2024 HGSC Award Recipient Kris King AB '24
At the 2024 Lavender Celebration, HGSC Board President Joseph Barretto (AB '72 JD '75) delivered the following address. His words celebrate both Harvard's new LGBTQ+ graduates and the winner of this year's HGSC Award, given to a graduating senior from the College advocacy and service on behalf of our communities:
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Greetings to all of you from the Harvard Gender & Sexuality Caucus!
At this time of year, the words “crossroads,” “new chapter”, and “endless possibilities ahead” are often heard. We want to celebrate the journey you have taken to get here.
The Harvard Gender & Sexuality Caucus – HGSC – was founded 40 years ago with the aim of getting The University to include sexual orientation in its non-discrimination policy. Two years later, The University did just that. Over four decades since, The Caucus has supported Harvard's LGBTQ+ students, alumni, faculty and staff with the goal of building a vibrant community, improving Harvard's LGBTQ+ experience and supporting social action.
As you prepare to leave the Harvard campus, we want to urge you to maintain your connection to the LGBTQ+ community here at Harvard. How to do that? Join the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus! It’s a deal that cannot be beat: membership is …. free! Through our newsletters, emails, events here and at local and regional Chapters throughout the world, we keep Harvard’s LGBTQ+ community together. Keep informed about LQBTQ+ events at Harvard! Boost your networking opportunities by using our online membership directory listing thousands of LGBTQ+ Caucus members worldwide! Help sustain our Community! Please join us! Before you forget! It’s simple: just check us out at hgsc.org.
Now that our little advertisement is over, we also want to celebrate each and every one of you today. We know it has been a long journey! Congratulations.
We are also here to award the 2024 HGSC Student Award to …. Kris King!
Kris is a nonbinary, transmasc, autistic, multiply-disabled athlete, and activist, with concentrations in History of Science and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies.
The range of Kris’s efforts and accomplishments are honestly too numerous to mention. But to mention a few, Kris has been:
- an organizer and convener bringing together intersectional voices in discussion with Harvard administration, through participation on Harvard’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, the Office for BGLTQ Student Life, the Student Accessibility Advisory Group, the LGBTQ+ Student Support Working Group, and the Inclusion & Belonging Student Leadership Council (where he was Co-Chair);
- TransHarvard, where they organized the 2022 and 2023 Harvard Trans+ Community Celebrations, welcoming over 1500 attendees;
- a curler: Kris is a four-time National qualifier, President of the Harvard Curling Club (MVP in 2023), 2nd Team All-American for USA College Curling (being the first openly trans+ All American curler);
- Harvard Athlete Ally where they sought to mobilize athletes against anti-trans bans in sport
- a multiply-disabled person: Through their work with the National Autistic Advisory Council through Autism Society, Kris brought their queer-trans-autistic perspective to the table. And as an openly disabled intern at the Office of BGLTQ Student life, Kris has pushed for greater accessibility along mobility, sensory, and invisible disability lines normalized conversations about disability in and around existing LGBTQ+ spaces at Harvard;
- Harvard Inclusion & Belonging Student Leadership Council, Co-Chair; and
- Trans Club of New England, Director of Community Engagement.
There is more, but to conclude, Kris tell us they’re hoping to follow their dream to be a disability bioethics lawyer, in order to ensure that more LGBTQ+ and disabled people are provided the full opportunities in politics, law, and policy to which they are entitled.
Thank you for your patience….
Now let me ask you to join me in awarding the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus’s 2024 Student Award to Kris King!