🌈 living LGBTQ+ inclusion in my small biz

I was scared to come out to my clients

I am lucky and grateful to work with some wonderful small businesses doing great work to educate, support, and help people. Although the world can feel overwhelming right now, I wanted to share that people are still doing amazing work to help their neighbors.

I appreciate that I’m able to work on projects I believe in, and also that I’m able to build my business on principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and respect. While federal websites are removing all mentions of “transgender”, I can say trans on my website if I want. (I just did!) I can say trans on my business website if I want. That’s one part of the magic of running a small business.

Recently, I decided that I was going to use they/them to refer to myself with clients. Previously, I let it slide, didn’t mention that I am non-binary, and didn’t have any indication on my website or in my email signature that I use they/them pronouns.

I was scared to come out to clients. I mean, these people pay me!

But it became clear to me that it’s important to me to be out at work. I obviously can’t control how other people think of me or talk about me, but I have a lot of control about how I can express myself in the business which I run.

I started by adding (they/them) to my display name in video calls. Yes, you can add pronouns in Google Meet now too - as well as Zoom. I don’t know whether or not my clients noticed, but at least I put that information out there in front of them.

Previously, all my testimonials just had my name if relevant - no pronouns. If a client referred to me as “she” in a testimonial, I replaced the word with “Rey.”

But the most recent time I received a lovely testimonial, I asked the client if she was okay with me replacing “she” with “they.” Yes, I could have just made the change, but I actually wanted to take the opportunity to come out.

I was a little sick to my stomach waiting for the reply, but I needn’t have worried - my client responded in an affirming and supportive way, encouraging me to use whatever word makes me the most happy.

Isn’t that so nice?

I think a lot of us have more than one work interest, more than one project, more than one audience. Limiting what I shared to each audience was holding me back from sharing. If I have to keep LGBTQ+ advocacy separate from small business separate from travel separate from outdoors and camping, that’s hard for me.

I’ve recently started posting a variety of different videos that I had in the backlog to my YouTube channel. Small biz tips, LGBTQ+ inclusion, camping in a car…

Guess what’s the most popular? Camping in your car. I have this one video about how to convert a Honda Civic for sleeping in that has 80 thousand views. 80k! And this is not even what my business is about. At all!

I’ve gotten 600 subscribers from this one video, over about two years. That’s the power of showing up in search results.

This sleeping-in-your-car video does not talk about LGBTQ+ inclusion. I do not mention that I am LGBTQ+ in it. Two things are true: this video helps marginalized people, including LGBTQ+ people, who may be more likely to need to sleep in their cars. And, this video is attracting a variety of people to my channel, some of whom distinctly do not want to hear about LGBTQ+ topics.

But I guess that’s what a lot of my work is about. I put together websites, designs, and writing that is (hopefully) appealing to a general audience. And then I’m also LGBTQ+.

I’m very much part of the community I am building. You, also, are part of this community - thank you!

While things are dire at a federal level, those of us who are working on local, grassroots projects - we are still going. We are still here!

Need a website? Please join me for an online event:

I’m hosting a free online event on how to design a website for small biz owners, writers, service providers, anyone who needs a web presence but doesn’t have an engineering team. We’re going live on Thursday, February 20th at 3:30pm Eastern time. I’d love for you to join.

Subscribe to my channel and click “Notify Me” on YouTube to get a notification when we go live on the 20th:

Thanks so much for reading! Let me know what you think in the comments.

Take care,

Rey