Margherita Coppolino is an intersectionality and inclusion consultant, who has worked across disability rights, LGBTQIA+ inclusion, and multicultural community advocacy since the 1980s.
Margherita is co-chair of ILGA Oceania and a member of the ILGA World Board, was appointed ILGA Oceania’s first Disability Sub-Committee Chair in 2020, is Vice Chair on the Drummond Street and Queerspace Board, a previous co-chair of Inclusive Rainbow Voices (LGBTQIA+ people with disability), and immediate past president of the National Ethnic Disability Alliance.
She has served two terms on the Victorian Ministerial LGBTI Taskforce and has been a member of the SBS Community Advisory Committee since 2019. Previously she held the position of Chair on the Arts Access Victoria and Australian Federation of Disability Organisations boards, with non-executive positions at Spectrum Migrant Resource Centre, Action on Disability within Ethnic Communities, Women with Disabilities Australia, and Short Statured People of Australia. She has been a panellist and moderator at LGBTQIA+ side events at the United Nations Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in New York.
Margherita is a first generation Australian, born to a Sicilian mother who migrated in 1959. She was born with a short statured condition and is a proud feminist and lesbian.
Host Sasja and Margherita trace the language from affirmative action in the 1980s, through equal opportunity and diversity, to intersectionality, and what changed for Margherita when she could finally be described as a whole person instead of being filed under disability. They talk about why no two trans experiences are the same, how a person can be welcomed in one community and shut out of another, the politicisation of trans and gender diverse people over the past decade and the case for the community returning to being a family, trans women in leadership at ILGA World and in United Nations spaces, and how Margherita responds when feminist arguments are used to exclude trans women. Margherita also walks through what an intersectionality audit examines, from bathrooms and uniforms to who appears in an organisation’s imagery and how recruitment questions are asked, and closes with what she would say to a young person about finding their superhero and owning it.