Creating an Inclusive Space for LGBTQ+ People

For Pride Month, fellow private practice owner Emily Cohen, M.A., CCC-SLP invited me to write a guest blog post on creating a safe space for LGBTQ+ people for speech therapists and educators. Emily is the owner of Tandem Speech Therapy and she provides pediatric speech therapy services for kids and families in Austin, TX.

As a queer person growing up in the rural South, my life experience has included lots of hiding and constant scanning around the environment to see if I was physically and emotionally safe. I remember times when I’d listen closely to conversations to see if someone mentioned a TV show that had LGBTQ+ characters, or I’d look for physical signs of acceptance, like a rainbow flag. Most of the time the signs weren’t there and I had to do a lot of guesswork to figure out when I was safe, with whom, and in what environments.

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