Speaker: Kimberly
Job title: Senior Advisor Global Intersex Rights
Company: Outright International

About the spreaker
Kimberly Zieselman, JD (she/her), is an internationally recognized intersex human rights advocate and leader, author, and nonprofit executive with more than thirty years of experience advancing social justice, public policy, and organizational leadership. She serves as Senior Advisor for Global Intersex Rights at Outright International, where she focuses on movement building, advocacy and policy, and resource mobilization. She also serves as a Global Advisor to the Astraea Intersex Human Rights Fund and is a 2026–2027 Harvard Kennedy School Carr-Ryan Center Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Fellow. She previously served in the Biden-Harris Administration as Senior Advisor to the U.S. Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons, becoming the first openly intersex person appointed to serve in the U.S. federal government. For more than a decade, Kimberly has helped shape the international intersex human rights movement through advocacy at the United Nations and other intergovernmental bodies. In 2013, she testified on intersex human rights violations before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the Organization of American States. She participated as the sole American intersex advocate in the historic 2015 United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Expert Intersex Convening and later provided testimony supporting the landmark 2024 Human Rights Council resolution addressing discrimination, violence, and harmful practices against intersex persons. She also moderated the first-ever intersex side events held inside both the United Nations in Geneva and at UN Headquarters in New York, and is an official signatory to the 2017 Yogyakarta Principles +10, which expanded international human rights protections related to sex characteristics. As Executive Director of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, Kimberly led the organization through a successful rebrand while tripling its operating budget. She helped secure California's first-in-the-nation intersex legislation and served as a key advisor to the groundbreaking 2017 Human Rights Watch report documenting medically unnecessary interventions on intersex children in the United States. She also served for several years on the board of InterConnect (formerly AIS-DSD), supporting intersex people and their families, and is a former Arcus Foundation Leadership Fellow. Before dedicating her career to intersex advocacy, Kimberly served as Director of Government Relations for Boston Children's Hospital, where she led the institution's first strategy-driven government relations campaign and secured more than $200 million in new Medicaid funding, earning the National Association of Children's Hospitals Legislative Advocacy Award. Earlier in her career, she coordinated a multi-state advocacy program for the national infertility patient organization RESOLVE and worked as a research analyst for the Massachusetts Joint House and Senate Committee on Healthcare. A passionate advocate for the power of authentic storytelling, Kimberly has advised on intersex representation across television, film, and journalism, helping shape the first recurring intersex character on television and supporting the public introduction of the first openly intersex celebrity. She consulted on Gender Revolution with Katie Couric for National Geographic and has been quoted or published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, BBC, STAT, The Advocate, and The Washington Blade. Kimberly is the author of the award-winning memoir XOXY, executive producer of the award-winning short film Common As Red Hair, consulting producer of the feature documentary The Secret of Me, and curator and editor of Defending Bodies, a global anthology of intersex activist stories to be published in 2027. Through law, policy advocacy, writing, and film, Kimberly's work bridges personal narrative and systemic change, demonstrating how authentic storytelling can transform public understanding and advance the human rights of intersex people worldwide. At the Harvard Carr-Ryan Center, her fellowship focuses on preserving the history of the global intersex rights movement through a digital oral history archive while engaging the Harvard Kennedy School community through writing, public talks, and film. By documenting the lived experiences of movement leaders, her work seeks to ensure that the history of intersex advocacy is preserved, studied, and carried forward by future generations. She holds a JD from Suffolk University Law School and a BA in Communications and Political Science from the University of Vermont.