LGBTQIA+ Mental Health | Workplace Wellness 

So, you are a manager or a leader, and you want to better support your LGBTQIA+ employees at work. Amazing! Creating a safe space for queer and trans people on your team not only supports their overall mental health and well-being. It also helps create a more inclusive, safe, and productive environment for everyone.

Professionalism should be less about uniformity and appearance, and more about how we communicate respect and integrity in our work. What this actually looks like should be a bigger discussion for our diverse and multicultural world!

Make inclusive and gender neutral language the norm

Gender is baked into our culture. If you’re part of the cis-het majority, and especially if you’re a man, it’s easy to miss how often exclusive language comes up in day-to-day interactions. Some common ways this comes up at work could be: 

• Requiring employees to address customers as ma’am or sir
• Requiring the use of titles like Mrs., Mr. or Miss
• Introductions like “ladies and gentlemen” (or even worse, talking about groups of employees as “girls”)
• Assuming an employee has a husband or wife (based on their gender)

Being deliberately inclusive can make a huge difference in communicating your workplace values as a leader. This needs to be a big-picture effort, rather than something to pull out when you know you’re talking to someone LGBTQIA+. After all, many employees aren’t out at work, or need to see safety signals first. Take some time to observe yourself and notice when you’re automatically using gendered language, and challenge yourself to come up with a gender neutral alternative. This can come up in casual conversations among team members just as much as official communications.

What about pronouns?

Pronoun usage has become a hugely politicized subject in the culture wars. However, inclusive language absolutely needs to include referring to people by the pronouns they want you to use. It’s basic respect, and there can’t be safety without that. As a leader, you set the tone and expectation for your team in this respect. Ensure you’re using correct pronouns consistently, and gently but firmly correct others as needed. If this is new for you, practice! It takes time to update your language. 

Most of the community agrees that making pronouns visible for everyone helps to normalize and create safety for trans and gender non-conforming people. Adding pronouns to nametags and email signatures can be simple ways to do that. However, I have talked to trans people—especially folks early in exploring their gender identity or transitioning—who find being asked to share their pronouns in a professional setting creates heightened anxiety. Potentially, they can feel put on the spot or pushed to out themselves. For this reason, I recommend always making this an invitation, rather than a requirement.

Have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying and harassment

One thing I’ve been hearing from clients recently is that workplace bullies have been emboldened by the current administration to operate more openly. With DEI policies being gutted, I’m hearing more stories of hostility towards women, LGBTQIA+ people, and people of color. 

Inevitably, there are some people whose personal beliefs are at odds with your desire to create an inclusive environment. That is their right. However, it’s incumbent on those of us with organizational power to make sure they can’t use those beliefs as an excuse to bully, harass, exclude, or discriminate against LGBTQIA+ team members.

If you have access to doing this, I’d recommend working with a lawyer to draft these policies (with an eye towards protecting you and your employees in a changing legal landscape). Better yet, talk to an LGBTQIA+ lawyer who can help!

Invest in your queer and trans employees

Building a truly inclusive workplace is an investment in your team. That means making sure LGBTQIA+ inclusion isn’t just a nice thought, but something that receives resources, time, and recognition. 

That might include: 

• Supporting mentorship initiatives for queer and trans employees
• Paying LGBTQIA+ consultants to help identify and solve inequities (not simply expecting your queer and trans employees to do it for free)
• Providing space, time, and a budget for an LGBTQIA+ ERG
• Offering benefits packages that include family planning, gender affirming care, and relocation assistance, mental health services
• Requiring sensitivity or diversity training for all employees, and especially leadership.

Don’t limit your efforts to Pride Month

We all know when efforts to be inclusive are genuine versus when we’re getting lip service from employers. Or worse, when companies cynically frame themselves as supporters of the queer community for appearance’s sake, while actively undermining LGBTQIA+ people and causes. There’s even a word for it—”pinkwashing”—and it’s a harmful betrayal.

Allyship is a year-round endeavor. It requires sustained work, trust-building, and community input. It also requires an intersectional lens. Let Pride be a reminder to start (or continue) the discussion, not the extent of it.

LGBTQIA+ Affirming Workplaces Matter for Mental Health

Why am I talking about this issue as a therapist? It’s because I’ve got a front-row seat to the damage that our workplaces are doing to our mental health, from stress to burnout to trauma. We spend a huge amount of our adult waking lives at our jobs. Of course, it makes sense that workplaces where we experience exclusion, harassment, or discrimination impact our mental health. 

The LGBTQIA+ community is already at a higher risk for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and trauma-related mental health issues. Elevated rates of suicidal ideation and death by suicide are common concerns, especially for trans people. The research is clear that these differences are related to minority stress, not because LGBTQIA+ identities are pathological. Having supportive communities, bodily autonomy, and legal protections are hugely protective.

Queer and trans folks also have higher rates of neurodivergence than the general population, including Autism and ADHD. The reasons for this are still being researched, but may be a combination of both nature and nurture. This is one more reason that creating inclusive workplaces needs an intersectional approach. Employees aren’t just queer or trans. They are often also women, or BIPOC/PGM, or disabled. The work of inclusion fails when it’s based in broader anti-oppression efforts and striving for accessibility. 

As a therapist, I can support my clients’ mental health as they navigate problems at work. I can help them heal trauma, or explore their identities, and make decisions about next steps. But I can’t change the bullies they run into, or the colleagues that look away, or the promotion that is missed because a manager is uncomfortable with my client’s identity. I can’t change the gaslighting or the lack of institutional support. The individual work is undoubtedly important, but bigger picture change is necessary for us to truly support LGBTQIA+ mental health.

If you read this far, I hope you took away something useful that you can bring to your team this week! This is meant to be a starting point, not a comprehensive guide, so please feel free to message me with questions, feedback, and suggestions.