Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm 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. 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. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going.

Today is episode 94 with the title beyond the Closet, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome TJ Richards. TJ described themselves as a programme manager and LGBTQ plus network chair at Santander and also chair of trustees at Q:Alliance. And when I asked TJ to describe their superpower, they said, is talking a superpower? Because they sure do love to do it. Hey, TJ, how are you? Welcome to the show.

Hi, Jo. Thank you so much for allowing me to join you. I've been a huge fan of your show from the beginning and of know you and I have known each other for a couple of years, so really excited to be here. And when we talk about today's episode of beyond the Closet, I think that's such an amazing title because my journey, and I imagine a lot of other people's journey, is very similar, is that working out that you're in the closet in the first place and then that journey of figuring out how the hell you get out of the closet and what that looks like for you and how you live a life without those boundaries. And it's such an exciting topic. I'm really excited to be here today and talk to you about it.

For most people, and I say most, the majority, we've had a census, we know that it's. Majority of people don't even realise there is a closet or something to escape, do they? They just wake up and they're always themselves.

Yeah. And it's so amazing because it's not until you stop to ask yourself that question that you start to realise whether you are in a closet. And maybe closet is an outdated term, I don't know. Certainly the term I grew up with. But finding out, realising that actually you're operating within a set of boundaries that you've not necessarily chosen for yourself, and that could be your sexuality, that could be your gender identity, that could be just the social role that society has put on you based on your perception. To them all of those boundaries play into sort of how you operate in the world. And realising that actually I don't have to is quite liberating and revolutionary in a sense. And it's a journey I think many of us have gone on.

And honestly, I wish the whole world would go on it, because it's a question we can all answer for ourselves. Whatever the answer is, who do I want to be in the world, and how do I be that person in a way that makes the world a better place? Like you said, that's the ultimate goal, to leave it a little bit better than we found it. Right?

Yeah. Essentially, you question whether closet is an outdated term. I suppose when I was going through my self discovery and exploration, I kind of used the metaphor around the three phases. The first one was a cage, a zoo. You're trapped behind the bars, living by somebody else's rules, where you have no negotiation. You're trapped in that cage, basically existing under someone else's rules. And then the fire. Extreme I've talked about was the plains of Africa.

Wild, roaming free. But then you're living in a world where you have got no safety, you've got no guarantee of support, no family around you. You're at a waterhole, being risked by eating by a lion or an alligator or a crocodile jumping out at you. So I was always trying to find what I called my safari park, which is kind of this place you can exist where the boundaries were so great, you never hit the fences, you got fed, you got looked after, you got someone caring for you. If you were ill or sick, someone was there. But you don't feel trapped because the boundaries are so vast and bountiful. And then you can exist in that world outside of the cage, and not in the wild, in this safe zone. And that's what I was always trying to find.

I called it trying to find my safari park existence.

I've not thought about it in that way before, but I think you're right. There's a freedom to not having the bars around you, right? But there's risk to being completely on your own and exposed and unprotected as well. And that feeling, I think, of being completely on your own is unfortunately something that a lot of people in our community and outside of our community, but specifically for this topic, is something that a lot of us have gone through. I mean, I don't know about you, Jo, but when I came out to my family, it was a rocky road. And for a good while, we didn't talk because there was disbelief, maybe, or a full hearted belief that I was doing something that was putting my very soul in jeopardy. And it was their duty to tell me this over and over and over and over again. And I tried real hard and it's so hard to understand from. To be empathetic.

From their point of view, they fully believed that I was making a mistake, that it was a phase, that I was doing something wrong and I fully believed the opposite. But if we had just shouted at each other and then shut down, that period of not talking would have never finished and there would have never been any progress. But that journey to allyship, right, like that journey, I had years to sit with the idea of, wow, I might be gay. And that was really, really hard. And it took me a long time to come to terms with it. And then I remember when I told my parents, in separate instances, because they were divorced, not being fully happy with the way that they responded, but also afterwards realising they had half a second to come to terms with that, whereas I had had years to think about it and come to terms with it and get used to the idea. And actually that allowed me to have a little bit of empathy for their perspective. I didn't agree with it, of course not, because I am me and I'm happy being me, but that space to grow, you have to give that space to think.

And it's. I don't know where I was going with that. Jo, I told you, talking is a superpower. Staying on topic, not necessarily, but I think that it's that having that freedom to make that choice, but knowing that you've got a support network somewhere, family chosen family, community, whatever that is, I think that's so important.

It also respects the boundaries of society. Social constructs. Not saying I want to be constricted by social constructs, but I respect there are constructs to follow. I will have a better experience in my life if I'm willing to play some games and compromise without impacting who I am. I recognise that I have a responsibility to be a good citizen as well. And the world doesn't always revolve around me. I'd like it to, as we'd all would, but it doesn't revolve around me. I think what you're saying there about when you said you shared your sexuality, you shared your gender identity with people and they thought you were making the wrong decision.

I mean, I had a similar challenge where I don't think people actually said I was making the wrong decision. It was more, what about them? So I've married, I've got two children. So my wife was concerned about how it would reflect on her, our marriage, her own sexuality, her own sense of identity and her aspirations and dreams of the future. So, quite rightly, she had a concern about her, and obviously, I thought it was all about me. I didn't realise it was actually about other people, that this transitioning malarkey. And my daughter, our daughter, she found it really, really difficult for many years, probably three or four years, and we didn't talk a lot in that period because she had to come out to her network, her friends, her colleagues, and she was now the daughter of a trans dad, if you like. So I didn't appreciate all these different dynamics at play. That wasn't about me, it was about how I impacted others.

And, as you said, you have to have a level of empathy and compassion for what I've triggered, caused, and not my fault, it just is. But I've been the catalyst for all these changes. And then I found the challenge was being the pain giver, but also the pain fixer. I had to try and make it better or smooth it over, but I was the problem and that was probably the hardest thing I had to come to terms with.

Yeah. And I think you're absolutely right, because it's that understanding. Sorry, it's that understanding that the words that are coming out of your mouth, the decision that you've made to be honest about yourself and who you are and who you need to be in the world to thrive and be happy, that has effects on other people. It does. And I remember one conversation being told, well, what about my grandkids? I'm never going to have grandkids now because of this. And I thought, well, that's because I hate children. Not because I don't hate children, I love children. I'm definitely not.

I'm child free by choice. But it was that they had expectations and plans for their life that involved me, because we're loved ones. And I was changing that dynamic and there were ripple effects of that that needed to be worked through, and we were eventually able to work through those together and arrive at a better place. But it was that acknowledgment that there's a journey that our loved ones have to go on to grow, and some of them are already there. Right. You see, I love seeing stories like I'm on TikTok all the time, of young people coming out to their parents and their parents being like, yeah, but I love you, so it doesn't matter. And it warms my heart, in a way. That also breaks it with happiness.

Right? Like, amazing. And I love seeing the potential of where our society and where humanity can go when we just open ourselves up and say, I love you. That's all that matters. You're happy, I'm happy, I love you. Let's carry on and live our lives. And that's the world I want. And I think that's the world that as a sort of inclusion, belonging activists that we're all working for, right? We want that for ourselves and for future generations. It's got to get better.

It's got to. I won't let it go anywhere else.

It's funny what you're saying there, about watching TikToks, about people coming out to their parents and things. I came out to my mum and I think she was 76 at the time, and it was a coffee shop in the local town. We sat there having a coffee and I was beaten around the bush and started crying and then just blurted it out, sort of thing. And fair play to my mum, she handled it pretty well and she just listened and we talked. I'm not sure how much understanding or context she had around it, but she talked and we talked. And if you try and find resources on coming out to your parents, it's all got young people imagery and young family imagery on it. There's no manual on coming out to your 80 year old family. So I've printed out all these brochures, all these downloads, all these pdfs, and brought them with me and left them in an envelope with a letter in there, because you know the way it is, you come out, you say something, and immediately the person's got more questions or they've misheard or something like that.

So I made sure there was a letter tag everything I was going to say and all this supporting documentation. I said, look, here's an envelope. When you get home, you got to want to think about this and digest it. Here's everything you could possibly want. And we met again a couple of weeks later. She'd obviously read this cover to cover several times, and she was starting to get on message. She wasn't quite ready to embrace me as me, but she said, give me time and let's talk about this, let's evolve this. And I think it took about six months for her to finally, I suppose, to be brave enough to have me openly be with her.

It took a couple of more years to tell my dad, but I did. Eventually, I wrote him a letter, because he's very hard of hearing, and so writing a letter was much easier to put it in context. And bless him. His reply was very supportive. However, it had a don't be hasty, we can fix you type undercut in it, which it was well meaning, it wasn't nasty, it wasn't malicious. It was just this belief that from his perspective and his lived experience, that queer people were broken. And that's how he saw it. But he wasn't disappointed in me.

He wasn't rejecting me. He just wanted to be fixed. I didn't respond to that letter. I left it a year and wrote him another letter and just say, look, this is where I am. This is what I'm doing. This is the success I've had as me. Some examples of businesses I've worked for, things I've done and achieved, sort of. Say, you can be proud of me.

I'm not broken. I don't need fixing. I've made a life and we're loving it. So, yeah, I think you just got to bear with people. And I could have easily fallen out. I could have easily reacted badly. But, yeah, I suppose the thing I've learned is around this talking, communicating compassion. And I suppose the biggest lesson is it's not all about me.

That's the biggest thing I learned.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's funny you saying you wrote a letter and had supporting documents. That's what I know of you, Jo. That's so, Jo. When I came out to my mother first, I said my parents were divorced, so I came out to my mother first. That was left a lot to be desired. And we didn't talk for a while after that, although we've moved on. But when I was so nervous and so scared of coming out to my dad and my stepmom, and I don't know why, because that side of the family is so queer.

So queer. Like, I don't know if there's something in the water in Mississippi or it's just my grandma's amazing genes or what it was, but I had two gay uncles, I had queer cousins. So it wasn't something od or new or something that nobody knew about. But I was terrified. And I was living in England. I just transferred. I was in the US Air Force before I got kicked out. I was transferred over here.

And it was right after September 11. So we were in the Middle east and I thought, right, I had a girlfriend at the time. I'm telling the story in terrible order. I had a girlfriend at the time called Tony, who's now my wife of over 20 years. But I was suddenly faced with the situation of if I were to die or be injured or if anything were to happen to me in what is a war zone, right? And I'm 1920 years old, they would tell my parents, but my parents didn't know Tony existed, so Tony would never know. And that was terrifying, right? And absolutely heartbreaking. So I thought, right, I've got to fix this. So I had friends on the base that knew, so in case something would happen, they would be able to tell Tony.

And they were really supportive, right? They would come pick up letters so that Tony could send them across to me for free through the military network. It was absolutely lovely. And now I am showing my age. Jo, I found one book that was about coming out to your parents later in life, right? Like, not as a child. And it was Ellen DeGeneres's mom who had written a book about her life, and Ellen. And Ellen coming out to her and how she had grown and come to terms with it. And Amazon was just a bookstore back then, right? This is how old I am. And I ordered that book and I had it sent to my dad and my stepmom with.

No, I chickened out. There was no note. Just this book turned up at their door. And then I gave it about a week. And I used my phone call to call home and my stepmom was like, oh, I got your book. And I was like, oh, cool. So what do you think? And she said, tJ, we've always known. And I was like, gosh, thank you.

Love it. The support is there, clearly, but I kind of wish you'd told me because I've spent years terrified of this moment and you've just been waiting for me to find the strength to do it. So I have always teased her that you could have told me a few years ago and saved me some angst. But yeah, the Ellen DeGeneres book. Well, Ellen's mom's book, whose name I can't remember at the moment. Great resource. Probably a little out of date now. There's probably newer ones, but it helped me.

That's wonderful. No, I think it's a great story. I actually asked my mum, did she have any idea or any inkling? And she said she had no idea. No inkling. And majority of my friends, if you had to do a vote, who's the least likely person in the friend group to be trans? I would probably been top of the list. I was not a candidate. I was not a candidate, which is probably why it shocks so many people. I think my friends found it quite hard, because this is always this belief.

You've been living a lie, or every experience we've had has always been this has been there. I never said something, so it was quite hard at times. But I've deliberately walked away from my male only groups and friends because I don't feel that sense of belonging. I'm not included. It's that belongingness. It's not my space, it's not my place anymore. And I was always fighting with it, but I was one of these dues. It's like a small group, it's a 1520, my old male friends in black tie, and I was in a dress, completely welcomed.

And we're driving home afterwards, I offered to give a couple of them a lift back to the Isle of White Ferry, and one of them said, thanks for your story, Jo, as you probably realise, my daughter is trans. And I said, well, I knew your daughter when we used to go camping together as your son. And he said, yeah, it's remarkable knowing you, knowing what you've been through, knowing the story, having the conversation with you over those years. When my daughter came out as trans, I was just so ready for it. It was actually so empowering. And then the person in the other seat said, oh, yeah, my eldest has come out as nonbinary, and we're having this conversation in this car. This is random car of my best friend, sort of thing. And there's three quarters of us, that's four in the car.

Three quarters of us have a trans story or a nonbinary story. And I suddenly thought, actually, I've got more in common with these people than I ever imagined. I imagined that I was an outlier here, rather than them all having a family or a close connection experience. And I felt immediately connected to them in a way I never imagined. So I probably prejudged them as being not understanding. But, yeah, the stories I hear all the time, I'm sure you do as well, and you meet.

Yeah, maybe prejudged. I mean, that's for you to decide. But I think what you probably did is jump started that journey for them, so that when that situation occurred later, they were able to link it back to, well, I've got a friend that's gone through something similar, I can empathise now, and I think the empathy is such an important part of just life, right, of being a good human, but also being a good ally is being able to see things from other people's perspective, to actually feel, put yourself in their situation and feel what they might be feeling. And then sit with that, because that can be quite uncomfortable sometimes, and then work out, what does that feel like for them and how can you support them? And sometimes that support is just being their friend, right? Like just being an open ear that people can talk to. And then suddenly life comes along and your kid tells you, hey, we need to have a conversation and you're prepared. Whereas when we were going through that, maybe that wasn't the case for our parents. So I feel like we're able to. In the positions that we've managed to attain in life, we're able to sort of push that needle just a little bit further for other people so that the doorways are more open for the next generation.

And I think if that's all I accomplish in life, that's enough. Right.

I want to say about back when you were in the military and your partner girlfriend at the time, Tony, and that need to ensure that they had a level of protection, whatever that may be, or respect or whatever, about the relationship, I can resonate with that because our parents are getting to the elderly stage. So my mum's in mid 80s, my dad's 90 ish, Marie's dad is 90 ish, and her mum passed away February this year. So we've been through this care home, we've been through this hospitalisation, we've been through power of attorneys, we've been through wills and probate and all this kind of stuff. What it made us realise is that if we want to have agency in our later life, we have to do something about it now. Otherwise whoever's left may not have their wishes respected. Marie's faced with the thing of me not being around and her having to defend my memory in a certain way against death, registration, all these kind of things, burials or whatever it may be, or dementia in a care home, and making sure that my identity and my being is respected in that situation. So we have to make decisions now around protecting our status and my status, if you like, beyond what I really felt I needed to do for me. I no longer do it for me.

I'm doing it because why do I need a gender recognition certificate? I don't need it, but what I need to do is make sure that I have it for the future. And there are other things. Making sure that it doesn't become a question that Marie has to answer in 20 years time when I can't. And that's the frustration of not being the default, isn't it? It's not being the maturity. It's having to double think everything absolutely.

And that having to think about your loved ones, how can you support them when they have to make these difficult decisions? And maybe you're not there or you're not compass mentors. I know Tony and I regularly talk about our life in the care home, right? Like, we're constantly talking about how we're going to have an amazing life in a care home eventually, with sponge baths and the works. But the reality for so many people is that they go into a care home, and I've heard so many stories of them having to go back into the closet because the situation that they suddenly find themselves in, against their will, in some respects, is that they don't have that support network anymore. They're not supported, they don't feel safe being out. Or maybe their partner isn't acknowledged when they come to visit. And in fact, I was talking about this with a friend, Matt Riley, years ago, who's since gone on to start, I think, tonic housing, which is an lgbt retirement community, and I'm all over that. Can you imagine that would be like, the utopia? If I have to go into a home, to go into one surrounded by my community, supported, to still be myself and not have to worry about that. My identity being acknowledged, respected, understood, on top of everything else that I'm dealing with is the utopia.

I have no idea how I got off on that topic. Jo, I told you're going to need a leash for me.

No, it's fine. I'm visualising the sponge bath and hoping it's the right kind of sponge bath and not purgatory.

I'll leave it up to your imagination things. You get bored when you get old, I reckon.

I think you're probably right. You're probably right. You mentioned you're chair of the LGBTQ plus network at your organisation. What challenges do you find working with organisations at that sort of level to bring sort of queer representation into their policy, marketing, product, whatever it may?

So I'm the network co chair for Santander's lgbt network embrace and I've done it for, I think, about seven years now. My other co chair, Darren Carrison, has been there since the beginning and we make a great team and I think the challenge has been understanding and being able to honour that line between my personal view of total revolution, take over the world, and also understanding that people move at a pace, right. I can't make people run before they can walk. I can't dominate the world and make it the place I want it to be without taking people along on the journey, right? Not that I'm ever going to be a dictator. This isn't that. But it's that understanding that change takes time. Much like we were talking about that journey to allyship, right? It takes time for people to understand and move. And sometimes I have to respect that there's processes involved to update a policy and it can't be done at a snap of a finger, even though I'm like, but it's just three words.

It's that having to temper my enthusiasm to bring it to a level where people can actually follow along and we can make that progress and make it in a sustainable way. Right. If you push the needle too far, it will start to pull back. So you have to do it slow and steady, even pace. And for me, I think it's just the impatience. I want a world where everyone is allowed to be themselves and not allowed expected, celebrated to be themselves. And that's just the expectation. There's not coming out, there's not anything special.

We are just people who are living our lives and that's all it ever needs to be. We're not there yet. There's so much work left to do and it feels like every day, watching the news, as much as I may try to avoid it, that there's more and more piling on the plate of the work that we need to do. And some of it is work that I'm sure we've already done. And it's coming back onto our plate because it feels like maybe there's a backward slide, but it's the impatience for me. I just want everything fixed now, Jo. I want it all now. Like Viola and Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory.

I want it now.

Violet Bo Laguard bought it.

Violet, Viola is my Venus fly up.

Sorry, is she the chewing gum person? She's the chewing gum one, isn't she? That has the blueberry chewing gum and swells right up like a balloon. Yeah, that's the one with a rich daddy. That's the one, yeah, they all have rich daddies. And if I remember rightly so, I'm a consumer, I'm a customer, I'm trans. And I accept that organisations will get it wrong. But the frustration thing is I work with a lot of large organisations like yourselves, like other banks, like other comms companies. And I know that most of the companies out there, the household names, have staff networks, have ergs, have inclusion policies, have trans nonbinary, queer inclusion ethos. I know that the intent and the corporate mission is wholly behind getting it right, but it's that frustration isn't it? You walk in, you make a phone call and everything goes wrong and it's like, what? Come on.

Yes, I've got a deep voice. I'm sorry, I've got a deep voice, but what else can you ask me? And I think I had a challenge with Santander a few years ago, which you helped me out with. I also had a challenge with Metrobank. And this is not to name a shame or to call you out, but what it highlighted was, I'm privileged because I know you. I reached out on LinkedIn or sent you an email with Metrobank. I delivered a trans awareness session to them three months previously, so I knew the head of people. So I was straight onto LinkedIn to the head of people and the people who organised that, the staff network. So I was able to make my problem disappear by going round the roadblock.

The front door says, no, you can't. You must go to branch with id before we can validate you and take you forward. And I said, these aren't the droids you're looking for. And you wouldn't ask anybody else for this information. Why have you chosen to pick on me? Well, we don't believe who you are. Okay, because my voice. Is that what you're saying? You don't believe me because of my voice. So you are discriminating against me under the Equality act.

But the risk profile kicks in. The risk management profile kicks in, and that people are risk averse, aren't they? And that's what's going on here.

Absolutely. And the rampant amount of consumer risk happening in the market at the moment is gobsmackingly large. So I understand the need to protect customers to make sure that they're not being scammed and things aren't being stolen from them. But there is that balance with also treating your customers like people and understanding that we don't all sound the same. And I've had exactly the same situation not too long ago with another company who I won't name because I can't remember if it was exactly them or not, but where essentially they just didn't believe that I was who I said I was because my voice didn't match their perception of who I should sound like. And that was so frustrating, because how can I prove it over the phone? Right? I am me. I have my security questions. Ask me.

I'll tell you about my mom. I'll tell you my life story. What do you want? And I think that is the challenge, because there's that balance between risk and safety and how do we confirm that in a world that is increasingly more and more filled with people who are lying and telling, that difference is hard, and I get it, but I think we can do better. I always think there's more we can do and the processes sometimes leave a little bit to be desired. Right, but what I love about Santander, and even about your story there, is that even if you're raising it with a person to say, right, this is my problem, we need to fix it. It's my job as a network lead at Santander and I imagine the head of people at Metro bank did exactly the same. Right, how did we get here and how can we fix this so that it doesn't happen to other people? And it's that sort of deeper analysis of understanding what's gone wrong and how can we make it better? That constantly happens in the background and there are so many processes in every organisation that I don't know that that work will ever be done, but the fact that they're always willing to listen to me when I say, hey, why don't we talk about this? Because this answer feels wrong. So how did we get here? Their heart's in the right place and I can work with that.

And I found that even when we were working through your situation, we were able to resolve it because people were open to going, oh, you're right, this isn't the right outcome for our customers and we need to make things better. So it's always work to be done, never.

The. For those who are listening, you've probably heard the term calling it out. There's also another term called calling it in, which is you don't just shout, you educate. And I think going through the experience with yourselves and also the Metro bank and many other organisations I've worked through that. My outcome isn't around compensation or wanting someone to prostrate themselves off the floor and apologise. My outcome is Always education. Education, and someone should learn from this and the process will be better next time. And I'm prepared to give you my time and effort and my experience on this to help educate.

And I think that's why I try not to get angry, I try to do it through the education route, which is not always easy. Again, if you're listening to this and you've heard the expression microaggression, putting the burden back onto the person that's been discriminated against or burdened is not always a great idea. But if not me, then who's going to say something? So sometimes you just have to sort of say, okay, I found a gap, let me fix it. Let me get in here and help solve it. But it's burdensome, though, isn't it?

It can be. And what's that phrase? Have I got the spoons for it today? And there are some days I don't have the spoons. And then there are other days where I'm like, right, I feel like this is my job, I need to make this better so that it doesn't affect other people and whether that's. We had a situation a while ago now where we were going into a supermarket and we were on our way. We were on a road trip, right, and we just needed to grab some bits, snacks for the road, because road snacks are important and use the loo. And Tony came in with me. We went into the women's loo because there were only women's and men's options. Fine.

And we were stopped by a cleaner who was mopping the floors right outside and said to my wife, you can't come in there. You can't go in there. And that moment of being like, do I have the spoons? To argue, what are we going to do? And you have that split second to make that decision, how are you going to deal with it? And sometimes you don't have the spoons. And I think that's okay. In this case, we did have the spoons. And, like you, I knew the right people to talk to in that organisation to fix that situation. And it ended up with the company involved going through some training around diversity and inclusion and actually just letting people use the loo like it's okay. So, yeah, I think helping people, knowing people helps, but the role of the people is that it's their job to fix it then, or to put things in place so that that's less likely to happen again.

Nobody's perfect, but we need to make it better.

As you're talking now, I'm sniggering, if you've listened to this, you can't see me sniggering, because it brought back a story that I experienced pre Covid three or four years ago as I'm a member of an ex armed forces club in the UK in London. So I'm ex RAF and I was going in and as I was going through the front door, someone started shouting out, excuse me, sir. Excuse me, sir. And I was just ignoring it, thinking I'm not going to play their game. So I just ignored it. And eventually they said, excuse me, without the sir on the end. And I turned around and said, what? And he said, whatever it was I needed to do, I said, it's not sir, it's madam. By the way, not happy with you shouting sir at me, but yeah, whatever.

So we dealt with the problem. So I went to the reception and said, look, can I just speak to the person that handles this kind of complaint, please, whoever it may be? And they came down and see me and they said. And I said, look, I'm not trying to make a big deal of this. All I want to do is just try and create some education here that they just dropped the sir off the end of the. Off the end of the sentence, say, excuse me, and just talked about degenerating conversations with things. And he said, well, we do all this quality stuff and we have our regular EDI training. And I said, well, clearly it's not working, so I'd like you to sort of take it more seriously and have a conversation. And we're just wrapping up the conversation and this person turned around to me and said, thank you, sir, that was really useful.

And I went and we paused at that point there. I looked at him, he looked at me and I said, so you've just proved the point. Clearly your EDI training is a tick box and doesn't work because it's just misgender me in this conversation, having had a conversation about misgendering. And he went, write it a sheet. He went, I'm really sorry, I'll write up a complaint against myself as well. I said, but no, it's not about that. It's about meaningful change. But, yeah, I recognise that my voice id, my voice print is in the male range and it's really hard for humans to sort of override some of these primary senses and responses.

We're so ingrained. So I get it. But it just highlighted that people believe they're doing the EDI tick box every year training. It's not meaningful, it's not embedding it, it's not diving into lived experience. And that's what I think we need to uplift in society is better lived experience training and experiential stuff.

And I think that links back to what you were saying about your friends. They may have been on an EDI course at work, they may know tangentially about EDI and those sort of theories, but I think for humans in general, until you live through that, until you have some lived experience of interacting with people who aren't the same as you, that's when it drives it home for you. And that's why I think it's so important for going out and meeting other people, talking to other people, whether that's university, college, those are great examples of when people, a lot of people first sort of mix outside of their little bubble for the first time. And that's why I think education can be such a powerful agency for change. Right, and for inclusion, because suddenly people are interacting with someone who has a different life experience than them, and maybe they use different pronouns, or maybe they're like me. I said earlier, I am a woman. Like a tomato is a fruit. Yes, but also kind of.

So I understand that people have that journey to go on, and I think the key to that is talking and interacting with other people in a genuine way and having the spoons at the time to have those conversations, like you said, and make that change in those tiny incremental moments, they build up to suddenly your mate going, oh, yeah, my daughter came out as Trans, and I was perfectly okay with it because I dealt. I'd gone through this before and I knew what it meant. Those incremental changes build up. A snowflake is a blizzard. I love that.

I'm a great believer. A snowflake on its own will hit the ground and melt. A snowflake with a billion friends is an avalanche. It creates change and landscapes move. So, yeah, I'm a great believer. Call me a snowflake all you like, but I stand with others.

I'm all right. Absolutely.

I was out with a friend the other day and we were talking about the Rishi Sunak baiting he did. A man's a man, a woman's a woman. And I listened to it and I said, you're right, I am a woman. You're right. I don't disagree with what you've just said. A woman's a woman. I am a woman. So I found it very difficult to get angry with that statement, because I agree with it.

I'm a woman. I pay my taxes. As far as HMRC are concerned, as far as my doctor's concerned, as far as my dentist, my Vat registration, my company's house, everything I have treats me as a woman, identify me as a woman. Passport, driver licence, everything. So legally, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as the government concerned, I'm a woman. So a woman's a woman. I agree. We don't need to get into adjectives and splitting hairs about what constitutes.

You say your definition of womanhood is different to other people's definitions of womanhood, or nonbinaryhood or however you assign yourself and describe yourself, so we all have our different nuances. And I think I'm a realist that a lot of gender is a social construct anyway. It's based time and space, experience of a man, a woman, a nonbinary person, queer person today is different to 200 years ago. It's different in the UK than it is in South America, for example. The role responsibilities and the expectations of gender are different. So, yeah, gender expression, gender conformity is a social construct. Gender identity for me is innate. It's the same.

My identity is innate as my sexuality and other things about me. But how I perform, how I meet the expectations of society, is a complete construct. That's what people get hung up about. That's what the debate is. We're debating the construct which is made up shit, isn't it? We made this shit up. We could change this shit, but it's.

Great because if we made it up, it means we can make up something new. Right? There's an opportunity in that. There's a hopefulness in that for me, because even though I rail at any constructs being put on me, I also recognise that because it's made up, we can just make up something new. And that sounds so much easier, right? We can just make up something new and it's not that easy. I get it. My impatience coming out again. But there's a hopefulness there that we could. That we could incrementally make those steps and change it.

Because society isn't set in stone. It's constantly changing, constantly evolving. We're not in the UK, we're not the same society now that we were when I moved here in 2001, just in that instance, things have changed pre Covid versus post Covid or during COVID All of these things. Constant change, constant evolution. And that means constant opportunity for betterment.

Do you think some people just. And I don't want to be stereotypical or judgmental here, even if it does sound like I am, but I find that some people want to be righteous and police people back into their lane or into their box or into their definition of right and wrong. And they're intolerant, if you like, of their rule set being breached, whereas I think you listen to what you're saying. I certainly. I think once you've breached those rule sets, you realise that they're social contracts, they're made up, and then you can be more adaptable and more flexible about other rules. You go, actually, that's just made up. We can unmake it. We can remake it, we can paint it a different colour and it's still fine.

But some people never challenge themselves to escape their rule set of programming.

Yeah, I do agree. And I think linking that back to your safari analogy earlier, it is scary coming out of a safe, enclosed space where maybe it is bars, but you know where they're at. You know what the expectations are and you know what to do to thrive in that world. You might not like it, but you know what the expectations are. You step out of that comfort zone, you start questioning things and challenging things. There's a fear in that and I see that a lot when I experience some of that. Hatred is not the right word, that's too strong, I think. But some of that pushback that I see in different areas of society, around people just being who they are and being allowed to just live, I think some of that pushback is a fear based response of, if you can question things, where does it end? And that is such an intriguing question, because where does it end? For me, that's a question of endless inevitability, possibility, solutions, making things better.

But until you get to that mindset, it's scary. And I try to have empathy even for that, because there must be some fear there about living outside of where you've always been, right? Stepping outside of your comfort zone is uncomfortable. And for some people that allowing us the option or acknowledging that we have the option to do that, questions their decisions to not do that. And I think there is fear there. And that's where I try to let my empathy come in. Sometimes it's harder than others, I'm not going to lie, but I think people generally think of themselves as good people and operate from that viewpoint. And so I try to give them a little bit of love and understanding, even on the hard days, such hard days.

Sometimes I just think if anyone's listening to this, who would identify maybe as cis straight? Have you ever actually sat there and tried to challenge or ask the question who am I? Or why am I? And something I realised going back when I was going through my questioning, trying to figure myself out, was I was trying to solve the problem, I was trying to understand why or how, or what being trans meant and how it affected me. And I was saying to myself, well, I'm an intelligent human being, I must be able to square this circle, I must be able to round this off, I must be able to fix it, I must be able to go right, I've solved the problem, I'm now okay, I don't need to do this. I rationalised it out. Did you go through this sort of, kind of, there must be a solution here somewhere sort of phase?

Yeah, I did. And it was funny. I mean funny, it's funny now. It was traumatic at the time. This whole podcast, Jo, is about me revealing my age to people. I very vividly recall in the mid ninety s, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. And there was a show on tv called Zena Warrior Princess, right? And it was a show that was a lesbian awakening for a lot of women my age. And I remember I watched it religiously every week.

And I identified with the taking the lead, being assertive, finding a problem, fixing a problem, making things better, getting a happy ending. And there was a lot of queer subtext in that show. But I remember that it inspired me, but it also terrified me. And that being terrified was the part that I was like, I need to fix it. And my solution at the time, I had read a book, I don't remember which book. I'm sure somebody will write in and tell us that basically one of the premises that was made was fake it until you make it, whatever you pretend to be for long enough, you will become. And in that sort of context, it was a warning, if you pretend to be the bad guy for long enough, you'll turn into the bad guy. I think was the point of the story.

But I took it as if I pretend to be straight for long enough, I will be. And so I found the problem. I'd found a solution. And then my implementation of the solution was to lay in bed every night in my room, in the dark, close my eyes and chant, it's okay to be gay, but it's not for me. It's okay to be gay, but it's not for me. And I would repeat it out loud and in my head, in the dark, in my little bedroom, until I fell asleep, sometimes in tears. Part of me thinks, looking back, how sad that was, that I was imposing my own bars on myself because of fear. Part of me is also a little bit proud that even in my fear, I wasn't being homophobic.

It's like, it's okay to be gay, it's just not for me. So I definitely tried to fix it. My solution was chanting. It was ineffective. I was definitely gay. That didn't change. Neither did my love for Zena. Still a huge fan.

But yeah, it's that chanting, that trying to fix it, trying to lean really hard into other things to cover it up. I went to military boarding school. I went to a military university. I joined the military, all of these things to try and take my mind off of the fact that maybe I'm gay and how terrifying that concept was and then having those bars removed. When I was kicked out of the military, they eventually found out that I was gay. And at the time, that was illegal. So suddenly finding myself without those constraints and being able to explore was a blessing. In the end, I was able to find myself.

And I love my life now. I'm happy. I'm thriving. What is the movie? 30, flirty and thriving? I'm definitely not 30, but I love my life now. And it was because those bars, I was able to escape those bars, whether on my own or because the bars were taken off of me, I was able to find a new place. And I think that was the point of it. Hopefully.

Hopefully it sounds by listening to you there that the hardest coming out you've done in your life is coming out to yourself.

God, yes. Absolutely. And I don't know why I was talking about this in my therapy session recently. I love therapy, recommend it for everybody. But it was that my father's side of the family, and I was living with my dad at the time, so queer. So, you know, there were so many. There are so many queer and ally people in that side of the family. And I don't know if there's something in the water in Pascagoula, Mississippi, if maybe it's the swamp air, maybe it's just my grandma's great genes, I don't know.

But the family is. We could have had our own pride parade in the early 90s, right? And so I should have known. I feel now I should have known that it was okay. But because it was me, it was that chant. And even looking back and analysing that chant, I came up with, it's okay to be gay, but it's not for me. Well, why not? Why not? What was the fear? And the fear was that it would close doors for, you know, at the time, I was adamant. I was be. I was going to go into the military.

I was going to be a test pilot. I was going to transfer to NASA. I was going to join the astronaut programme, and I was going to go to Mars. These were the things that were happening, and none of that could happen if I was gay. Because it was illegal to be gay in the military. It was couldn't. We had don't ask, don't tell at the time, which essentially meant they wouldn't come out and ask you, TJ, are you gay? But if anyone found out I was gay, that counted as telling. So I essentially had to be in the closet or risk being outed and then kicked out, which was eventually what happened.

Because it turns out I'm terrible being in the closet. Once I accepted who I was absolutely awful at it. Never been so happy to fail at something in my life in the end. But traumatic at the time. Absolutely traumatic. Because the thing that I was holding on to was what my future was going to be and how it was going to look. And that was being taken away because of an innate part of me, just because of who I was in love with and who I loved. And it didn't seem fair and it wasn't fair.

It was Bs. It was no good. It forced me to question things and to answer things that I hadn't allowed myself to in the past. So in the know, it worked out. But God, it was a long road getting there.

I think we need a queer mission to Mars now. We need to start a campaign. Yeah, because I think you'd look so cool on the martian surface with your blue hair, red background, you'd be rocking it.

Absolutely.

We have some rainbow patches and we'll have a rainbow flag on Mars.

Listeners can't see it, but I have got a rainbow NASA pin on my desk. Even now, I still like to dream.

Well, I suppose the sadness of your story there is balanced by the fact that had you joined with those aspirations today, you would probably succeed and not be afraid to do that. I mean, I know that in the US you're one election away from it, going back again into the problems and what we see in Florida and the south and Texas and other states that are kind of, I guess, red states in american politics language. There was some really worrying precedents being set around legislation. You said don't say gay. It's not just don't say gay, it's being illegal. It's being actively outed and ostracised around trans kids, all this kind of stuff. And we see that leaking into the UK as well, don't we? We see a lot of this. We do far right rhetoric and I mentioned Rishi Sunat speech, but we see the chair of the Equality Human Rights Commission, we see our home secretary, we see our health secretary, we see the problematic guidance that's been put out around supporting young trans people in schools and education.

Sometimes it feels like we're just under threat and under battle every day, just existing, doesn't it?

It does. And so many of our community are just exhausted right when the essence of our existence is debated and air quotes around debated because we're just existing. We're just people living our lives. What is the debate that is exhausting? And when you see progress, I think certainly I did, and maybe a lot of people as well, allowed myself to become extremely hopeful. Oh, we're just on the other side of the rainbow bridge, right? We're almost there. We've almost made it. And then you see that pendulum start to swing back, and it starts in other places, and then you see things start to leak over here, and it's exhausting, and it's terrifying, because at the end of the day, the only agenda that I'm pushing is to let me and my friends exist peacefully, right? We just want to live our lives. I want to be treated like a normal human being and allowed to seek my own happiness.

That's all I want. I don't feel like that's asking for something revolutionary. But more and more, it feels like other people see that as treasonous, almost. And it's an interesting place to be in, in history. And I remain forever a Pollyanna. And I am convinced that there are enough good people in the world that are standing together and will staunch the flow of backwardsness that will help us to move forward, or at least stop the slide and then move forward. And I have to have that hope, because otherwise, what is there? I think it's going to be an interesting time, and I reckon in 100 years, they'll be studying this period in history, and I hope they're studying it from a place of happiness that we made the right choice and that we chose love and acceptance, and not that we chose to put more bars on people's closets and force them into smaller and smaller cages. I have that hope.

Thank you, TJ. That was a really powerful way to finish this episode. And if you're listening today, drop a comment in, tell us what you think. I'd love to hear your thoughts. That was a really powerful close by, TJ. So, yeah, share your thoughts as well, TJ, thank you. That was truly amazing. It's been an honour to spend an hour and a half or so just chatting with you and getting to know you better.

How could people get hold of you, connect on LinkedIn, something like that? Would that work?

Absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. TJ Richards. I think there's only one of me, certainly only one of me with blue hair. So if you just look for the blue streak down the middle of the fake mohawk, that'll be me.

Fabulous. Fabulous. And finally, just a thank you to you for listening in. I couldn't do this without your support. Get to the end saying hi. If you're not already subscribed, then please do subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, whatever your chosen platform is, and leave comments. And why not give us a like? Or why not give us a five star recommendation? Tell your friends, tell your colleagues. I've got loads of other guests coming up.

We're going to hit our hundredth episode soon, and I'm sure you'll be equally inspired by them over the next few weeks, months, or even hopefully, years. Of course, if you'd like to be a guest, I'd love to have you on, so drop any feedback and suggestions to me. Joanne Lockwood at jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk and finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It has been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.