving queer youth, running the LYRIC Youth Talk Line to provide peer counseling for queer youth nationwide. She then worked for 2 years as the first program director of the SF LGBT Community Center. 

Suegee Tamar-Mattis was born on March 14, 1963 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and their family ultimately settled down in New York City. Their father came from an Orthodox Jewish Russian background, while their mother came from a working class Christian farming family in rural Louisiana. Suegee spent a lot of their early childhood hospitalized for life-threatening respiratory problems and they were never operated on. As was common during this time, being intersex was never openly discussed. Suegee felt alone in being intersex, but being from NYC, they were also surrounded by a strong community of close trans and queer friends.

Suegee attended Antioch University for the radical political scene, moved to Boston where they encountered anti-semitism, and landed in San Francisco, studying at the SF Art Institute. Amidst the heightening AIDS pandemic, they became a phlebotomist and started volunteering at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics. Through connecting with Susan Stryker and Jamison Green, Suegee met Bo Laurent (also known as Cheryl Chase). Suegee and Bo worked together   on  the first intersex retreat in 1996 in Sonoma County. 

During these years of grassroots activism, Anne and Suegee met in 1992 in a SF Street Patrol training, a community-led public safety initiative to protect queer people from violence. When they shared their first kiss during Suegee’s Street Patrol-themed 30th birthday party, the rest was history. They moved in together, got married, and welcomed a baby into the world. Anne quickly became a strong ally in the budding intersex movement. As they had their second baby, Anne and Suegee both decided that, to make more meaningful change with their existing strengths, they would need to return to school. Thus, Anne began law school and Suegee began medical school. 

Anne attended law school at UC Berkeley and went on to teach courses in LGBTQ+ law, sex discrimination law, and sexual orientation law, and for some years served as the only out faculty member at UC Berkeley. After law school, she founded InterACT, the first organization in the world focused on legal advocacy for intersex people. Since then, Anne’s outstanding LGBTQ+ legal advocacy for has won her a multitude of honors including Unsung Hero by KQED; the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Award by the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice; the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence scholarship; the Equal Justice Works Fellowship; the Echoing Green Fellowship; membership in the American Law Institute; and the creation of the InterACT Anne Tamar-Mattis Intersex Ally Award. 

Meanwhile, Suegee entered medical school at the Orthodox Jewish Touro University, where they remained closeted throughout medical school and then were nearly denied their medical licenseby the Osteopathic Medical Board of California for being intersex. During residency, Suegee realized that trans patients were intentionally traveling to see them on their clinic shifts, which inspired Suegee to open the first transgender health clinic in Sonoma County in 2006. The clinic is still running to this day and has trained countless trans healthcare providers. Suegee went on to work at  a homeless clinic, conduct research with the Human Rights Watch on the medical dehumanization of intersex people, travel around the world to train healthcare providers on care for intersex patients, and testify before the state Senate to pass intersex bills. 

After completing their graduate education, Anne and Suegee moved to Sonoma County with their two children and their longtime co-parents, Oren Slozberg and Irwin Keller, to form a queer kibbutz.

Today, Anne and Suegee remain very active in social justice movements while also running a psychedelic medicine clinic called Liminal Medicine. They generously share their wisdom with us as they reflect on the necessity for unity across communities, new ongoing research, the beauty of communal homes, and being living examples to disprove stereotypes in their ever ongoing march for change.