Happy Pride Month 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🌈

[tranguyen]

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Saturday ☀️

As it's June 1st, I want to officially say:

Happy Pride Month 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🌈

I've shared a short post to kick-off Pride Month celebration in the Community Corner, but inspired by the recent thoughtful discussion kickstarted by @MudFire_Dex around Pride celebration and building an inclusive culture, I'd love to check in with everyone.

Is there a particular topic you'd like to see being discuss more widely in the broader Seller Community? Whether that's about how business can build LGBTQ+ supports into their culture all year round or LGBTQ+ allyship at work, please let me know in the reply. We'd love to highlight these discussions as part of the Question of the Week series ❤️

[MudFire_Dex]

Thank you Tra! Pride is always about revelry and revolution ❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜🤎🖤❤️‍🔥 I'm always up for a discussion about inclusion that fosters change, safety, and love for my community.

[tranguyen]

Couldn't agree more @MudFire_Dex 🔥 

Inclusivity is definitely a topic I want to focus on for this month — and beyond — as I think there's so much to do, but it can be overwhelming for folks to know where to start. Even things that they believe to be small would go along way. 

[MudFire_Dex]

@tranguyen what if there was a discussion somewhere in the community on the personal greetings aspect of customer service?
I'd love if people asked questions or asked how to change their business environments and shops starting with small steps. When shifting from a predominantly upper middle class white audience (former owners were marketing execs who had a lot of friends/co-workers as members) to creating the space we wanted (younger, more diverse, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ inclusive, less inhibited by socio-economic pressures and expectations) one of the first shifts we made was customer greetings. Our former greeting was simple and non-gendered - but it was "Are you a member?" which made people feel tokenized, unremembered, marginalized, and unimportant and often led to them actually not asking a question. A simple shift to "What can I help you with?" has made a HUGE difference in welcoming people in to the space.

I was reading about Master Card's True Name project and know from personal experience that I definitely fall into the category of trepidation and sometimes fear while shopping or going out - especially if I am alone and not with my wife or friends. Sometimes I have fear or just discomfort at the knowledge that someone won't acknowledge me with correct pronouns or greeting (I.E hey ladies instead of something more gender neutral). I think I am tough looking with a soft heart, tallish/strong/big/tattooed with a fade haircut, and have a pretty well constructed sense of self and have only worn masculine gender clothing since I was 28 years old, and it still knocks me down a peg or sometimes feels like a personal attack even when the person is well meaning with their greeting because I am like "but did you see ME though?". Then I get in my head about the greeting being intentional to put me in my place, and that is probably many times a crappy way to categorize it. I think most don't understand the forethought and planning that go into the creation of self when you are transgressing what was assigned to you at birth. I think many of us have not considered marginalized and intersectional identities and access to public spaces. I think it would be so cool to help others understand and make small changes in their businesses.

What if y'all created a safe space to foster inclusive language discussion and have a place where people can express their concerns or questions instead of saying it is something they just don't think about? Could questions be submitted anonymously? Like the style of the Q&A things that are done with experts sometimes in the finance type posts? That way no one would feel like anyone was looking at them like they didn't know something or was awkward for them to ask?

This was an interesting piece from MasterCard about a debit/credit card that would be issued in a preferred name - to avoid the awkwardness of social transition prior to a legal name change or gender change. Again - personal to me as I contemplate a name change but also pertinent to the reinforcement of gender while shopping and being a customer - and I think we can do better as business owners to mitigate this because ultimate acceptance is seeing and respecting each other's humanity, right?

https://www.mastercard.com/news/perspectives/2022/true-name-feature-for-transgender-community/

https://www.mastercard.com/news/media/xtzfcktz/true-name_nonbinary_2022-insights_final.pdf

[tranguyen]

This is a great idea @MudFire_Dex — I'm bringing it to our team today to see how we can plan for it as a Q&A event where folks can have the option to ask questions anonymously. Depending on bandwidth, we may not be able to host the event this month but we definitely will make it happen this year! 

In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for any additional topics we can highlight as part of Question of the Week, definitely let me know here. 

Paging @GeekInStitches and @SSB_YVR as well — let me know if you have some ideas for featured discussions too!