Paving the Way For Transgender Equality in Corporate America With Mary Ann Horton

My guest on this episode of Punk Rock HR is Dr. Mary Ann Horton, a transgender activist and the author of the book “Trailblazer: Lighting the Path for Transgender Equality in Corporate America.” We talk about her amazing career, how she advocated for one of the corporate world’s first transgender equality workplace policies, her book and her advice to HR leaders looking to be more inclusive.

Mary Ann has worked with many Fortune 500 companies to improve their HR policies and be more inclusive of the transgender community. She shares her advice for applying her strategies to your organization.

Punk Rock HR is proudly underwritten by Betterworks. The world’s most dynamic organizations rely on Betterworks to accelerate growth by supporting transparent goal setting, enabling continuous performance and learning from employee insights. Betterworks is on a mission to help HR leaders make work better. Discover how they can help you by visiting www.betterworks.com.

Pioneering Transgender-Inclusive Language in Corporate America

In 1997, Mary Ann was working at Lucent Technologies and had started to come out at work. She noticed that the HR department already had equal opportunity (EO) policies protecting gay and lesbian employees. 

“They touted that as a feature that sexual orientation was in the nondiscrimination policy, and I wanted that, too,” Mary Ann says. “So I asked Lucent, ‘Would it be possible to include transgender-inclusive language in the EO policy?’”

Lucent officials took months to respond, but the response was positive. Lucent had a request of its own: “If we did include transgender language in our EO policy, what language would we use in order to be as inclusive as possible?” 

Mary Ann consulted with activist friends and proposed that Lucent use the wording “gender identity characteristics and expressions.” Gender identity is “one’s internal sense in their self about whether they’re a man or a woman or possibly a nonbinary person, somewhere in between,” Mary Ann says. Gender expression refers to how other people see an individual socially. 

With Lucent’s backing and that specific language in place, the company amended its nondiscrimination policy on Oct. 28, 1997, with transgender-inclusive language. Mary Ann went further, persuading Lucent to also add coverage for transgender people in the company’s health care plan. 

While those moves were revolutionary at the time, they’re relatively common now at large companies. “62% of Fortune 500 companies include transgender health benefits in their EO policies,” Mary Ann says. “And I think, the last I saw, it was 92% of the companies include trans language in their nondiscrimination policies.”

Focusing On The Needs of the Business     

HR and other leaders play an important role in prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion within organizations and in normalizing the work experience for all employees, including transgender people. 

“If you’ve never met a trans person before, then you might have images in your head that come from controversial figures on the right or from whatever,” Mary Ann says. “But we don’t all have fangs and fishnets. We’re just regular boring people. Once you meet a real trans person, we’re just a part of the great diversity of the world.”

Every employee just wants a safe place to work and contribute. “Once I learned that my role is to focus on the needs of the business, then I do that,” Mary Ann says. “I focus on the needs of the business, and management appreciates that. And I do it in a kind way that helps my co-workers, too, and my co-workers appreciate that I can help solve the problems of the business.”     

After her time at Lucent, Mary Ann helped other large corporations adopt similar policies, including Apple, IBM, Xerox and American Airlines. Eventually, as the movement picked up, she could take a job at San Diego Gas & Electric, focus on her job “and enjoy living in paradise without having to do all the trans activism anymore.”

Her book is the culmination of those decades of work — and her personal journey. “it’s a very nontraditional story, because I was coming out in the workplace long before I transitioned to full time,” she says. 

Years of giving seminars and workshops showed her that people appreciated ‌personal stories, and that led her to write her memoir. “In part, it’s a coming-of-age story that tells how I learned myself to be a transgender woman very, very gradually,” she says.         

How HR Can Support Transgender Employees Now

The best way to become more inclusive as an organization is by living that example, starting with corporate leadership and HR. 

“If management supports a particular trans person, either full-time in the new role or part-time in the new role, and says, ‘This person has my full support, and get on with your job and don’t mess with the person,’ then it’s going to happen,” Mary Ann says.

Companies looking to become more inclusive and diverse have a lot of leeway in the policies they set, as long as they follow federal law. And there’s help beyond just the law.

“You can look at OSHA, you can look to the EEOC, you can look at best practices in your industry, in human resources, and you can look at the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index,” Mary Ann says. HR leaders should also look to outside resources, conferences and workshops that help them connect with other HR professionals and LGBT+ experts who can help companies support their employees. 

“Whenever a decision is being made by a business, if the people making that decision are as diverse as possible, you’ll get better decisions made,” Mary Ann says. “So you want all kinds of diversity, and that includes LGBTQ+.”

People in This Episode

Mary Ann Horton: LinkedIn, Book: “Trailblazer: Lighting the Path for Transgender Equality in Corporate America“

Transcript

Laurie Ruettimann:

Punk Rock HR is sponsored by Betterworks. The world’s most dynamic organizations rely on Betterworks to accelerate growth, by supporting transparent goal setting, enabling continuous performance, and learning from employee insights. Betterworks is on a mission to help HR leaders make work better. Discover how they can help you by visiting Betterworks.com today.

Hey everybody, I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Dr. Mary Ann Horton, a transgender activist and the author of “Trailblazer: Lighting the Path for Transgender Equality in Corporate America.” In today’s show, we talk about Mary Ann’s amazing career as a computer scientist — very esteemed, very successful, she was such a badass — and her work in really setting forth a path that had never been done before. She helped to author some of the earliest transgender equality policies in corporate America.

I was thrilled to have this conversation to learn more about Dr. Horton’s history, to learn about her work in corporate America with big Fortune 500 companies, and how that can apply to you in your organization. And, most importantly, just to hear her origin story and where life has taken her. So if you want to meet a truly badass individual who is fixing work for so many people across America, well, sit back and enjoy this conversation with Mary Ann Horton on this week’s Punk Rock HR. 

Hey, Mary Ann. Welcome to the podcast.

Mary Ann Horton:

Thanks, Laurie. It’s great to be here.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I’m so pleased to have you. And listen, as we get started, I always invite people to tell me their origin stories, so why don’t we do that? Why don’t you tell me who you are and what you’re all about?

Mary Ann Horton:

Hi everybody. My name’s Mary Ann Horton. I am a transgender woman. I have a history of, as a transgender activist, working with large companies, Fortune 500 companies, to improve their HR policies to be inclusive of transgender people. I was involved with Lucent Technologies back in 1997 when they became the first Fortune 500 company to include trans-inclusive language in their nondiscrimination policy. So it’s been an exciting ride.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Yeah, yeah. You come at your life story a lot of different ways, and you’ve written a memoir, and we’re going to talk about that. But you’ve got a background that’s very technical, so can you tell us a little bit about your technical background?

Mary Ann Horton:

Sure. Professionally, I’m a computer nerd, pretty much hardcore. I have a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, and I was there from 1978 to 1981, which was a very exciting time because we built technology that the internet is based on. So I had a small hand in building tools that people use every day. And I’ve made my living professionally as a computer scientist, and that’s been great for me. But in addition to some rather cool technical accomplishments, I’ve been working as a transgender activist, so I tend to be a little bit badass on both sides.

Laurie Ruettimann:

You are. Badass is the right word. But wait, we need to talk about something that you were definitely involved in, which is the email attachment. Tell me more about that.

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, when I was a grad student at Berkeley, email was just flat files with a command line interface, and you couldn’t send binary files. And that mostly didn’t matter, because all of our files were flat files, but it got to the point that I needed to send binary files around. So I wrote a little tool that would encode binary files into text files that were slightly bigger, and used that to email them. That was in 1980. And it turns out, that became the standard format for the email attachment later on. So people ask who invented the email attachment, and a lot of people say I did.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Amazing, amazing. I don’t know. Is that a blessing or a curse? I’m not sure.

Mary Ann Horton:

It’s kind of fun. It’s my little 15 minutes of fame in the techy world.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Yeah, there you go. There you go. Well, you’ve got this technical background and you’ve got a career that’s this amazing esteemed professional career, and a lot of people would say, “That’s enough. I’m good. I’ve got one job.” But you’ve got multiple jobs. The second job that you’ve identified is as an activist. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, sure. When I started to come out in the workplace back in 1997 with Lucent, I was really intrigued that the gay and lesbian people were protected by the corporate EO policy. They were allowed to come out at work without fear of being fired because sexual orientation was in the policy. And I wanted to come out because — it turned out that coming out is really important. And I learned a lot from them that when you spend your time in the closet, you’re spending energy hiding part of who you are, and that energy takes away energy that you could be using for something productive.

So the gay men and the lesbians were bragging, almost, about how, when they came out of the closet because they were allowed to, their productivity at work got better, and their job performance got better, and that was a really good thing for the company. So they touted that as a feature that sexual orientation was in the nondiscrimination policy, and I wanted that, too. So I asked Lucent, “Would it be possible to include transgender-inclusive language in the EO policy?”

My request went through mysterious channels up to our director of diversity, and then the question came back a few months later, “Well, if we did include transgender language in our EO policy, what language would we use in order to be as inclusive as possible?” And I thought, “Wow, what a great question to ask.” I know when an opportunity is presented, and I didn’t know the answer to that, but I consulted some activist friends of mine. And the answer that came back, after a little bit of wordsmithing, was, “Gender identity characteristics or expression.” 

So I passed that up and a few months later, Rich McGinn signed into policy, on October 28, 1997, the new Lucent EO nondiscrimination policy that protected discrimination based on gender identity characteristics or expression.

Now, I should explain those terms, what they mean. Gender identity is one’s internal sense in their self about whether they’re a man or a woman or possibly a nonbinary person, somewhere in between. Gender identity primarily protects transsexuals and nonbinary people who want to live full time in some gender role that’s different than their sex assigned at birth. Gender expression is also a widely used language, and that refers to how other people see you socially. So that can reference your hairstyle, your makeup, your clothing, your body language, all sorts of things like that. Your name, for example, your pronouns, those are part of gender expression. 

The third part is gender characteristics. And gender characteristics are medical conditions, usually at birth, that cause a person’s biology to be somewhere between male and female. And there are a whole lot of very medical-sounding conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome and hypospadias and pseudohermaphroditism and all kinds of things like that. You almost have to be a medical professional to understand them.

The interesting thing there is that the gender characteristics language has faded from current HR policy. And usually, you’ll see today that language put in the EO policy will say, “Gender identity or expression,” and they leave out “characteristics.” But if you talk to the intersex society, and I would urge anyone in HR who’s looking at their EO policy and their wording to talk to the Intersex folks about this, they are currently requesting the language “sex characteristics” be put in EO policies, separate from “sexual orientation,” and separate from “gender identity and expression.” 

interact.org is a great source if you wanted to contact Intersex activists and find out what they’re thinking. I don’t mean to speak for them, but they’re an important group, too.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I was just thinking as you describe what it was like to go through this experience in 1997, that there were all sorts of ways that the world worked back then, and I was very new to the workforce in 1997. But in early 1998, we had the rise of Newt Gingrich, here in America, and Monica Lewinsky and all of that. And sex was very titillating, and it was very binary in the way that we talked about it. We talked about affairs and all of these moral characteristics, and here you are being an activist, being an early trailblazer, so to speak, in this world, in this conversation. So what was that like for you? Did you feel safe? Did you feel supported? Did you encounter resistance? What was your life like back in 1997?

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, it was very scary at first. Coming out of the closet, the first few times you do it, can be really scary. And when I came out to my boss, I was a wreck sitting at his desk talking to him, and he pushed a box of Kleenex across the desk for me so that I could cry into it when I was choking up. But he was great, he was very supportive. My work group was very supportive. Most of Lucent was wonderful. 

The only problem that I ran into in the workplace was that, before my first day at work coming out as Mary Ann, someone made an anonymous complaint to HR saying, “If that person uses the women’s restroom here, I’m going to file a complaint about an unsafe workplace.” And suddenly, there was this flurried meeting on a weekend between all sorts of people. Corporate security was there, HR was there, our LGBTQ employee workplace group was there, management was there, medical was there. Everybody but me was there at this meeting, deciding what restroom I was going to use.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I would imagine that that experience happens today in 2023.

Mary Ann Horton:

I think we’re past restrooms now in the workplace, although with some of the red states, you never know what they’re going to come up with these days. They’re already trying to mandate a bill in Oklahoma that would forbid insurance coverage of anything related to a transgender person, which sounds unconstitutional and anti-commerce and anti-freedom to me, but there’s movement back in the other direction. But for the most part now, restrooms are not a big deal. Locker rooms are starting to get touchy, and locker rooms are a touchy issue for everybody anyway.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Locker rooms are generally terrible and not a great place for anybody, no matter your identity. So here you are in 1997, you’ve had this experience of helping Lucent really shape policy around being more inclusive, creating an environment that’s welcoming for all employees. Where does that go from there in your professional journey?

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, I was able to work, at the time I hadn’t transitioned full time, so I was able to work some of the time as Mark and some of the time as Mary Ann. And since I was working four days a week from home anyway, because I was in Columbus, Ohio, and my work group was in the Chicago area, then it didn’t really make that much difference. But people were great about accommodating me, about using the right pronouns when I came into work in one role or the other. The process of coming out very quickly became routine for me, and I got to be very good at it. I developed quite a bit of courage, and the fear went away.

We very quickly got over the restroom issue. Initially, I was told that I had to walk a quarter-mile to the medical restroom, which was a single-occupancy restroom. But after a couple of years, we got the policy changed that a trans person should use the restroom corresponding with the gender they’re currently presenting. And I want to add to this, there is fear in the workplace even today about nonbinary or gender-fluid people in the workplace. There’s pretty good support for a person who wants to transition permanently, and starting on a particular day, the transition day, they have a new name, new pronouns, new appearance, they use the new restroom and so on. And they’re pretty good about that.

But there’s fear among some HR people about, what’s been disparaging, we refer to as “flip-flopping” and what today we would call, “gender-fluid.” And I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been there. I’ve been in a Fortune 500 company, and I was gender-fluid. Sometimes I came in as Mark, sometimes I came in as Mary Ann, in 1998. The company had no problem with it. The issues that I faced were the exact same issues that any transsexual that goes full time faced. 

There was nothing in particular that was different about being part-time. I just had to get used to sometimes people using the wrong name or the wrong pronouns because they weren’t sure how I was presenting that day, especially if it was on the phone or by email, they couldn’t tell. So I had to suck that up. But other than that, it was fine. And there’s no reason to fear a nonbinary person coming. I’ve been there. Those who say something cannot be done should get out of the way of those of us who are doing it.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I’m really curious about that, because that’s 1998, and you’re having those conversations with HR professionals, but they are still happening today. So if you encounter a human resources professional who has some concerns about someone expressing themselves in a gender-fluid way, what practical advice do you have for them besides, “Get out of the way,” which is a great piece of advice, but how do they make sure that they’re being inclusive but also expressing their concerns in a way that they feel heard, as well? How does that conversation go?

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, as an HR person, you want to support your employees. You want all your employees to be as productive as possible in their job without controversy. And most large corporations have a culture of inclusion and diversity. And the management, in particular — management is very important, people don’t get promoted into management if they don’t support diversity and inclusion. So if management supports a particular trans person, either full time in the new role or part time in the new role, if management supports the person and says, “This person has my full support, and get on with your job, and don’t mess with the person,” then it’s going to happen. And support from, especially from that big boss, whoever the local person is that everybody really listens to — that powerful boss one or two levels up locally that they see every day — if that person expresses their support, then the rank and file will express support, too. And people may spend 20 minutes coming in to meet the new person and going, “Oh, that’s what she looks like now. OK, fine.” And then, very quickly, it’s like, “OK, it’s no big deal anymore. Let’s get back to work.”

Laurie Ruettimann:

That message around “Let’s get back to work,” I think it’s lost in the conversation. We get hung up on some of the drama, some of the performative aspects, and really we center ourselves as straight hetero people, and we think we’re the main character of the story. But I think once we have that experience, and we move forward and we get back to work, it really sets the tone for the culture moving forward. And I just wonder where we got lost. Why don’t we focus on the work in a lot of these conversations? Why are we still getting caught up in some of the histrionics and the drama here?

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, if you’ve never met a trans person before, then you might have images in your head that come from controversial figures on the right or from whatever. But we don’t all have fangs and fishnets. We’re just regular boring people. Once you meet a real trans person, we’re just a part of the great diversity of the world. There’s nothing particularly unique about us. We’re no different than a gay person or a Black person or a woman in a role that’s been traditionally assumed by a white male, and we’re just as capable of doing the job. And if we’re supported by our management and positioned to thrive in a company, then we will perform well.

One of the big revelations that one of my bosses shared with me one time — he had just been outsourced to a company that was servicing Lucent, and that was a really big blow morally to him. And he said, “Every day, I come into work and I ask management, “What do you want me to do today? Do you want me to solve the business’s problems? Do you want me to sweep the parking lot? What do you need me to do?” And whatever it is, I do it and I go home, and I laugh my way to the bank.” 

Focusing on the needs of the business is so important, and that’s been my success story through the years. Once I learned that my role is to focus on the needs of the business, then I do that. I focus on the needs of the business and management appreciates that, and I do it in a kind way that helps my co-workers, too. And my co-workers appreciate that I can help solve the problems of the business.

Laurie Ruettimann:

You mentioned fishnets, and Mary Ann, I have to tell you, back in 1995, when I was an HR intern, I showed up at work in fishnets and Doc Martens, and I got sent home.

Mary Ann Horton:

Yeah. I would say, certainly back then, fishnets weren’t appropriate for the workplace. And I don’t know that that’s changed.

Laurie Ruettimann:

No.

Mary Ann Horton:

I don’t know that fishnets are appropriate for anywhere.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I thought I looked cute, and apparently that’s not proper business attire. So I learned that lesson well myself, as Laurie Ruettimann, the little punk rock HR girl, so yeah. 

Why don’t we talk a little bit about your book, because that’s what really drew me to our conversation. You’ve written this terrific book. Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit about it?

Mary Ann Horton:

Sure. I’ve done a lot of transgender 101 seminars, hourlong workshops, over the years. And a big part of that is when I take 20 minutes, and I tell my personal story. And it’s an interesting story, it’s a very nontraditional story, because I was coming out in the workplace long before I transitioned to full time. And at the ends of these stories, people told me that was the best part. They really appreciated it. It was nice to have the language explained and the pronouns explained and all that, but the best part that they appreciated was my personal story. 

So I had enough people ask for more about my personal story, that when I finally retired, I decided it was time to write it all down. It became a bucket list thing for me. So I wrote my memoir, it’s called, “Trailblazer: Lighting the Path for Transgender Equality in Corporate America,” and I’ll hold it up to the radio microphone so your viewers could hear me holding up my book.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, we do have video capability, and also we can snap a photo and certainly send it out, but we’ll include a link to your book in the show notes. But tell us a little bit about some of the main points of your story that you want people to hear.

Mary Ann Horton:

In part, it’s a coming-of-age story that tells how I learned myself to be a transgender woman very, very gradually. I was a late bloomer. Most trans people will tell you that they knew from their earliest age that they’re in the opposite gender role, but I had no clue anything was different until I was 9 years old. Then I started being interested in the clothes. And then, by the time I was 30, I started being interested in more than just the clothes, I wanted to present full time as a woman some of the time. And it wasn’t until I was 45 that I started seriously finding myself needing to transition to full time. So I was a very slow learner, and I lost two marriages because of this gradual transition from a man to a woman.

But also, coming out in the workplace gave me the opportunity to be an activist. And I spent time first working with Lucent to improve their nondiscrimination policy, and then to persuade them to include transgender health benefits in the company health plan. Because up until that time, it was routine to have an exclusion clause that said, “We do not cover anything related to a sex change,” that had become standard language in benefits policies. 

And that’s being phased out now because I was able to do some research to show — that PhD in computer science background came in handy — I was able to do a survey and do the cost analysis and figure out that the added cost per insured was about 17 cents a year, which was 0.004% of the total cost, so it’s basically round-off error. And that’s been confirmed in subsequent studies that it’s essentially a round-off error. So today, 62% of companies, 62% of Fortune 500 companies, include transgender health benefits in their EO policies. And I think the last I saw, it was 92% of the companies include trans language in their non-discrimination policies.

So I started that movement, going first with Lucent, then I started networking with other companies, convinced Apple to do it in 1998. In 2000, Lucent spun off Avaya and Agere, and they inherited the policies. And then, I started networking with IBM and Xerox and Chase and American Airlines, and they included it as well. And by 2002, it had picked up and was included in Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. And that’s a very attractive carrot for most large companies. They want that 100% score in the HRCCEI. So to get that 100% score, you need to have the trans-inclusive language in the EO policy, and you need to have the trans-inclusive benefits in the health plan. So a lot of companies are doing that, 62% of them.

It got to the point that I could stop waving the flag for that and just focus on what would the cost be to add it, so I did the research. And it got to the point where, when I moved from Ohio to San Diego in 2007 to work for San Diego Gas & Electric — which is a great company with great inclusive policies, by the way — that I found in California, all the important work has been done. Not in Ohio — like in Ohio, where there’s still a lot of work to do in Ohio, it’s becoming a red state. But in California, the important work’s been done, so I got to sit back and focus on my day job with SDG&E, keeping the hackers out of the electric grid, and enjoy living in paradise without having to do all the trans activism anymore.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, you had this amazing journey, and you have this book that’s out now. And also, do I understand that it’s been performed live?

Mary Ann Horton:

Yes. That was one of the exciting things. The International Memoir Writers Association in San Diego has an annual event they call the, “Memoir Showcase,” where you do a short piece that’s about a chapter, and they commission a professional actor to perform that live in front of an audience in La Jolla, which is a very nice part of San Diego. So I submitted the first chapter of my book, the intro chapter, which was the first day I spent as a woman. That’s quite a story because it was a very white-knuckle adventure. I was very scared.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Please tell us a little bit more about the first day you spent as a woman, because you’ve teased us out with this story. So tell us a little bit more, and get us excited about the book and the chapter and how it felt to see it performed live.

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, the story begins with me having just put my two kids to bed. My wife has gone off to study to be an EMT at her friend’s house, and I’ve put the kids to bed. I’m alone. I’ve started to accumulate a small stash of women’s clothes, so I’m trying them on in the bathroom, and her headlights come into the driveway, and I rush to do a quick change, and I can’t quite do it, and she catches me. And this leads to marital strife. It leads to me deciding to take a day that I’ve got scheduled at a conference in Phoenix, to blow off the first day of the conference to go to a mall, buy a bunch of women’s clothes and get a makeover done, and spend that entire day as a woman in order to experience it and see how it felt.

So I went through that day, and at first it was very scary. I’m going out into a mall, and there’s all these retired people walking around getting exercise at 10 o’clock in the morning, and I’m the big attraction because I’m like nothing they’ve ever seen, especially with no makeup and a Fred Flintstone beard face.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Oh my goodness.

Mary Ann Horton:

So the makeover definitely helped, and I felt a lot more relaxed. And by the end of the day, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. But I went back to my hotel and I took all the makeup off, took off all the clothes, and I checked in with myself, and I asked myself, “How was it?” And the word that came to mind was, “Boring.” It wasn’t this big exciting rush that I’d been expecting, it was just really boring. So I threw all the clothes away, and I went back to face the music at home. But what I didn’t realize is that I’d chosen the wrong word. 

A couple of years later, after I had more experience spending time fully as a woman, what I found out that was the right word would’ve been, “Relaxing.” I was much more relaxed as a woman than I ever was as a man. That was a real light bulb moment for me.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Absolutely. Well, what did it feel like to have your story told on stage?

Mary Ann Horton:

Oh, it was wonderful. They chose this amazing professional actor, a man, and he went on looking and acting like a man with a male voice telling this story of, at this particular time, I was a man. And the story of this man who’s scared, shaves off his mustache and goes out in the world and is just petrified at what’s going to happen. And he did this amazing performance in front of several hundred people in this auditorium at La Jolla. It’s been videoed, I hope to see the video sometime soon. It was a writer’s event. It wasn’t just mine. There were 10 different stories they submitted, I think, a couple of hundred short stories were submitted, and mine was one of the 10 that was chosen.

Laurie Ruettimann:

What an honor.

Mary Ann Horton:

They were all really, really excellent stories, and I highly recommend the Memoir Showcase to anyone who’s looking for a wonderful evening of entertainment, because those were some powerful stories, and I was really, really excited to have mine as one of them.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, as we start to wrap up the conversation, I think about the human resources professional in Ohio or in Indiana or even in my state, North Carolina, who is looking to move their organization forward. And I wonder what lessons you could give to them, what words of wisdom you can share having done all of this work as an activist, but also as a consultant, as a partner to human resources teams, who are really committed to being inclusive and delivering on that promise to all employees.

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, corporate America gets to decide the policies that they’re going to have within their own company. And even if there are rumbles in the legislature about maybe what’s happening in schools or what’s happening in sports teams, corporations have a lot of latitude, especially if you have your own property with your own restrooms that you can set the policy for. 

So you can set your policies, and as long as they’re in compliance with federal law, and federal law really is the big driver, state law is a factor, but federal law overrules it. So you can look to OSHA, you can look to the EEOC, you can look to best practices in your industry, in human resources, you can look to the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. There are a lot of excellent resources out there.

There is a conference called Out & Equal Workplace Advocates that meets every year and focuses on LGTBQ corporate inclusion, and they are a wonderful resource for anyone who’s looking to set their policies to network with other HR professionals, with other LGBTQ workplace employee resource groups, and to learn how to do it best. And states all around the country, I can’t speak to the foreign international community, but all around the United States, in all 50 states, there are corporations based that want to be successful at business. And they are most successful at business when they embrace diversity. Because whenever a decision is being made by a business, if the people making that decision are as diverse as possible, you’ll get better decisions made. So you want all kinds of diversity, and that includes LGBTQ.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Absolutely. Well, Dr. Horton, Mary Ann, ma’am, I’m so glad that you were able to join us for a fun conversation, an interesting conversation, and one that I think I personally enjoy, just because I love hearing about a fellow writer seeing their story on stage. What an amazing journey. Thank you for writing the book, and thank you for being a guest on Punk Rock HR.

Mary Ann Horton:

Well, thank you for having me.

Laurie Ruettimann:

If you’re interested in learning more about today’s show, you can visit punkrockhr.com. There, you’ll find show notes, links, resources and all the good stuff. Now, that’s all for today. Thanks for joining us, sharing this episode, and leaving thoughtful comments on Instagram and LinkedIn. We appreciate your support this and every week on Punk Rock HR.