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This podcast episode discusses the importance of inclusive language and pronouns in creating diverse and equitable workplaces. The guest, Kai Scott, shares his experience as a gender strategist and highlights the significance of pronouns in representing gender identity. Pronouns help avoid assumptions and create a more inclusive environment. Sharing pronouns is voluntary and can be a way to show support and respect for gender diversity. This podcast aims to create awareness, showcase a variety of perspectives, and inspire courage for all of us to create more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces and communities for all. I am your host, Anne-Marie Pham, CEO of the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion. As CCDI celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2023, we welcome you to today's episode of Leader Talks Season 2. Hi, everyone. June is Pride Month, and we're so pleased to host today's podcast on the topic of inclusive language and, in particular, pronouns. And today's podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, Reliance Home Comfort. Reliance is committed to being the destination of choice by delivering exceptional experiences for customers seeking comfort and team members seeking a rewarding, inclusive workplace. And by fostering diverse, equitable, and inclusive organizations, Reliance is focused on creating a more comfortable tomorrow in communities where their team members work and live. And so a big shout-out to Reliance Home Comfort for your support. So today, I'm really excited to invite our podcast guest, who is Kai Scott. We have known Kai for a while at CCDI. Kai has helped deliver multiple training sessions on gender diversity, and so we know that Kai has a great amount of experience and insight in this topic. But let me tell you a little bit about Kai, for those of you who don't know him. Kai has been the President and Gender Strategist of TransFocus Consulting in Vancouver, BC, since 2016. And he has many years of delivering training on gender diversity and has this great ability to help guide thoughtful, respectful, and impactful conversations about gender diversity with many audiences and in a variety of workplace and community settings. And some of the large-scale projects and training efforts that Kai has undertaken include big clients such as CitiBank, the City of Vancouver, Canada Post, the RCMP, TELUS, and Alberta Blue Cross, for example. So we're so pleased to have you with us today, Kai, and to learn about your experiences, and hopefully take away, you know, some ideas and things that we can do to celebrate Pride Month, to learn more, so that we can be a better ally towards gender diversity. Welcome, Kai. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here to talk about this topic, which is near and dear to me. Absolutely. And so let's find out a little bit more about why this is near and dear to you. Can you maybe tell us about yourself and what were the factors in your life that brought you to build this incredible career and this consulting practice around inclusion of gender diversity in the workplace and the marketplace? Yeah, thank you so much. Well, it's really interesting. It began with a volunteer effort. That's the origin story of TransFocus. Even before we opened the doors, myself and the co-founder, Drew Dennis, we were on a committee with the Vancouver Park Board to figure out how to make recreation more inclusive. And as part of that effort, along with some other community members, we came up with 77 After extensive consultation and with both community members as well as staff, just to try to get to an understanding of what to do. And based on that, we presented that it was passed. We were very excited. But then we got a lot of interest from other organizations that said, oh, my goodness, this is amazing. Can you help us do this, too? And that's where we started to realize, one, it was a volunteer effort, which we could do one time, but not sustainably over and over. And so Drew Dennis and I realized, wait a second, we might really have something here to continue to help folks and do it in a sustainable way by opening up a consulting practice. So it did start off as a volunteer effort and then grew into once we understood the needs of people into a full-fledged consulting practice, which we opened about seven years ago. It's kind of amazing to think so much time has already passed. It feels like yesterday and way more time than that. I will say a little bit more about my professional background. I am a social scientist, so that means I kind of collect data, do education sessions. And prior to TransFocus, I actually worked in the mining industry. And some people are a bit surprised when they hear that. It feels like very different worlds. But I used to look at the social impacts of mining on communities, specifically Indigenous communities. So the through line of my career, which has been about 15 years, is complex social change. And that's where Indigenous issues, especially land-based issues, I've dealt with and worked with and had the honor of collaborating alongside Indigenous nations, as well as the gender diversity piece in so many different areas. So that's a bit of a background of mine. Of course, I should have mentioned at the outset, I used the pronouns he and him in terms of my lived experience. Aside from my professional background, I am a transgender, bisexual man. And so I have a few components to my identity. Of course, the gender diversity component is being a trans man. So I'm a man and I was female assigned at birth as a quick definition. Wow. Thank you very much, Kai. Thank you for that background about who you are and also that community volunteering experience, that work experience in mining. I love it when people find a path in their life where they can actually sort of integrate or align these various intersections of identity and interest and passion. So you're an example of that. And it sounds it sounds really great. So at CCDI, certainly we've been around now for 10 years and we are definitely seeing more organizations, workplaces and public institutions using pronouns, trying to be a little bit more proactive doing that. We are doing community of practice events right now across Canada. And, you know, we've added pronoun stickers as well on the name tags. So we're seeing more of that. But we're also seeing pushback and a lack of understanding in this area. So let's lay it out on the table for those people who are still uncertain. Why do pronouns matter? Hmm. Yeah, such a good question and one that is foremost on people's mind. As you said, they're noticing it pop up more and it creates for some people in an anxiety. Right. What is this? I don't understand. I feel kind of left out of what's happening. They don't know how they fit into what's happening. And so it's this mystery and it's hard to access information or they don't know even where to begin to get that information. And that's why education sessions are really key to break that down. First, what are pronouns? Right. It starts as basic as that. And, you know, some people think, well, you should remember from grade school when we were in elementary school, when we talked about this in grammar lessons. Right. It's how we refer to one another in the third person. So if I'm having a conversation about someone else with another person, I'm going to use pronouns like he, she. There's also gender neutral versions such as they, a singular use of they. And so these are really important ways to refer to somebody. More often than not, we do use their names, but we want to spruce it up a bit. Our minds can't take too much of the same thing. And so we revert to pronouns when talking about somebody. And why it's important is because it's strongly linked to gender. So this is one way we represent gender in how we talk about one another. And so typically what happens is we make assumptions about what somebody's pronouns are for meeting them for the first time and then kind of assigning pronouns to folks. And we don't mean to misstep or make any mistakes about it, but that's where sharing pronouns can avoid these assumptions and clarify right from the outset. So there's no mystery, no wondering who's what and what pronouns do I use? It's, oh, it's right there. It's clarified. And so anyone can provide their pronouns. Of course, it's always voluntary. And this is something I really want to underscore because oftentimes people think that they have to provide pronouns and nobody is required to. It's an optional thing that as part of creating an inclusive environment, somebody may opt into it. Certainly folks who use gender neutral pronouns, which are relatively new to other people, they're likely to share their pronouns, but again, not forced to because sometimes maybe not. They don't want to. Yeah. Yeah. It might not be safe for them. It depends on the environment they're in, whether or not they feel ready to share their pronouns with others. And then, of course, also people who are not a part of the trans community, they can also share as a way to say, we can't make assumptions and here are my pronouns. So you don't have to guess. That's right. That's right.
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