What I Teach About
Hi there, lovely people! I’m excited to be writing to you today with something a little different. Before we get into that, a few quick reminders:
I have an event coming up on supporting your trans family members and queer family members as well as protecting your own mental health at family holiday gatherings. It’s an event I host every year and always a wonderful opportunity to come together in community. There will be a recording available for those who RSVP!
I’m also going live TOMORROW with
at 12EST/9PST!! We’re going to be chatting about concrete tools for actually getting through to people in difficult conversations, breaking out of queer echo chambers, and how we talk our way to a better world.What’s your real job, Ben?
I’ve realized in a handful of conversations lately that some people don’t know what exactly it is I do outside of writing good queer news. I wear a lot of hats, but my “day job” is pretty much what I spend my time writing about. I’m a self employed public speaker and advocate, and an author too. I give presentations for companies and congregations and universities and hospitals and everyone in between, I meet with PFLAG chapters and support families of trans kids, and I have one on one conversations with people struggling to do right by the queer folks in their lives.
My work centers around storytelling, teaching, and connection, and I’d love to tell you all a little bit more about how I got into this as well of what kinds of events I do since I know I have a lot of PFLAG chapters and ERG members and community leaders who follow me on here. Since transparency is important to me, I’ll share openly my two goals with this newsletter today:
One is to find more opportunities to share my message of joy, hope, and allyship with as many people as possible and potentially pay my bills along the way. You should know that budget is secondary in these conversations for me. This isn’t just a career, It’s a calling. I’m so fortunate that my paid speaking engagements and paid subscribers give me plenty of flexibility to host free events for PFLAG chapters and safe congregations and even just groups of friends that want to host an interesting salon to talk about something new.
The other is to show you an example of something I talk about often, which is finding the forms of change making that are both effective and bring us joy. There are a million different ways to positively impact the world around you, and I don’t like all of them. Some of them I find tedious. Some of them I find stressful. Some of them I’m plain old not good at. Others light my heart on fire and make a genuine difference. By choosing to lean into joy as well as maintaining conscious practices of rest, I’ve been able to build a nearly six-year career as a public speaker while largely keeping burnout at bay. Advocacy doesn’t have to drain you, and I wanna share some stories about how I found my way to that.
As you read through these stories, I hope you ask yourself, Where is my own alignment with joy and meaningful change making? And as you read through the variety of speaking offerings, I hope you ask yourself, do I know someone who needs to hear this? Maybe you’re the leader of it, or maybe you know of a local conference. I should apply to them or a friend who might be interested in talking about this. ERG leaders, heads of HR or DEI (yes, those still exist!), Pastors and rabbis, or just friends who like to make things happen. My goal is simply to reach as many people as I can while I’m here on this Earth. So don’t let doubts about budget or my interest end the conversation before it even starts.
If you’re already convinced, feel free to check out my website for a more robust list of speaking options!
The Very Beginning
At 16 years old, I began giving presentations to the health classes in my school about what it meant to be transgender, nonbinary, or otherwise LGBTQ+. It felt like a very adult responsibility in ways that were both incredibly cool and deeply draining. The weight on my shoulders of knowing I had to try to fix everything for the kids who quietly came out to me in the hallway after the presentation was heavy.
I created an analogy around sitting in chairs that has grown to become one of my favorite teaching tools, here’s that cute original graphic!
Offering: Creating a Joyful World for Trans Youth
This session reviews the content of my book, which focuses on supporting our trans loved ones. This conversation will walk participants through the basics of creating supportive environments for transgender and nonbinary youth and strategies for centering joy and preserving the magic of childhood in the face of hateful politicians and confused family members. While the predominant narrative around trans kids focuses on suicidality, this session instead focuses on possibility, beautiful futures, and joy. I created this session because I shouldn’t have had to become an adult to get the support I needed in school.
A Bigger Stage
In the fall of 2018, I saw an opportunity to audition for a TEDx festival being run through my undergraduate university. I was accepted to speak, and saw the talk as an opportunity to share everything I knew about allyship and then close that chapter of my life and focus on my elementary education program. That spring, I delivered the presentation and fell in love with being on stage as myself rather than a character in a play.
You can watch that here, if you want! It still stands strong as a great intro to trans allyship with plenty of humor and storytelling.
I had an amazing time, and instead of closing the chapter, it opened a whole new book. The talk was posted to youtube, then to facebook, where it garnered significant attention, including from an HR company that asked me to come do a training for their annual thank you party that fall.
Offering: Trans 101
This workshop is all about building foundations through personal story. After reviewing what it means to be transgender and all of the language that comes up in these conversations, he’ll discuss issues facing the transgender community in the workforce and the world at large, why it matters to be proactive about your support, and what individuals and organizations can do to create a safe, supportive environment for all people.
This session works great as a lecture-style presentation, a fireside chat, or something else! It’s also available with specific lenses for your industry or group, including healthcare, social work, human resources, faith-based gathering, or grandparents group (for example).
Taking the Leap
After my second paid speaking engagement, I realized I had an opportunity to do a whole lot of good, and I decided I wanted to leave my education program, graduate early, and try building a career as a public speaker. I’d met a few people who knew what the career path looked like and believed in me very early on, and after many long conversations to persuade my nervous parents and girlfriend, I decided to submit the paperwork to graduate early in February 2020. When I was sent home from campus for COVID and workplaces moved to zoom, it unexpectedly became a perfect opportunity to begin hosting webinars for companies desperate for any kind of event to bring their employees together.
I finished my coursework and officially graduated in the summer of 2020, almost two months after I had moved to St. Louis to move in with my girlfriend for medical school!
Offering: Storytelling for Social Change
This 90-120 minute workshop is extremely interactive (and one of my favorites to host). After introducing participants to the when, why, and how of storytelling to bring about change in the world around us, we’ll talk through the concept of relational organizing, empathy bridge building, and then open up to a storytelling open-mic. Participants, if they wish to, will have the chance to develop a story and share it with their peers.
Burnout!
In the beginning, my presentations were deeply draining for me. I put in huge amounts of energy, worked off a precisely memorized script, and casually shared some of my darkest moments with zoom calls full of disabled cameras. I jumped right back to other meetings after my events ended and didn’t know why I was so tired all the time. Slowly, I realized I needed to start setting better boundaries, taking time for rest, and leaning into joy in the stories I selected for my presentations.
Offering: Choosing Joy, Resource Mapping, and Resilience Building:
Though many of us feel a strong urge to stick our heads firmly in the sand and leave them there for the next four years, this is only going to further cement feelings of isolation, anxiety, powerlessness and defeat. We’ll talk through important strategies for avoiding burnout and empathy fatigue and build our emotional capacity muscles. We’ll review how to locate and support local resources, as well as how to engage with the news in a way that balances staying informed with maintaining our sanity. This session is perfect for anyone from beginner advocates to front-lines rights defenders grappling with burnout.
Fighting the Fight
In early 2023, I attended a hearing at the Missouri state capitol for the first time. Quickly, I became a regular in those unholy halls, and I joined my local PFLAG chapter as the advocacy chair. The more time I spent helping parents, allies, and queer folks learn how to get involved, the more energized I became. I started to spend a lot more of my time on efforts to build a better world for the trans folks who came after me, and the ones who live here today.
Offering: Future Dreaming and your Advocacy Superpower
This session will be highly actionable, giving participants lots of ideas for how to use the skills you already have—be it conversational, organizational, educational, or something else—to build a world worth living in for yourself and those you love. We’ll walk through a “Future Dreaming” exercise, in which we ground ourselves in the world we want to build, to prevent our advocacy from coming from a place of fear, pity, or anger. We’ll also get very real with each other and ourselves about the barriers to participating in advocacy initiatives. To close out the session, we’ll also talk through a number of critical self-care and community-care strategies for advocates to ensure that we can avoid burnout as much as possible.
Offering: Responding to Resistance:
This 90-120 minute session will walk participants through the wide variety of reasons someone might not feel ready to support their transgender and LGBTQ+ coworkers, from fear to faith, from misinformation to masculinity. After painting a clear picture of the people we hope to reach, we’ll talk through strategies for how to reach them in a way that is safe, productive, and sustainable, as well as how to handle when conversation isn’t possible.
Final Thoughts
Six years in, I have no intention of stopping any time soon. I am so grateful for the people who’ve lifted me up, helped connect me to opportunities, and the people who’ve opened their hearts and their homes to me to make cool events happen.
Some of my favorite events have been for small groups and small towns and rural areas and people who others might have written off because of their age or their faith or anything else, but these events continue to be such a source of hope for me. Despite what we’ve seen from the administration this year, and the pieces of my work that might look a little bit different, I am still here. No one can stop me from telling my story.
That’s all the news that’s fit to print for today! I hope you enjoyed reading this. If any of these sound interesting, or you have an idea but you aren’t sure how to make it work, or if you know exactly how to make your idea work, send me a message or an email and let’s make it happen! These conversations are what will allow the good queer news to continue for as long as possible!
If you have an event you want to do that isn’t listed anywhere… also let me know that! Most of the particularly awesome-sounding events on the speaking page are custom events that different folks asked if I could design for them and I loved them enough to make them permanent offerings. Let’s create something together!
All my love,
Ben