How and Why Your Organization Should Continue to Celebrate Pride When the LGBTQIA+ Community is Under Attack

A supporting hand waves in front of a rainbow flag flying on the sidelines of a summer gay pride parade

Even with positive advances in rights and protections in recent years, this Pride month arrives with LGBTQIA+ people under attack.

Politically-motivated legislation attacking this community, especially transgender youth, is proliferating, despite a lack of evidentiary backing. These efforts include removing content from school curricula, limiting public restroom access and banning people from getting the care they need.

Furthermore, major brands and employers are caving to political pressure to end or reduce marketing featuring LGBTQIA+ people. Overall, these attacks result in normalizing and fueling negative sentiment toward the community, denying people their identity and humanity, and in many cases, putting lives at risk.

Against this backdrop, celebrating Pride month at your organization is a vitally important and powerful affirmation of the humanity and dignity of LGBTQIA+ people.

Rather than engaging in politics, celebrating Pride is a simple, but clear gesture of support for your colleagues and friends who are personally experiencing trauma or isolation as a result of current events.

If you’re wondering how you can show up for your staff in a way that makes a meaningful difference in their experiences well beyond Pride month, consider the following.

Be an Ally

People from vulnerable groups can experience isolation in their workplaces. To be an ally in your place of work, advocate to advance initiatives to create a safe and inclusive environment.

Listen, learn, and model inclusive practices and language to activate your support.
Talk about LGBTQIA+ issues and challenge anti-LGBTQIA+ comments to reduce the potential for isolation.
Use sound judgment and rely on existing resources so as not to burden your colleagues as you learn.
Consider these helpful links with tips on how to be an ally with the wider community and the trans community, specifically.

Talk and Share Resources

This is a diverse and intersectional group, and no two experiences are alike.

Offer resources with practical and actionable approaches to creating inclusion in the workplace.
Learn more about what it means to be LGBTQIA+, and what it means to be transgender in particular.
Provide staff training to address homophobia and the many underlying factors that impede equity and inclusion for LGBTQIA+ people.
Use language that centers on respect for people, their identities, their humanity and their right to self-determination.

Speak Out against LGBTQIA+ Violence

As you offer resources internally for your staff, it’s equally important to demonstrate your organizational values and use your platform to speak publicly in support of the LGBTQIA+ community. Taking a firm stand signals to your staff that they matter and that you care about their lived experiences.

Some concrete actions include:

Staff-wide emails to show support are just the beginning, and shouldn’t stand alone. Create space during all-staff meetings and smaller team meetings to acknowledge the ongoing violence and allow staff to dialogue. And, be sure to echo what you’re sharing internally, with similar statements and actions externally on your communications platforms.
Consider working with a community partner and/or curating special programming during Pride month to both enlighten your staff and celebrate the community.

Engage LGBTQIA+ Vendors

Decisions about whose work to feature, whose voices to elevate and whose businesses to support have impact. Through inclusive procurement, your choices demonstrate your commitment to DEI. Seek out and engage such vendors, creators, artists, writers, leaders and business owners. Wherever possible, think about intersectionality and engage BIPOC trans folks in your work. Some concrete actions include:

Build procurement policies and practices around vendor/supplier diversity and include your DEI statement or beliefs in this policy.
Set DEI-related procurement goals.
Create a questionnaire to send to potential vendors, or use it as a checklist as you research potential vendors.
Conduct a semi-annual vendor analysis to ensure you are spending organizational dollars in a way that reflects your values and beliefs.

Update Office Policies to be Inclusive

Your benefits packages, your employee handbook and your client-facing materials are further arenas where you can support trans colleagues and co-workers. Do your research and read the fine print to ensure that you’re selecting policies that provide humane coverage without unnecessary or misguided conditions.

Steps you can take include:

Create and normalize gender-neutral restrooms.
Update all internal and external materials and policies to they/them pronouns instead of he/she binaries.
Edit your dress code to remove gendered language and implications, and ensure the rules are the same for everyone.
Select inclusive healthcare coverage that offers medical procedures for gender affirmation, generous fertility preservation and infertility services.

Thaly Germain is Managing Director of Transformation & Culture at BerlinRosen.