Tyler Ford and Arabelle Sicardi Credit: photo by Jana Birchum

So many aspects of what SXSW has become concern themselves with How To Advertise Harder, n’est-ce pas? Of course this panel, moderated by Shepherd Laughlin who works gathering and processing humint on trends, is going to be asked about how brands can best engage with Generation Z in all its newly revealed and thus universe-disturbing gender-fluidity.

Tyler Ford and Arabelle Sicardi Credit: photo by Jana Birchum
You know brands, right? The entities that want to sell you stuff? Yeah, well. Luckily for the audience, the young movers-and-shakers Arabelle Sicardi, Becca McCharen, and Tyler Ford nodded hello to and shook hands with that line of questioning but went on to discuss their own personal and non-commercial experiences in dealing with, in being part of, and (yes) even marketing to, a youthful spectrum of humanity ablaze with the letters LGBTQ and more. And the panel, and the filing of this report on the panel, and the festival in which all of it takes place also fit in with a salient takeaway from the discussion: What’s enabling modern teens to embrace and maybe actually, hurray, celebrate their other-than-gendernorm selves? You can thank the Internet for that, citizen, the endlessly connecting Internet. And give an especially vigorous thumbs-up to Tumblr.

Generation Z and Gender: Beyond Binaries?

Friday, March 11, Hilton Austin Downtown

This article appears in March 11 • 2016.

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