01:56 - Episode Intro: Who is Casey Watts?

• Happy and Effective

02:25 - “Gay” vs “Queer”

• Cultural vs Sexual


• Black vs black


• Deaf vs deaf

06:11 - Pronoun Usage & Normalization

• Greater Than Code Episode 266: Words Carry Power – Approaching Inclusive Language with Kate Marshall


• Spectrum of Allyship


• Ambiguous “They/Them”

16:36 - Asking Questions & Sharing

• Ring Theory


• Don’t Assume


• Take Workshops


• Find Support


• Set Boundaries


• Overgeneralization


• Do Your Own Research – Google Incognito

28:16 - Effective Allyship

• Reactive vs Proactive


• Parenting


• Calling Out Rude Behavior – “Rude!”


• Overcoming Discomfort; Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable


• Recognizing Past Mistakes: Being Reflective
  
  
  
  
  • Stratejoy
  
  


• Celebrate Progress


• Apologize and Move On
  
  
  
  
  • Microaggressions: Prevention & Recovery
  
  
  • happyandeffective.com/updates
    
  
  

Reflections:

Mannah: The people on this show are all willing to start and have conversations.

Casey: I will make mistakes. I will find more support.

Mandy: Reflection is always a work in progress. It’s never done. Keep doing the work. People are always evolving and changing.

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Transcript:

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CASEY: Hello, and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 268. I'm Casey, and I'm here with co-host, Mannah.

MANNAH: How's it going? I'm Mannah and I'm here with Mandy Moore.

MANDY: Hey, everybody. It’s Mandy and today, I'm excited because we are doing a panelist only episode. So our host and panelist, beloved Casey Watts, is going to take us through Casey did a LGBTQ panel for Women Who Code Philly a couple weeks ago and it went really great. He offered to do a show to talk about the subject in more depth on the show. So we're here to do that today.

So without further ado, why don't you give us a little intro, Casey?

CASEY: Sure. I'm going to start by talking about who I am a little bit and why I'm comfortable talking about this kind of stuff. My name's Casey, I'm a gay man, or a queer man. We can get into the difference between gay and queer [chuckles] in the episode. I live in D.C. and I really like my community groups that I'm in to be super inclusive, inclusive of people of all kinds of backgrounds and all the letters in LGBTQIA especially.

MANDY: That's awesome. So right there, you just gave us an in. Can we get into the difference between gay and queer?

CASEY: Yeah. I love it.

People lately use the term “queer” as an umbrella term that represents all the letters in LGBTQIA especially younger people are comfortable with that term, but it is reclaimed. Older people, it used to be a slur and so, like my cousin, for example, who's older than me hesitates to use the word queer on me because she knows that it used to be used to hurt people.

But queer people like this as an umbrella term now because it is just saying we're not the norm in gender identity, or sexual, romantic orientation, that kind of stuff. We're not the norm. We're something else. Don't assume that we're the norm and then it's not describing all the little nuances of it. It's just like the umbrella term. So I'm definitely queer and I'm gay.

Another distinction that I really like to make and that's cultural versus specifically what the term means. So I'm gay and that I'm attracted to other men, but I don't hang out at gay bars and watch RuPaul's Drag Race like the mainstream gay man does in media and in life. I know a lot of people who love that I'm not comfortable there. I don't like it. I think drag queens are fun I guess, but they're also really catty and mean and I don't like that, and I don't want that to rub off on me personally. Instead, I hang out in groups like the queer marching band which has a ton of lesbian women, bisexual, biromantic people, asexual people, intersex people, and trans people and has all the letters in LGBTQIA and I love that inclusive community. That's the kind of group I like to be in.

Some of the gay men there talk about RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it's like a minority of that large group. I love being in the super inclusive cultures. So I'm culturally queer, but I'm sexually romantically gay. So depending on what we're talking about, the one is more important than the other.

I have a story for this. Before the pandemic, I got a haircut at a gay barber shop. It's gay because D.C. has a lot of gay people and there's a gym above the barber shop that's pretty explicitly gay. They cater to gay people. They have rainbows everywhere.

I got my hair cut and this woman just kept making RuPaul’s Drag Race references to me that I didn't get, I don't get it. I don't know what she's saying, but I know the shape of it and I told her I don't like that and I'm not interested in it. Please stop. She didn't because she was assuming I'm culturally gay, like most of her clientele and it was really annoying and she wasn't seeing me, or listening to what I was saying and I was not seen. But she's right I was gay, but I'm not gay culturally in that way.

Does that make sense? That's kind of a complex idea to throw out at the beginning of the episode here. A lot of people take some time to get your head around the cultural versus sexual terms.

MANNAH: Yeah. That is interesting especially because with so many identities, I guess that’s true for every identity where there's a cultural element and then there's some other thing. For instance, I’m a Black man and no matter where I hang out, or what I’m interested in, I’ll always be a Black man, but there is associated with both masculinity and specifically, Black masculinity.

CASEY: Yeah, and I like the – lately, I've been seeing lowercase B black to mean a description of your skin color and uppercase B Black to mean a description of the culture and I like that distinction a lot. It's visual.

Deaf people have been using that for years. My aunt’s deaf so my family has a deaf culture. I'm a little bit deaf culture myself just by proxy, but I'm not deaf. I'm capital D Deaf culturally in amount. Her daughter, who she raised, my deaf aunt, is culturally Deaf way, way more than the average person, but not fully because she's not deaf herself.

So there's all spectrum here of cultural to experiencing the phenomenon and I was happy to see, on Twitter at least, a lot of people are reclaiming capital B black. And for me, it's capital Q Queer and lowercase G gay. That's how I distinguish into my head—culturally queer and I'm sexually gay.

MANNAH: So one of the things, I've been thinking about this since our intro and for those of you listening, our intro is scripted and as simple as it was like, “Hey, my name is Mannah,” and passing it off to Mandy. Generally, when I introduce myself – I just started a new job. I introduced myself with my pronouns, he/him, because I think it's more inclusive and I want to model that behavior and make sure that people around me are comfortable if they want to share their pronouns. I do think that this is championed by the queer community and as a member of that community, I'd just love to hear your take on people being more explicit with that aspect of their identity.

CASEY: I love the segment. Pronouns is a huge, huge topic in this space lately especially. I like to start from here, especially with older audiences that we us