 Ewch drpl tharr. You don't worry about this. You have to excuse me. I'm much more nervous about this talk than normal, because it's much more personal to me than anything I have done before. Normally when I talk about inclusivity in any way, it's usually in the context of accessibility inclusive design. It will probably talk a bit about dark mode and CSS and stuff. And that is my happy place. So this is quite far out. And one of the reasons for that, the reasons I've never really wanted I've never really wanted to talk about this. I don't really feel like my experience is especially interesting, so I've never really suffered from any kind of prejudice, or in some cases some people have suffered violence and all sorts of things like this, and I've never really experienced that. I'm definitely not the most knowledgeable person about LGBTQIA+, I say that a lot in this talk. Issues, I don't know all of the history either, and I definitely can't speak for all of the individual groups that are encapsulated within that acronym. So, for anybody that doesn't know, this stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and then the plus sign is literally every other identity that doesn't fall under one of those, so that's quite a lot of people really. Siobhan has just done my intro for me, so I could probably mostly skip this slide. I'm Kirsty, hello. I do work at Humanmade. I have been there for over five years now. I am a senior engineer, and I am trying to figure out how to be an engineering manager. It does have its interesting challenges. But for the context of this talk, I am openly gay, so this is not something I've ever stood up in front of a crowd of people and said before, so that's a bit weird in itself. But I identify as a lesbian. I married my wife in 2022. Nope, 2020 even, during the pandemic. It was like in a six weeks period where we may or may not be allowed to let it happen. There's more than a few of you in this room that know my wife. She's been known to crash WordPress events quite frequently. Fun fact, she's also crashed Humanmade events before I started at Humanmade. Well, the WordPress community is diverse. I think simply by the nature of it being a global community, it's diverse. Diversity generally refers to the existence of different characteristics within a group, whether that be race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, cultural background, et cetera, et cetera. So with WordPress having people from all over the world contributing in all sorts of ways, I think it'd be really difficult to argue that it's not diverse. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that I think we pride ourselves in the diversity of our community. But does that actually mean that it's also inclusive as well? And what is the difference? So when we talk about diversity, we also combine inclusivity quite often, but they don't automatically mean the same thing. Inclusivity is about creating a welcoming environment where everybody feels equally valued. Achieving diversity doesn't automatically mean creating a truly inclusive environment. In fact, diversity without inclusivity is actually pretty useless. I really started thinking about this talk and this general topic after I came back from WordCamp Europe. I really enjoyed WordCamp Europe and there were some sessions about inclusivity. There was Women in Tech one, Petia did a really cool one on cultural intelligence, but there was nothing about the LGBTQIA plus community or how to represent it in that schedule at all that I saw. So I took a look at the other two flagship events, so WordCamp Asia and WordCamp US, and their schedules were pretty similar. There was nothing in the main event that spoke to LGBTQIA plus people. But there was pride vent parties at all three of them, which is fantastic because it acknowledges that there's a recognition that we need to make space for this community within WordPress. I did go to the WordCamp Europe one. I had a really great time except for the 15 minutes where I was trapped in the toilet and actually had to be rescued. That was embarrassing. I don't recommend that. But anyway, the pride events, they're still any side events. They're not in the main agenda anywhere. I did also look at the community summit sessions as well. There was one on diversity, equity, inclusivity and belonging, which sounded really interesting. I read the notes back of that. But again, most of the talks as far as I could tell from that was language barriers, accessibility for meetups and events, and managing different cultural behaviours. We really didn't say anything about LGBTQIA plus. I told you I say this a lot. I figured, well, somebody's got to be talking about this somewhere in the WordPress space. Maybe it's at another WordCamp that I've just not been to. I checked WordPress TV and I searched for LGBT that resulted in a total of six results. Two of those are the same talk. I did a search for lesbian. That gave us two results. I searched for gay, which gave us only one relevant result for talks from WordCamps. Now, admittedly, I didn't try particularly hard to search for anything more than that. Maybe there are others out there that perhaps a language barrier prevented them being in such results or I don't know, I just searched the wrong terms. But if I was an LGBTQIA plus person and I was coming newly into the WordPress space and I wanted to know how inclusive this is for me, I don't think I'd try that hard to be honest. I think this is what I'd see. This tells me that there's not a lot of open conversations happening. For this community within WordPress. So, what are the challenges? I think what's unique about this community really is that it's not always obvious that somebody identifies as LGBTQIA plus. And then on top of that, even if they do, they're not necessarily willing to be open about it. And there are many reasons why that would be the case. It's definitely a deeply personal choice about whether you're going to come out or whether you're going to be open within the community. But it usually bottles down to just this. Fear. So, for this slide, I did originally start by trying to list all of the reasons I could think of. Somebody would be fearful. It was taking a really long time, so I asked to chat GPT instead and this is what I got. Actually it's pretty accurate, so I was quite pleased with that. The yellow ones on here that I've highlighted are the ones that were personal to me. So, you know, I said everybody suffers from some fear. These were mine. So, fear of rejection I think is pretty straightforward. I was concerned about bullying and discrimination. I'd seen a lot of it in the hometown I used to live in. Fear of being stereotyped, I said earlier that I identified as a lesbian. I still actually hate the word lesbian because of the stereotypes that are associated with it. The impact on relationships. So, it was a concern to me that my friends and family would look at me differently and see me differently and therefore that would impact my relationships with them. And of course, I was obviously uncertain about being accepted as me. So, if we know it's not always obvious when somebody identifies as this, let me ask you a question. Here we have a very generic stock photo of what should be a diverse group of people. But as an example, I'd like to ask, could you identify a gay person in that picture? Like genuinely? Or maybe bisexual or asexual? Do you actually think it represents LGBTQIA+, at all? No, I don't. We can't always wear rainbow t-shirts and glitter to immediately identify ourselves. It's not always that straightforward. And then if we choose to hide, it becomes even harder to tell if we're there or not. So, for the most part, we do get to choose how open we want to be. I mean, unfortunately, there are cases where that's not always true. But for the most part, we can hide in plain sight. And this can be good for us sometimes. You know, it gives us the... You know, we have that protection of hiding. But the downside of that is it really can make it so much harder to come out and be open. If people are unaware that you're there, then perhaps biases will show somebody will say something in front of you that, you know, I hope they'd never say in front of an LGBTQIA person, plus person knowingly. Microaggressions like this get set in front of us all of the time. If you were to hear an overtly racist comment, that would probably be deliberate. But homophobic slurs are generally not challenged at all. Because people that say in them don't even realise they're saying them, and everybody else just accepts it as the normal. These few examples. So, like, that's so gay or complementing someone of the same gender and then, like, oh, no, don't worry, I'm not gay. Like, implies that it's really bad to be gay. It reinforces that message. Assuming someone is in a heterosexual relationship by asking the question, there insinuates that heterosexual sexuality is the only normal one. Everything else is abnormal. And so it continually reinforces these negative messages. There are others as well. Some of you, I'm sure, remember Little Britain. Like, with the only gay in the village. Like, I'll after that at the time, but it doesn't set a very good tone. And I've also been really guilty of this from time to time. There's a specific example where I've told many people that I think my wife's taste in music is really, really gay. And I've justified it in that I've thought, well, you know, you could call that genre of music. There are songs that get played in every gay club. She loves every single one of them. But nearly all of the time that will actually be interpreted as, I think, her taste in music is terrible. And just between me and all of you, I do think her taste in music is terrible. But it is these small slights, the seemingly innocuous comments that continually reinforce that it's wrong to be gay or identify as LGBTQIA+. You know, it tells you that you should hide, that you will not be accepted if you try to be your true self. Right, so I did do a little bit of research for this and reached out to some friends in the community and this is what I got back almost unanimously and I admit to it as well. This is what I'm talking to about hiding in the open. It's often much easier just to not talk about your personal life other than risk letting something slip that might make people suspect. For me, I would never refer to my wife or then girlfriend by name ever. So I would always call him my partner. I'd always avoid phrases like wife or girlfriend because they're not gender-neutral and that would give that away. I'd always use gender-neutral pronouns. And I don't do this very much anymore to be fair. But I do still do that within work occasionally. Not with my human-made colleagues but with larger project teams. So those teams will include clients, stakeholders, external development teams, designers all sorts of other people and they could be located literally anywhere in the world. I don't know their cultural or personal beliefs so I do tend to keep things a bit more quiet. And thinking about that, there is still 64 countries in the world that criminalise home of sexuality. Half of those are or were in the Commonwealth. And according to Google, I didn't ask chat GPT this one, I just googled it. It's probably wrong by now. There's 195 countries in the world at the moment which means nearly a third of all of the countries in the world are registered against LGBTQIA plus people. So that means it's actually really, really highly likely I could work with a contractor that lives or who has lived in one of these countries and believes these issues. I could meet people at work camps or meet-ups and things that have lived in these countries or still do that uphold these beliefs because it's not always possible to know what their cultural beliefs are. I mean, the reality with my project team so it's like they probably don't care at all what my personal life is like or they decided I was gay ages ago just because I've got short hair which is another stereotype of lesbian. But it does mean that I am always much more cautious about how I engage in what is for everybody else small talk or trivial conversations as a result. And I know I'm not alone in this. And unfortunately unless the world changes more it is getting better. I sat on the train next to a group of teenagers that had a very enlightening conversation in the open yesterday which would never have happened when I was a teenager. Most of us will never feel truly comfortable at the moment. So what can we do in the WordPress space? Well, we can't fix all of the world's problems. But hopefully I've started a conversation here and made some of you think and we can then continue this conversation in the wider WordPress space so the next time we have discussion sessions about diversity, equity, inclusivity and belonging or you want to pitch a talk to a word camp the LGBTQIA plus community is considered more heavily within those things. I have talked a lot about fear and hiding. We don't know how many people in the WordPress space are just not open and just don't want to be. Probably never going to be. If you are somebody that is open and comfortable I'd encourage you to be even more visible than you currently are. This is the first time I've made myself this visible but of course only if you're comfortable to do so. And to literally everybody else in the room look around and think about how your actions and interactions could help someone feel more welcome. It's not enough to just assume that because there's a few of us that are open there's no more work to be done to create an inclusive environment. This isn't unique to WordPress of course but WordPress is a huge community so even the smallest change in this room today can have a really big impact on the wider community and hopefully extrapolate out into the wider world as well. I certainly hope so. Thank you.