Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I am your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot co dot uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on itunes, Spotify and the usual places to plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is episode 83 with the title uplifting queer Genius. And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Dr Joel Davis Brown. Joel describes himself as a change agent that has too much stuff going on.

When I asked Joel to describe his superpower, he said queer minded creative problem solving. Hi, Joel, welcome to the show.

Good morning. Or I should say, good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here. Nice to meet you.

Absolutely. Joel, we've just had an amazing warm up in the green room, so I'm looking forward to this conversation no end. And we came up the title uplifting. Queer Genius. So what's all that about, from your perspective?

I think, well, we're at a time in global history where queer people are being denounced and how should I say it? Discriminated against, criticised, misunderstood, on, in new and not so new ways. And what is ironic is that a number of the skills that the world needs in order to create a world that works more perfectly for all of us, a lot of the things that the queer community embodies are those very skills. And so this is an opportunity for us, as a community and as a world, to start to fully recognise, appreciate and understand what queer people bring to the world from a leadership standpoint, from a transformational standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint and from a global standpoint, in order to take advantage of our talents, to honour our gifts. And hopefully, I would hope, as a byproduct, to make more space for us in the world, given the beauty that we possess and the things that we naturally use and utilise just by virtue of being queer. So there's a lot there that we naturally, I think, bring to this space, bring to the world, bring to a lot of different dimensions and regions and parts of the planet. And I think it's about time for us to spend some time really examining what those are and really giving breadth to how queer people actually benefit the world, as opposed to this persistent narrative, which is one where people see us as a threat. So that's what the whole idea of Uplifting Queer Genius is about, is giving change the narrative and starting to view queer people in a more full bodied way than we have previously.

That's quite interesting. The way you say that, because I would call myself describe myself as queer. I'm a trans woman. And what you're saying there about this queerness as a superpower within us that the world needs more of to balance out some of the things that are going on, I'd never really thought it in that terms. I transitioned seven or eight years ago effectively, and I felt an immense sense of freedom, an immense sense of enlightenment and empowerment within myself as a result of that. I put a lot of that down to my gender identity. But maybe there's a whole different dimension in there that you're talking about here, around the extra dimension of queerness. Not just around gender, it's around sexuality and the multifaceted nature of queerness that brings out that real richness of difference of experience that maybe straight people, CIS people have that, as you say, they see us as a threat.