LGBTQIA+ Inclusion in organisations
Creating environments of safety, dignity and belonging
For Pride 2021, I was privileged to be able to share some thoughts on LGBTQIA+ inclusion and the importance of building cultures of safety, dignity and belonging. This talk was given for an international organisation multiple times for an international audience located in multiple continents via zoom.
For the astute observer, you will notice that my way of talking about gender and sexuality has changed some since I wrote about it last year in LGBTQIA+ inclusion in yoga spaces. Since writing that post, I’ve thought a lot about wanting to update it with new thinking and to offer a version that was not just directed at yoga spaces. This is my current evolution in a search to describe gender and sexuality in more useful ways that are more true to the lived experience of trans and queer people.
Nothing is created in a vacuum. I want to acknowledge three particular aspects of this talk and the roots which supported their formation. First, I want to acknowledge the imagery I used and adapted for use in the talk’s slides came from the Transgender Unicorn model. Further, I had been looking for a reframe of my appeal to Yogic Ethics in the article I wrote last year. In June 2021, I saw a talk by Staci Haines given for the Mindbody summit hosted by Embody Lab in which she mentioned the need for safety, belonging and dignity as lying at the root of social justice movements. This felt like a useful frame of reference to use for this talk. Finally, the opening meditation is based heavily on an exercise which I learned some years ago. I have studied online with the Strozzi institute, Coaches Rising and Amanda Blake at different points in time and been exposed to various version of this centering exercise as taught by Richard Strozzi and others who have been exposed to the work of the Strozzi Institute.
Further resources
List of some common non-binary identities
Non-binary pronouns in different languages