| DELIVERING ON DIVERSITY, GENDER EQUALITY, AND INCLUSION
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| International Day of Pink is around the corner, on Wednesday, April 13. In this issue, we focus on LGBTQ+ youth—books that celebrate them, resources to support them, and LGBTQ+ business leaders who are serving as role models for the next generation. |
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| Kacen Callender is the author of Felix Ever After, a young-adult (YA) novel about a trans teen learning that he deserves love, and the National Book Award–winning King and the Dragonflies, which tells the story of a 12-year-old struggling with grief from the loss of his brother as well as questions about his own sexuality. Growing up in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, Callender, who uses they/them and he/him pronouns, faced bullying and a culture of hostility toward LGBTQ+ people that made them feel isolated even before they realized they were queer. The author creates in their books the kind of world they wish they had grown up in: “I write what I wish my life had been.” Whenever they write a book, Callender thinks of today’s LGBTQ+ youth, “the readers who might need a story that lets them know they aren’t alone—that they’re important and valid and perfect and loved, and that we need them to stay with us; that our world wouldn’t be complete without them.” |
| That message is important to adults as well as teens. As fellow author Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, who uses they/them pronouns, explains in their essay “The healing power of queer coming-of-age stories,” YA books offered them “an alternative history, one full of hope for the life I might have lived, and a kind of longing for a world that wasn’t once but might still be.” Like Callender, Marzano-Lesnevich came out as trans in their adulthood and did not have the adolescent experiences depicted in queer YA lit. Books like Felix Ever After, they write, “dare create a world in which trans youths don’t just endure but thrive. They teach us to dream that queer adolescence, and queer lives, need not come with added pain.” These books provide a sense of repair to many LGBTQ+ readers who are long past adolescence, offering a vision of a world that “embraces who we are with joy.”
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| Next Wednesday, on the International Day of Pink, people around the world will wear pink shirts to stand against bullying, discrimination, and violence toward LGBTQ+ people, including those who identify as intersex, asexual, or Two-Spirit. Day of Pink started back in 2007, when hundreds of students at a high school in Canada showed up wearing pink to support a new student who had been bullied for wearing a pink shirt. Now the campaign is international, with events at schools and workplaces. |
| You can signal your support for colleagues—and for LGBTQ+ youth—by wearing pink on Wednesday, April 13, and by learning about and using appropriate terms to discuss gender and sexuality. Plus, from The Trevor Project (a nonprofit that McKinsey supports), here’s A Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and Nonbinary Youth. |
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| — Edited by Julia Arnous, an editor in McKinsey’s Boston office |
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