Don Mamone – Understanding Gender today and in the future!
Are your assumptions about others hindering genuine connections? How can you shift from judgment to curiosity to learn more about those around you? In this episode, Don Mamone and I dive into understanding gender, inclusivity, and breaking away from biases rooted in personal experiences. Discover how to create welcoming environments and the significance of personal stories in reshaping societal expectations.
Listen to this new episode for insights on fostering inclusivity, understanding diverse identities, and shifting perceptions through curiosity rather than judgment.
About Don:
Don Mamone is a speaker, identity coach & consultant teaching audiences and clients how to reach their maximum potential & impact by discovering & embracing their true identity and supporting companies dedicated to safe spaces that support unapologetic authenticity.
Get Don’s new book: “Different Doesn’t Mean Broken: Living Courageously Outside the Binary”
Connect with Don:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/
https://www.instagram.com/
https://www.facebook.com/
https://www.tiktok.com/@
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Wedding Business Solutions, I sit down with Don Mamone, a non-binary professional speaker and identity coach, to dive deep into the world of gender identity and inclusivity. Don shares their personal journey of coming out at 45 and the importance of approaching gender with curiosity instead of judgment. We explore the complexities of the LGBTQIA2S+ acronym and offer practical advice for wedding businesses to create more inclusive environments. Through our discussion, you’ll hear personal anecdotes and professional insights that emphasize the need for understanding, continuous learning, and proactive inclusivity to foster acceptance and support within our industry. Join us for an eye-opening conversation that aims to make the wedding business a more welcoming place for everyone.
If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com
Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com
View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/
Understanding gender today and in the future. Listen to this fascinating conversation. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I am so glad to have my co Wedding Pro educator, Don Mamone just on here to talk about something that I call it the elephant in the room. Don. But thank you so much for joining me.
You are so welcome. Thanks for having me.
We were together at the Wedding Pro event, and I think we were sharing a whiskey, if I’m not mistaken. And I said, you need to come on the podcast because there’s so much that’s misunderstood about gender these days. And people are confused, a lot of it, just because they’ve never been exposed to the ideas or people. Right. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. And of all the people to come and talk about this. We were talking. I was like, you have to come up.
We just need to talk about this. So first of all, tell people who you are. And you’re a speaker, you’re an author, you’re an educator. Tell us about you.
Well, thank you so much. Yeah. My name is Don Mamoni. My pronouns are they, them, and yes. I’m a professional speaker. I’m an identity coach. I’m an author. My wife and I have owned a photography business for now, oh, my gosh, nearly 20 years
And I’m a late bloomer. I didn’t come out publicly until 2021. I was at the ripe old age of 45. And I have now committed to engaging in thoughtful and provocative conversations like this one to help people understand more about gender.
Great. And you identify as non binary?
I do identify as non binary. Thank you.
Okay. And some people listening are going, I don’t understand. What is that?
Yeah. So I’m so excited to share that with you. So in order to do that, I’m going to maybe scare the listeners for a hot second. But I just, I want you to bear with me. We’re going to do just a little bit of science. And sort of what I want to do is just lay some groundwork. The concept of gender in the gender 101 space, Alan, is that you take a peek under the hood and you know immediately what that person is. And that served us for a while, but it doesn’t serve us any longer because we now know with scientific research and medical resources that it’s much more complicated than that.
And I think we can admit that humans are beautifully complicated. Right. The tapestry and the intricacies of humanity. So gender really does have four base elements. Okay. And I’m going to just tell you what they are and then I’m going to tell you. That’s how I become non binary is you have your gender identity, which is who you know yourself to be, Alan. In your head and in your heart, you have your gender expression, which is how you share that gender identity with the world.
And for men, women, non binary agender, it’s basically the clothes you wear, the makeup you wear, how you style, your hair, how you speak, your cadence, your nonverbal, all that stuff. Then of course, you have your orientation. Right. A lot of people call it your sexual orientation, which means kind of like who you’re attracted to. I call it your orientation because Alan, who you’re attracted to, physically, remote, emotionally, romantically, could be different. And lastly, you have, of course, your anatomy. Right. And that doesn’t mean just your parts.
It means your entire biological makeup. All those four things come together to create the most beautiful Venn diagram you’ve ever seen. And right in the middle is who you are. And the reason that I’m non binary is because when I was, I don’t know, four or five, I said, there’s something different about me. I feel like there’s both man and woman, masculine, feminine, inside of me. And it wasn’t about what I did, it was about who I was. And so, with a great deal of courage and support from my wife of now 15 years, I came out saying those exact words and identify as non binary because I don’t believe that you have to be one or the other
Thank you for that.
You’re welcome.
And again, this is the discussion that I want to have because people don’t understand. I think most people start with what you said, which is, let’s look under the hood and you are the parts you were given. And there you go. So I’m sure you experience a lot people meeting you for the first time and either doing a double take, heading the other way. Yeah, right. I can just imagine those things. I remember the first time I met you because your name, Don Momone. Right.
And I turn, I’m like, okay, not what I was expecting.
Sure, right, yeah.
Not new for me, but just not what I was expecting because your name to me sounds masculine. Right, right. And I was like, okay, not what I was expecting, but hi, how are you? And let’s talk. Right? Yes, there you go. But that also took time for me because the first time you experience anything. I grew up in New York City and I went to a school where my elementary school, there was one black Boy and one black girl, right? And it was just. And it kind of wasn’t really even the neighborhood, it was just that particular school. That’s what it was.
I didn’t choose that. It just happened to be right. And then you go to middle school and all of a sudden, oh, well, no, there’s. There’s a lot more black and brown people here. And then you go to high school and there’s more black and brown people than there were white people over there. But it’s that exposure. We live in a bubble. I also grew up in a Jewish household and my mother’s lens was everybody and everything is Jewish until proven otherwise.
My funniest story is there was a textiles place near where we lived in the Hudson Valley. S H A R E D. And my mother called it Shahred Textiles because her lens was, oh, they must be Jewish or Middle Eastern. I was like, shared, it’s shared.
It’s shared Textiles.
It’s shared. There you go. So as a non binary person, when you have that experience, somebody coming up doing the double take, somebody, you know, kind of walking the other way, give us an idea. First of all, what are you feeling? And second of all, what do you do in a situation like that?
So first of all, let’s just acknowledge that. Thank you for having an open heart and an open mind and for realizing that we all look at the world through the lens that we kind of grow up with. But that is not the only lens. And we get to refocus. Little photography pun. We get to refocus our lens. Right. And recalibrate things to ensure that we keep up with our thoughts, our beliefs and what we learn and what we know.
Right? So what we know is kind of instilled in there. What we know and what we learn are different. So, you know, when that happens, I think it’s been an evolution for me. I think at first, when I very first came out and I was very first sort of learning to lean into the idea of expressing myself in alignment with my gender identity, identity, it was much more uncomfortable for me. I. I didn’t want to be an inconvenience, right? I didn’t want to take up space that made someone feel uncomfortable. I was. I’m a lifelong people pleaser.
I am a lifelong person that operates in service to a lot of people. I’m in a service based industry as a speaker and as a coach and as a photographer. Then as time went on, I realized, hey, wait a minute, I have every right to exist in this space and to take up as much space as needed. And candidly, out of representation for others that get to see me and get to realize that I’m not the only one. I’m not alone. I get to take up even more space. And so now, what typically happens is when I catch someone feeling as though maybe they’re being caught off guard or don’t know what to do or say, I lean into them and I ask them a question. And typically what happens is their guard is down.
Right. They stop, I think, coming at the situation from a place of judgment and hopefully. Right. My intention is for them to come to the situation with a place of curiosity. And like you said. Okay, well, that’s not what I expected, but how cool. Let me ask them some questions, right? Let me find out more about them and who they are and what makes them tick. And it’s funny, because we do live in a world full of expectation and full of sort of supposition.
And, you know, the same is true of the binary, which I don’t believe really exists. I believe that we all exist now on a spectrum more than ever. But, you know, you hear the word Kelly and that person may walk up and you expect to see one or the other. Right? And it’s probably based on your lens. If you had a best friend that was a boy in elementary school and somebody named Kelly walks up, you make, oh, yeah, that’s right. Right. So there is an opportunity to be pleasantly surprised and to replace judgment with curiosity and just kind of lean into it.
And I think the point there is that we all have this history and understanding. We can refocus. That lens is really what it’s about. My sister’s name is Jody. First time I met a boy named Jody, I was like, oh, okay, yeah, there you go. Right.
And when I say curiosity on, I literally mean, like, when I think people are afraid, afraid to ask questions, afraid to make statements. And I think that they get to be understandably cautious because we don’t want to offend. I know that I don’t, and I know that I don’t like it when I am offended. But what I will say is it doesn’t mean that we get to not say anything. It means we get to be very careful and we get to be mindful of our intentions. Right? So if I met somebody that had a unique, interesting, or unexpected name, whether it be based on gender or anything else, I might just lean straight in and be like, do you mind if I ask how you got your name? Where did your parents come up with that? And Invariably, it’s the most interesting story ever. And it immediately places any shock that I had at the name to begin with.
Right. My wife and her mother have the same name. She was the first girl I ever met that had the same name as her mother.
I was like, really interesting.
Okay. Yeah. And again. But now it’s common when I meet somebody else. Oh, just like my wife. You’re right. Just like there. Right.
Which is funny because if you grew up in the east coast, you know that almost every Italian family like mine, everybody has the same middle name. Every girl in my family, I think, is a Marie. Right. Gina Marie, Emily Marie, Teresa Marie. It’s remarkable.
Right. Or my wife’s middle name, which she hates, is Anne. She’s not Carol Ann, she’s Carol. Do not call her Carol Ann.
Right. But.
But that’s also a. Maybe a stereotype in her mind of what a Carol Ann would be. Right. A Carol Ann would be that, you know, Catholic girl in the plaid skirt, you know, whatever over there. So. Yeah, but curiosity. I love that word because it describes my life.
Right.
I am curious. And again, not wanting to offend, but I am cur. And I remember a friend of mine, a speaker friend, who we know is a lesbian. She identifies as a lesbian. Everybody knows that. And she said one day that I’m a lesbian woman married to a transgender man. And I said, just one of these days over a drink, you’re going to explain that to me because I don’t understand that sentence. Yeah, right.
I understood. I just the beginning.
Yeah.
I didn’t get the other part. And then, then my mind is, if. Am I going to offend her if I say so. Your husband. Her husband. Your husband was a woman who transitioned to a man. Your husband was a man who transitioned to a woman. Your husband is not.
Could you explain this to me not out of again, offenses like I just don’t understand, because that was the first time I heard that phrase.
Yes. And this is a beautiful entry into sort of a little bit of anecdotal story. You know, when I. When I came out to Emily, it was because we had a nine month old daughter. And I knew that I could not live an inauthentic life like I was and show this precious little gift how to be exactly who she was everywhere. She went to love who she wanted, do what she wanted. And so when I came out to Emily, my biggest fear was, in fact, not that she wouldn’t love me or she wouldn’t support me, but that she couldn’t go on the journey with me. She would have had every right to say, listen, I love you and I think you’re an amazing human, but I can’t go on this journey.
And I won the karmic lottery of spouses. Somehow I don’t know what I did in a previous life, but my wife looked at me and said, you’re my person and that’s all that matters. And I think that that’s the beauty behind the idea that Emily identifies as heterosexual. I am still male assigned at birth, although non binary. And as anybody would ever meet me probably knows, my expression leans to the feminine side of the spectrum. And I think that’s largely because I told that poor little girl that you are not allowed out. And I kept her in a box for like 40 years. And now the female part of me just really enjoys having long hair and wearing earrings and makeup and, and dressing on the feminine side of the spectrum.
She could have said like, yo, I’m hetero and this isn’t what I signed up for. And yet she looked at me and said, you fall in love with the person, not what they look like. And so I made a joke and it, it is a, it’s true statement. Although cheeky, right? Tongue in cheek. I said, I kind of feel like when I came out as non binary and started expressing myself, I kind of outed you as either pan or lesbian. Is that okay with you? And she’s like, I don’t care what you call me. I love you and you’re my person.
So there you go.
So what a beautiful story that your friend was in that space of what I again, complicated, beautiful, unbelievable, messy human tapestry of emotion and attraction and identity. Like it’s just. I love it. I think it’s amazing.
Yeah. And there’s so many stories like this. When my wife was growing up, it was a blue collar neighborhood, blue collar Christian neighborhood. And not very tolerant of other people and outsiders. Yet directly across the street were Bob and Pete. And we’re talking about in the 1960s, 1970s, who were a couple and they were really good friends with my father in law, who was not the most tolerant person of other people and cultures. But these guys were. Okay.
Why? Because he knew them. He knew them and they could babysit the kids and you could go over there and work on the car together and you could do whatever because they were just a couple of guys across the street who happened to live together, happened to be a couple. Just look again, we’re talking 1960s, 1970s, not sure, not now. And that always struck me as funny as, like, why are you okay with them, but you’re not okay with others that you don’t know. Yeah, right. And it’s because you don’t know them. I mean, that. That’s what it is.
We didn’t have. We don’t have to live their lens. We have to live our own lens. Sure, but. But that was struck me as funny because. Not funny, well, odd. The fact that if you just step back a second, you just realize if you just get to know somebody now, you understand more what it’s like to be them. You know Terrica, right?
I do, yeah.
I remember. Yeah, I remember everybody. I love her. She’s my bodyguard. That’s a whole nother story. But so I remember Terrica saying to somebody about how she had the talk with her son. Well, the talk I had with my son was not the talk she had with her son. But in my mind, it’s like the birds and the bees.
And she’s like, no, what happens when he gets stopped by the police? This is what you do. And whatever’s like, whoa.
Yep.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. I never had to have that talk with my dad and with my sons. And this is, again, that just opened my eyes to, okay, I don’t know what that’s like.
And I think, I mean, and none of us can have the lived experience of someone else, but we can open our hearts and minds to learn from their lived experience. And I’ve had conversations with some of my African American and black friends that have. Have blown my mind in that same way because it wasn’t even a consideration in my world. And I think. I think now would be a great time to use a word that I think is so important and so misunderstood. And that’s the idea of privilege. Right. One of the things that I say frequently, Alan, is that the cost or price of authenticity is oftentimes privilege.
And I’ll use that as an example. As a. A straight CIS presenting white man, I was at the very top of the privilege ladder. I never had to worry about my gender identity, my sexual orientation, the color of my skin ever being used against me. Really never. And when I started living an authentic life and I started telling people that I was non binary and I started expressing myself, suddenly, places in which I took for granted that I was safe, happy, warm, comfortable were no longer. And that is the price of authenticity is handing over privilege. And I can tell you a story that every one of your listeners will, I think, empathize with, even if they don’t Quite understand it yet.
Okay.
I was at a. I don’t want to call it a dive bar, but I was in an establishment on the east side of Dallas that I hadn’t really been to before to visit friends. Now, I wasn’t in a pink prom dress because that’s not appropriate for that, although I could rock a pink prom dress. I was wearing jeans, skinny jeans, and like a flannel top, but I had on a tank top and makeup, and I have long hair now and I wear earrings. I was clearly presenting as I felt comfortable. I was in the restroom. And because I didn’t know the area and I didn’t know the people, I was doing my business in the men’s restroom because I typically choose in Texas to use the male assigned a birth restroom because it puts the onus of potential struggle on me as opposed to walking into a woman’s restroom and having them. Unfortunately, and I think unintelligently being concerned about what I might be doing in there other than nature stuff, doing my business, I was in the stall.
And because of the conversation that was being happened outside the stall and the fact that there were various voices of very low baritone and the way in which they were talking, I was no longer comfortable to leave the stall. So for the entire duration of time they were in there. And I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but I want to say maybe three to five minutes, I, an adult human, stood inside the stall for fear of going out and being harassed and. Or physically assaulted, period. And that, to me, is the height of this conversation. Like, handing over that privilege is something that I deal with every day. And one of my most ambitious efforts is to help business owners and entrepreneurs understand what it’s like and to grow their businesses with differentiation. All kinds of wonderful things, but most importantly, it’s how to help them understand what it’s like living in a world where you get to be courageous every day just to be who you are and to dispel the myths and to open up their hearts and minds so that they can go out and have these conversations and do things so I can use the bathroom with safety and security.
So we were talking before we got on about this binary choice, like you said in Texas, there you had to choose the male assigned to birth, female assigned to birth, bathroom. You told me a story where you went through a TSA and you got pulled for secondary screening, which could be random, could be your boots, who knows? And what happened.
So tsa, for those of you who don’t know if you’re not TSA pre check. You go through the scanner where you hold your arms up like you’re being held up at gunpoint, which isn’t funny at an airport, I guess. But you put your hands up and they scan you and they scan your anatomy. And so right before you step in, if you haven’t noticed, they interact with the screen and that’s them picking your gender. There’s a picture of a little boy and a picture of a little girl, and they pick your gender. And the reason this was happening was because I was traveling with my nephew who wasn’t TSA Precheck. So I went through General TSA with them and they pressed the button and it was this very sweet black TSA agent who had this kind of southern draw that I loved. Oh, I’m sorry, honey, I must have pushed the wrong button.
And then it scanned again and I had to lean in and I said, honey, there is no button for me. And I stepped out and they had to wand me and scan me because I engage in gender affirming care, which means that I won’t pass screening on either side. And it was not uncomfortable for me except for the fact that, like Terrica’s experience, and I am in no way making a comparison between race and gender. But other than the fact that which TSA agent did I get if I were pulled over? My immediate thought would be, which police officer is pulling me over? Is it the one that’s going to just look at me and say, can I have your license or registration? You are going a little fast. Or is the person going to be like, oh, you’re one of those people, and then something ensues. So the TSA PreCheck has a bit of funny to it because there was no, there was no outcome from that experience, but it was an experience. And it makes you second guess that our construct is based on the binary. And that oftentimes puts us in situations where you’re like, oh, gosh, what do I do here?
I’ve noticed I pay attention when I’m given a form or doing a survey or something. Whether or not there are other choices there. More often than not these days, I’d say there are, but there’s still a whole bunch of times where they’re not. I’m like, again, I don’t have to worry about that because my box is there.
Yeah.
So let’s talk about this in terms of the wedding and event industry.
Yeah.
In terms of. There’s, there’s different things here. There’s one is Feeling comfortable working with someone who you just, you don’t know how to approach them. And the other is physical accommodations where if you own a venue or a bridal shop or something like that, where, you know, do you have gender neutral bathrooms? That’s, that’s kind of a low bar, really, like, you know, but there’s, you know, what other types of accommodations and how can the people listening move from this is an inconvenience for me to I’m making it convenient for my hosts, my guests, my clients, my customers, my couples. Right. Because there has to be that shift from, oh, I need to do this in my venue, this is going to cost me money to I’m doing this because I want to be open to everyone. I want to be accessible to everyone. And again, not a parallel, but, you know, if you have a handicap accessible building, sure.
You’ve made accommodations in many cases with ramps and elevators and things like that. Yeah, this is, this is another accommodation. Some would consider it an expense and inconvenience or whatever. So how do you work with them?
There are so many wonderful ways in which we can approach this. Let’s just get started with the number one, and that is that I think a lot of people struggle with this because it’s the number, it’s the new battle in an age old war of sort of equality or rights or accommodation. Right. This is just the new one. Right. And there’s not that many of us, like, just for statistic purposes, like 1% of the population, 1% of the overall population identifies as transgender or non binary. And for those of you that are, like, what does that even mean? Just quick clarification. Cisgender means that you’re born and assigned a gender at birth and that your entire life you align with that gender assignment.
So, Alan, I’m going to assume you’re a strapping, good looking cisgender man, which means you were assigned male at birth. You felt a man your whole life. Truth.
Got it. You got it.
Perfect. Wonderful. There’s a beautiful thing to be. Well, transgender people don’t have that. They are assigned a gender at birth, and then at some point in their life, they say, this doesn’t fit. I am not this gender. And so transgender people, which I count myself a part of because my gender assigned at birth and my gender identity don’t match. We’re only 1% of the population.
But I want to remind people that are in business, there are a lot of people that love me, there are a lot of people that support me, and there were a Lot of people that want to see me accommodated and to be comfortable. And that includes people whose wedding I might go to.
Right.
So let’s talk about it. Yeah. Is it sometimes, quote, inconvenient for you to accommodate for people that are not. They’re non conforming or transgender? Yes. Are we worth it? Yes. We’re humans and we’re deserving of respect and accommodation. So. And if it’s the 1%, you’re like, whatever, it’s just 1%.
You extrapolate that by the number of people that love me and support me and want to care for me, and suddenly you’re turning away a lot of business. Because I know that there are people that align with their gender sign of birth, are straight cisgender people that are like, I would never do business with someone who isn’t going to accommodate four. So it’s worth it, number one. Number two, this isn’t, in my opinion, a quick change. I accept and acknowledge that we’re moving the Titanic. We’re trying to turn a very large thing. We have been a binary society, not a binary world. There are plenty of places all over the world where they don’t exist under gender binary, but we are a binary society.
Here on the Western Hemisphere, if you’re a venue and you have two bathrooms and one has a stick figure of a man and a stick figure of a woman, you can always put a stick figure for either. If you’re not ready to go that far, then you can ask yourself, client or your couple, do you know if you have any transgender or non conforming guests coming? And how would you like us to handle it? We have a beautiful framed sign that doesn’t look like somebody scratched it on a piece of paper right before y’all showed up that says, please feel free to use whichever bathroom aligns with your gender identity. Now, to your question of, like, comfort. And you know, you have to understand that you might be working with those people or you might be somebody like that as a guest in your venue. Okay, That’s a culture thing. If a venue wants to open their doors and open their minds and hearts to people that are transgender or gender nonconforming, and you’re willing to put up that sign and somebody that works for you says, I don’t believe in that, that’s not okay with me, then it’s your decision to then say, okay, we’re going to bend to this will of this employee because it’s not a part of our culture, or we’re going to tell that employee that this is what we stand for. This is what we believe in. This is a part of our culture.
And if that’s not okay with you, then you’re not welcome to work here any longer. And that’s a decision every business gets to make. I am not in a business of telling you how to run your business, but I am telling you that doing it now, Alan, gets you on the front wave of the bubble, right? It puts you on the right side of history before you’re feeling compelled to do it, before there’s a law that forces you to do it or something to that effect. So that’s kind of the high level of what that looks like.
Now. That could be for a venue. I was telling you that the United Club at Newark, when they redid it, all the bathrooms now are gender neutral. So that if you have a venue and you’re about to go under a renovation, including that renovation, that could you make all your bathrooms gender neutral. And then it’s not a matter of anybody choosing. It’s just, I need to use the bathroom. And there it is.
And it’s funny, Alan, because, you know, we talked about the East Coast. We also talked about travel. You and I both travel to speak and do our business. This is a. This is really largely a United States thing, and it’s really a, like, west of the Mississippi thing. If you go to New York City, they don’t have money for a bunch of different bathrooms. They have a bathroom, and a lot of times it says wc, which stands for water closet that comes all the way over from grand old England, but it’s just not a thing. And, and I will say that I acknowledge that there are some people that are just resistant.
And. And I, again, I’m very tongue in cheek. I’m a very cheeky little monkey. They idea that this is new and that this is so hard to understand, some people are just going to be resistant. And what I tell, like, listen, long after Marco Polo and Columbus and all these people traveled, there was an, I’m embarrassed to say, still are. People are like, nope, Earth is flat. And this is all one just big conspiracy. There are people that will look at me for ages and say, nope, there’s two genders and it’s based on peak under the hood.
That’s okay. I’m not here to convince them. What I’m here to do is tell them that I exist, that I deserve respect, and that I’m going to very slowly turn the tide towards the idea that, yes, in fact, everybody’s used a gender neutral bathroom. Because the one in your home is gender neutral.
Drop the mic. Don’t drop the mic. They’re expensive.
Don’t drop the mic.
All right, so one last thing. I was looking at your website, and there’s a acronym list that keeps growing.
Yes.
Right. So LGBTQIA2s plus.
Yeah.
Okay. I have to say, that’s beyond me. I thought I had the acronym down, but you added more stuff on there. So lesbian, gay, binary, transgender, queer, eye, intersex. Intersex. What is that?
It is the biological term for a really awful term that used to be used. It is someone that is born with no discernible quality between man and woman. And what that might look like is. And for those of you that are into the science. Right. I usually scare people off when I talk science, but it means that they may have a divergent chromosomal makeup. Right. Which means that they’re not XX or XY or that their XXXY does not align with their gender assigned at birth because of part.
Right. And so way back in the day, they’d be like, I mean, I don’t know, let’s just pick one. And they would do surgery on an infant and just pick one. And if they picked wrong, wrong binary. If they didn’t pick the one that was best for that person, then we had troubles. And so intersex is now what we call someone who has no discernible gender assigned at birth.
Okay.
At A is asexual, which means basically, that they are somebody that knows in their mind, in their heart, that they really have know kind of that it is the absence of gender.
Absence of. Absence of gender. Okay.
Yes.
Okay. Two. That’s a new one.
So the two and the S go together. And I think this is so beautiful. So, first of all, thank you for your question and for your curiosity. Right. I literally had someone say to my face, which I’m welcome to do. And two caveats. Now, one, if you meet somebody that’s a member of this community, especially someone like me, that’s new. Absolutely.
Ask them about their experience, but don’t necessarily ask them to educate you unless they’re an educator. I’m an educator. You can ask me anything, Alan, and I will teach you, and I will show you. But if you meet somebody, you know, it’s. It’s not always the best feeling to be like, oh, what’s this whole thing with this acronym? Tell me about it. But I actually had somebody say to me, oh, my God, it’s like the whole Alphabet now in a very derogatory term. And what I want to point out is that every one of these letters is on there because there was a group of marginalized people that have been pushed to the side, whose voices have been quieted for too long. And so they’ve kind of earned their place in this list.
The 2s stands for two spirit, which is part of the indigenous culture of America. So previously Native American and now sort of more empathetically, indigenous people. Indigenous people have believed for millennia in the idea that there are people that have two spirits, which means the male spirit and the female spirit. Now, I Wish I was 1% indigenous person so I could say I was two spirit, because I think it’s just such a beautiful representation of how I align and how I feel. But the 2s is that. And then, of course, we put the plus at the end because there are more people that are being marginalized. There are more people that are being kind of pushed to the. To the edges, and their voices are being quieted.
So LGBTQIA2s plus, I think, rolls off the tongue so beautifully.
Well, thank you. And again, I love seeing it on the site because I’m curious. I’ve always had a curious mind. And I remember when. I don’t know if you knew Katharine Hamm, President of Gateways.com Good friend of mine, and she narrated. She did the narration in a book, the Art of Capturing Love, a photography book, which just a beautiful book. And I’m looking at the photos and I’m reading the narration. I’m learning so much.
And I felt like I thought I was already educated and open. And I’m reading this, going, wow, this is kind of like Terrica’s speech with her sons. I didn’t know this, and I didn’t know that. I didn’t know this, and same thing there. So my curiosity there is always like, okay, I thought I had this down. You added some more stuff on there. But the plus is always there’s going to be more stuff, and there should be more stuff, because we just have to. We want to be inclusive there.
I am so glad I got to meet Emily. You guys are so cute together.
Thank you.
I didn’t get to meet Frankie yet, though.
No, not yet. But she. She went. I am so proud to say that she went for one of my first speaking engagements in Pride this year, we went to Charlotte, and I spoke to a group of people about, you know, my keynote talk. One of my most popular topics is that the future is fluid, which obviously references gender identity, but also the. In your. And I want To. I want to thank you and compliment you for your curiosity and the fact that rigidity never serves.
And here you are in a world understanding the relativity of I only know what I know, and I certainly don’t know what I don’t know. And so I’m just going to constantly be in the quest to know more. So she came to me with me on a talk, and I was. It was so amazing to see her in the audience that I’m confident that you’ll meet her at one of our events soon.
Excellent. I remember the first time my son saw me separately, and one of them I said, so, what did you think? He goes, I wasn’t really interested in what you were talking about, but I found myself wanting to listen. I was like, oh, somebody who’s been hearing me their whole life. I was like, cool. And then I said, what else? He goes, and I had him bring some friends with him so he wouldn’t be alone. He goes, and my friends think I have the coolest dad. I was like, yes.
I had to tell you, like. And it was very hard for me because this was a brunch event and it was a drag brunch for Pride, and we were talking about all kinds of. Of things. And so I was the keynote at the end and I was like, how did I do? And she’s like, it was amazing. But the drag queens. I was like, yeah, like, following a drag queen is always an uphill battle, but it was wonderful.
There you go. There you go. Well, Don, thank you for sharing your story with us. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with us. I hope people listening will be more curious and be more willing to ask questions. And it’ll be in the show notes. But how can somebody find out more about you?
So it depends on what I try to meet people, where they’re at. So it depends on where they like to show up. I’m. My inbox is open, my DMs are open. I am on Momoni. And you can put that in the show notes on pretty much every social media platform. So I encourage people to not only consume my content because I’m sharing it every day, but to those of you that want to learn more, for those of you that are parents of a gender non conforming or transgender child who are looking to create safe spaces for them in your business, in your life, please, please, please reach out.
Excellent. Thanks for joining me. And I’ll see you at the next event.
Yeah, you will.
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