Redefining LGBTQ Inclusion: Celia Daniels on Truth, Faith & Allyship

Welcome back. I'm really glad you are here. I hope you have been enjoying the Friday edition of the pod Beyond the Breath. It has been really fun for me to experiment with a little different formatting and more direct topics and discussions. In a few weeks, I will be relaunching this podcast under a new name that will better encapsulate not only what we do here, but what we see as a way to approach all that is going on in the world. And I cannot wait to share this with you. Don't worry, I will make it super easy to find and to share with others. As the cruelties of Trump and his sycophants continue to play out, there is almost a sick pattern of the groups of people they are targeting: truth, accurate information, and education. Are three of the best ways to counter mis and diff— disinformation. And today's guest offers us that in spades. Ilya Daniels is an entrepreneur, motivational speaker, DEI champion, blogger, composer, musician, photographer, hiker, and filmmaker. She is an Asian Indian who identifies as gender non-binary, transfemme, and is recognized as on the top 20 LGBTQ leaders in biopharma, the top 10 LGBTQ+ voices on LinkedIn North America, and the top 100 LGBTQ+ women in DEI worldwide. Our conversation was not what I expected, but it was more than I could ever have hoped for. Without further ado, My interview with Celia Daniels. Welcome back everyone. I am so delighted to have you listen in on this amazing conversation that we've already started, and I really wish that y'all could have been here about 10 minutes ago when we started this. Um, but we'll see if Celia and I can recreate a little bit of this and have you just sit back and enjoy this most incredible human being. And their life experience. I'm just so grateful that you are here today with me and that you are willing to open your heart and share your experiences with us.

So excited to be a part of this conversation today because it's resonating so much with what's going on in the world today. And as human beings, you know, how can we create that empathy for our listeners? They, um, and that's something that I love to, and I'm so happy you are able to create that platform for people like me to come and share my story. Thank you.

Of course. Of course. It means more than I think words can really describe right now. I have a million thoughts running through my head. Um, you are so incredibly accomplished. You are an engaged advocate, and you wrap all of your unique life experience into this phrase that I had not really heard until I was reading through who you were and reading through your website and reading through your bio, and that's trans evangelism. And I was so struck by that, and I think that kind of goes to the conversation we were just having. And I'm wondering if you can share what that means and where that came from.

Absolutely. People actually think that I'm an evangelist for this. You know, it's so funny when they, when they ask me, are you an evangelist? I say, I am a, you know, it's, it's a corporate jargon actually. People talk about it in certain IT settings. They'd say, oh, we're just going to be a corporate evangelist. And I just grabbed that and kind of owned it. I wanted that to resonate with, uh, in a true meaning, I would say, because as a trans person, I'm a person of faith. Um, I've been raised as a Christian in a very more, I would say, in a conservative Anglican community that we grew up in. And, um, I have so much going on in my life and I felt like people have misconstrued the meaning of evangelism in today's concept. It's nothing but spreading the good news, right? It's evangelism is supposed to be good news. It's gospel. That's what it's called. Unfortunately, the good news has been bad news for a lot of people. And that's where I felt like I want to really refocus on something which can be a good news for people. And as a trans person, I want to be an evangelist in this space, not just as an evangelist as an And like what you see today, but an evangelist for good news for people, giving them hope, giving them confidence and helping them humanize their lives and spreading love and kindness. That's the most important thing in a world of hate. So that's what I kind of meant by a trans evangelist, I would say.

Interesting. Something that struck me a little bit ago when we were starting to talk about this is that you, you grew up in a Christian home. And, um, so all through discovering who you are in this world, right? And connecting to your authenticity, that piece stayed really solid for you. And that doesn't always happen that way. In fact, I would say, um, probably I'm sure there are statistics somewhere, but perhaps more times than not, it does not happen that way. So I would love to hear about your experience with Christianity in tandem, as well as how that helped with the pieces of the story, like mental health and your transition process and all of these pieces.

Yeah, thank you. I would love to share, Heather. One of the things that I, and please stop me because I can go on and on. I want to be cognizant of our audience and especially of our time today. One of the things that I wanted to take us back is probably in the early '70s. I grew up in India and when I was probably around 4 years old, I knew I was different. And in my own little words as a child, I could only tell my mom that, "Mom, I want to be a girl." My mom looked at the social constructs created by the colonial British government in India And she said, you're a boy, you're not a girl. But I was so insistent in what I said, and she allowed me to wear my cousin's clothes. I was wearing the clothes, running around. I was so happy, and I felt the gender was very fluid. And in fact, in India, gender was always fluid. It's a 6,000-year-old culture. Gender, non-binary, gender non-conforming was absolutely a 6,000-year-old culture in India. If you look at the history, When you look through the epics and read through the stories of the gods and goddesses, uh, in Hinduism, they were all very gentle on boundary. It's been a cultural part of India, even in the Vedas and so many places. Gender was so fluid. It was a spectrum. And to me it was so, and that's what I thought, gender's so fluid and I'm gonna be a boy and a girl, but probably, um, And when I was 7 years old, my mom told me that you're a boy and you cannot wear your cousin's clothes anymore. I felt like a part of me was taken away. Part of me was taken away, but it wasn't replaced with something. And that's the time I went through a lot of loss of my own identity. And I didn't know what was going on. And I felt like I, I want to be this girl. I love being this girl. It's so natural to me, but If you're taking that away, what do I do?

Right.

I didn't tell my mom, but I just took it to the closet. So I started doing things that I used to do. I started wearing skirts and started dancing in the house when no one was around. And I was so drawn to femininity. And I, I just celebrated femininity as a child. To me, it was so important. In a country where women are second citizens, for a boy to come out and say, I want to be a girl, is something— it's never unheard of. It's a very patriarchal community in India. So to me, that was one part of it. I have felt like there was something taken away. It led me to some traumas that I never anticipated. And, um, just want to give a trigger warning to some of our audience who are listening today. So when I was, um, in my elementary, I was abused by my uncle. And to me, that left me with scars that I didn't know what to do. I was probably in my fourth grade. I didn't have an answer to it. I didn't tell my mom. My mom never knows even till today. I mean, my mom and dad passed away, but they never knew that I went through that. I've shared it with my wife, with my brother, but that scar left me with a lot of mental health issues as a child. And here I was struggling with gender incongruence, which is you're born in one gender, but your brain is telling you you're in another gender. And to me, I didn't know, I knew all that now, but at the time it was such a shame and stigma if you're part of the LGBTQ community. If you're a boy, you need to be a macho boy. If you're a girl, you need to absolutely feminine. You wear long dresses and you wear dangling earrings and you're always making sure that you're in the back, you know, you're always attending to men. Even when I walk into some houses, the girls are allowed, they ask the girls to bring coffee for the boys. Even if I say I wanna go to the kitchen and get coffee, they'll say, no, you're a boy, you sit down. I will ask her to bring the coffee for you. That's the kind of culture I grew up in. And to me, that was part of it. But the interesting and the most, I would say, significant thing that happened in our lives was, um, my dad was a Hindu in his, um, he grew up as a Hindu, but when he was 14 years old, he felt, I mean, he lost both his parents when he was in the 6th grade and he felt sort of solace in just going and reaching out to a God who really cares. And he was drawn to the Catholic religion, both Mother Mary and Jesus. And that's how he started his life. And my mom was a Christian. And it was interesting to see how they both were trying to teach us religion.

Yeah.

They were telling us to be a part of it and I do respect other religions. It's not that I and my uncle, my dad's brothers and sisters, they all were, are still Hindus. They're not Christian. So we grew up in a community where we had to navigate as a Christian within a non-Christian environment. And Christians are only probably 6% of the population in India. They're a very minority, minor, uh, yeah, it's a minor population in India. Which also led me to think that I'm trans and I'm growing up in a Christian community. It's like oil and water. It's not gonna mix together. Mm-hmm. So I would rather think that God is gonna punish me. If God is gonna punish me and he made me this way, I would rather continue to sin. So I was like, anyway, I'm going to hell. So what? I'm gonna do what I wanna do. Right. That's the kind of rebel, rebellious, um, I would say rebellious attitude I had as a child growing up in a Christian family. I just wanna pause here because I've said, shared a lot of stuff before I jump into something, but I know.

No, I'm so glad. I'm so glad you did. Um, and it certainly, it makes so much sense. As your parents introduced you to Christianity and brought that into your home, that wasn't something that was always part of your home, correct? That was something that, or were you always, was Christianity always the religion of your home?

For my mom, it was.

For my dad, it was not. Okay. Because here's my curiosity is at what point, and this is something that I questioned just kind of with Christianity in, in a bigger sense is when do we get those messages that being gay or being trans or being gender non-conforming or being bisexual are wrong? Where does that come from? When are those messages given? Right? So obviously, I mean, we know the obvious where people have mistranslated the Bible, but where else does that come in, especially for a child? Like I, because I've gone back in my own life and I've thought, at what point did I first hear that? Like when, where did that come from first? And so I'm always kind of curious, especially in a situation like yours that is so unusual. Right.

I think for me it was, they can call it a silly childhood for me, you know, being a girl, maybe everyone are going through that. It's a phase. But when I felt that I was a Christian and being raised, going to church, going to all the meetings and also being part of a church. I felt guilty entering church because to me it felt like I'm different. Not many of them know, but I felt like I was sinner all the time, all the time. And that led me to a trauma and I felt like I started getting into self-harm. Because to me it felt like anyway, you are gonna be rejected and if people know that you are trans, They will start bullying you. If my parents start, if they know that I'm trans, they will be put to shame. It came from the society. And for me, I would say growing up in a culture which is predominantly Hindu culture, the trans community was very prominent in India. They're called the Hijras. The Hijras are transgender folks, but they have a religious connotation to it. And they grew up in a Hindu temple and a lot of the hijras were called, uh, dasis. Dasis means angelic being. So when they were revered in the temples those days, because gender was revered and people who had different gender or gender expansive were revered in India. The reason is they felt like they were not men and they were not women. They were somewhere in between. And these people are angels and that's how they looked at the trans community. I'm talking about literally 6,000 years old. And they were, they used to be in the temples and people, they would go to them and they would get blessed. And that's why the Hijra community, they come and, uh, they come and bless you, you know, and they have a child or bless a wedding. Uh, they sing songs, they dance, they are performers. But when the colonial British government came to India, what happened is that They ostracized this community and they put a label that this is wrong. And they looked at it from the eyes of a Christian perspective, brought in, bringing in judgment into those lives of people where this was part of the culture. Now that made people feel, oh my God, we didn't know this was wrong. We just thought this is okay. But they said, no, it is wrong because you can only be a man or a woman. I'm talking about like 16th century or whenever the, when the British government came to India, probably in the 18th century. I may be wrong in terms of my numbers, but they, they changed the culture in India. And that's probably the reason why even the people in the government in India, they listened to the British government because they felt like they were influencing the laws, the policies. When you go to the office, when you go to the to workplace, when you go to the hospitals, they made sure this community was ostracized and they ostracized this community. So this community didn't know what to do and they ended up as beggars, sex workers, and performers. So here I am, a child growing up in this community with Christianity, and I'm looking at the Hijra community and in my mind I'm thinking that I am you, but I don't want to be you. 'Cause you're ostracized. I wanna have family. I wanna be trans. I wanna be a girl, but I don't know how to live my life. I don't know how to go about doing that in a community that ostracizes people like me. So should I come out or should I not?

Right.

That was the biggest question that I, that I had. And yeah, to answer to your point, it was introduced by people It was not introduced by— and people who didn't belong to our country, they're the ones who introduced because they looked at it from the lens of a Western world where they even made the Indians wear pant and shirt. A lot of men were not wearing pants. A lot of women were not wearing gowns. And so they taught them to wear because they felt that's the right appropriate clothing. And it's so sad that the culture of India was completely messed up along with these issues that we are talking about. That is much deeper ingrained in the culture of the country. That religion was misinterpreted, misused, misunderstood.

Right. Well, and this goes to something that I have been thinking about, and it's not a groundbreaking thought by any means. I think many, many people who have thought about this and considered it a lot have come to this conclusion, which is this is all based on fear and control, right? And so, as you know, in this particular case, the British coming into India, control. And that's how you control a population, right? And, and when you take a step back and you look at all of the different places where Christianity moved in and, and this not to say this hasn't happened with other religions, but we're talking specifically about Christianity right now. Um, you see this replicated. Over and over again. And, and now in the time that we are in, in America, I believe it's been amplified by a lot. And so it, it always brings me great joy to hear perspectives such as yours. And I heard someone speak the other day and I thought, oh, okay.

Yay.

Like there are people out there who are Christian, that Christianity is their faith. And they have peeled away all of those man-made layers, right? All of the, um, all of the fear, all of the control, all of the, this was created by man. These were, um, you know, I always say that the Bible has been translated and retranslated and retranslated. I'm not quite sure how many times, but always by men and always for a purpose. Each time, um, something has been taken out, something else has been added in for a purpose. So I say all of that, um, just as it's fascinating to me to hear it in the way that you just shared it. So I'm curious at what point, and certainly if I ask a question that you do not want to answer, just tell me. Um, okay. No pressure. At what point did you decide to come out when you were still living in India?

There were a couple of times I would say that I, there was a breaking moment in my life, which was one of the turning points where it kind of helped me to decide what's going to happen to me. So what happened was during the 9th grade, I walked out of my home and, and, and Celia walked out in the sense I just came out of my house to walk. I think in the American context it's different, but I went outside as Celia. I wore a long dress and a pink t-shirt and a scarf around my head, and I, I couldn't take it anymore. And I felt like I wanna be Celia in the world. And that's the very first time I walked in the streets of India. I was caught by some people while I was walking through a construction site and they threatened me that they would tie me up and take me to my dad. And I was probably around 10 years old at the time, a very small child. And I was there standing in front of like, start what was as people, maybe there were like 5 of them, turned into like 10 and 15. And there were a lot of women who came and joined. They were looking at me and they were all fascinated to look at a person in an affluent community standing there in a dress. Now in India, there's a casteism and a classism. If you, we live in a good society, we lived in a very good community where it was a nuclear colony and we had lots of scientists and people who are well-educated live in that community. And they don't expect people like me to be standing there in a dress because the Hijra community are all these people who are downtrodden. They're like the homeless community, the scums of the society. And to To me, that hit really hard and I didn't know what to do. And I felt like I was standing there and they said, we're gonna take it to your dad and yelling at me. I was so scared. I was trembling. And even at that moment, I said, no matter what happens to me, I'm not gonna tell them who my dad and mom are because if something happens to me, I'm gonna go down with it rather than taking it to my parents because I don't want my parents to live in shame because of me. So that was very hard for me. And for some reason I spoke in another language in India and I ran away from that place. They chased me, but they couldn't. I had to pull my skirt and I was running so hard. I ran, came back home, but now I just want to give a trigger warning to the audience again.

Sure.

I started contemplating suicide because I felt like people don't like me. If my parents come to know, they will be insulted. They'll be ostracized from the community, from the church, because they find that the son is not just gay. They may think I'm gay because they didn't know what was going on in India with me, right? Gender identity and sexual orientation. They don't know all that. So I was so worried about it. And I was, I tried killing myself and there was a point in my life I felt, you know, my, my oxygen was leaving my lungs and I felt like I don't, I was afraid to die actually. And I said, can I just live? I wanna live. But the other part of me said, I'm afraid to die and I'm also afraid to live. I don't know what to do. It was so hard for me to accept the fact that I'm so different and why can't I just live my life like any other friends of mine and any other people in India.

Right.

And that's That put my brain into a freeze, I would say, because it was a very traumatic situation. I went through the trauma that made me feel like, um, I went into denial, a denial stage where I felt like this is not happening to me. I'm not trans. Like what we learn in certain conversion therapy, they tell you, you are not who you are because God created you differently.

Right.

I just created that my own idea that, okay, this is not happening to me. I cannot be trans. And I just went with it. I just prayed to God. I said, God, forgive me. And I'm, I didn't know what was happening. It didn't go away. It just came back. Just, just couple of months back, it just came back and I didn't know what to do. I remember the time I used to go to the beach and cry and I was really sincere. I said, God, why did you make me like this? I want to have a family. I want to marry a woman. And I was always attracted to girls. I was not attracted to men at all. That also led to a lot of confusion within my own mind that I didn't know what was happening to me because if I knew I was attracted to men, I would have known that I'm gay, but I wasn't. So in all this that was happening to me, I was confused with so many And there's no one to teach you. My mom actually knew that I was different when I was young. She used to talk about me to my, my cousin sister at the time. Uh, I think I, I heard from her recently whenever it came out to her, and she actually told me that when you were a child, you used to have a gift under the Christmas tree. And, uh, when your mom used to ask you, who is that gift for? I used to say, That gift is for Celia. So I had no idea who this Celia was, but I created an imaginary friend to whom I could share, and that person was Celia. She was a girl, and I felt comfortable talking to her. It's more like people who have DID, dissociative identity disorder, what they do is they create these alters in order for them to find their There was some solace in that. Maybe I, I didn't, I know what I was going through, but I felt like I had to speak to someone and Celia was it. And many years later, when I came out after that, I, I, I instantly picked that name and I said, Celia, my name is Celia and I will always be Celia. And Celia is not a common word in Indian dictionary, you know, but It's actually a Latin word from the word Cecilia, and Cecilia means angelic bee. And to me, I never knew why I came up with this name, but my denial was very true, and I felt like I wanted to move on in my life. I graduated, I went through, I did my master's in computer science, and I worked on the first human genome project that came to India. So this was one of those times when I worked with my professor in a research institute in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. It's one of the most reputed institutes in, in the country and also in the world. I worked in that institute and I was thinking, is there an answer to what I'm doing and why I'm different today in the DNA, in the chromosomes? And I went to the fundamental part of— is there an answer? Why am I a man wanting to be a girl? It's not fetish, but it's different. It's not like a crossdresser. Yeah, I was probably called a crossdresser. So it was not the dressing part of it, but something that drove me to identify in that gender. And I didn't know what it was. I didn't want to transition at the time. This was probably in my college days. And while I was starting to work, I would say in my mid-20s, I was going through a crisis and I wanted to have a family. And while I was going through all that, I met my wife and it was an arranged marriage. We instantly fell in love with each other. We started our life here. I was invited by Dun Bradstreet to come and work in the United States. So I came in '97 working for Danone Roche, and I was doing consulting for so many companies, and I was a successful businessman at one point, but in my personal life, I was struggling because I had a daughter at the time, and I had the life that I wanted. I wanted to be a father to my daughter, and I wanted to be a husband, and I actually did. But to me, there was something that was different. There was part of me that said that you are not yourself. And at the time I just said one thing, God, if you made me different, you have to take care of it because I don't know how to handle this. I remember in Colorado, Grand Junction, I was sitting in the national monument and I cried. And I prayed my heart out. I said, God, you have to take care of me. I don't know what I'm doing, but I know that I'm just pretending to be who I am and I'm not really who I am because I feel that deep inside there are two genders within me. Outside, I'm pretending to be someone, but deep inside I'm this girl who is so soft and feminine. And loving and caring.

Yeah.

And I wanna explore more of that. And I felt calm and peace after that. I would say there was nothing dramatic happening in the clouds, you know, it didn't part.

There was no, no lightning.

I get emotional each time I talk about it, but I felt like God was telling me that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, and I've seen you form in your mother's womb. And I created you for a reason. That was it. All I needed was, I felt the words that I read spoke to me. There were no preachers, there were no pulpit messages. I heard about it and I felt so confident and I said, okay, God, I got it. I'm gonna start doing what I'm doing. I'm gonna come out more boldly and I'm gonna do it. So to me, religion wasn't, it wasn't religion, it was a relationship.

It was faith.

It was relationship. And I felt like, why am I being misunderstood if science tells that there are people like me who are born this way? Why is there a problem? Can we change it? So I went deep into science because I'm a person of science. I work in the life sciences industry. I'm working with drugs industry, doing research in so many lasers and in the healthcare industry, I started reading and more and more I read, I felt like people are born differently. I don't deny the fact that God created man and woman. I get it. But also God created other people who are different.

Right.

And to me, that was very clear. I, I just felt that. I started reading. It's because I went back to the text. It's not because I heard some pulpit, some— I read some book, because I found that message in God's word. There's only one chapter in Bible, in Deuteronomy, I think, verse, uh, chapter 21. It says man should not wear women's clothes and woman should not wear men's clothes. People quote that and say that trans people cannot be like us, but they leave out the important thing is it was written for that context and, uh, to men and women. How do you define clothing today? You know, in those days, both of them had same kind of clothing, right? They both were wearing robes. So how does it even make sense? And, uh, there was mix of cotton and other fabric. There was so much about, uh, fields that shouldn't be, uh, mixed. And there were a lot more that was given because they didn't want the Jewish religion, the community to mix with the pagan, uh, Assyrian culture, the, the Palestinians. And there was so much going on those days. So God was giving them these instructions not to yoke with people who are unbelievers. And I get that, but that's being translated, mistranslated. Going back to your point, it hit me hard when my friends, in Indian language, you don't have a language for saying you're gay or homosexual. They used to call them perverts because the word homosexuality was completely misconstrued. You've probably seen that movie, 1946, where the first time in the Yale, they, they came up with this terminology because they knew there was nothing else available. And they were referring to a different group of Greco-Roman culture where they, the Western folks introduced it for the Eastern issues they had. It's completely messed up. Going back to the point of relationship. I think my, when I discovered, when I started reading the Bible back to back, went again and again, the question that I asked was, God, am I gonna hell because I'm trans? God, am I gonna hell because I'm gay? Oh God, am I gonna hell because I'm a bisexual? I don't think God even gives a damn about it. Like, I created you that way and I'm gonna take care of you. And I know that it may not be exactly what I had planned as a man and woman for reproduction, but I care about you that you can live and start a family and you can still be my loving child. And that message was very powerful. People quote Sodom and Gomorrah, they go all over the place in Bible, like finding verses. If you wanna find a verse in the Bible to create hate, you can find it. You will find it.

You will find it.

If you wanna create a word, wanna find for a verse in the Bible that spreads love and kindness, you have thousands and thousands of words and verses to do so. Focus your time on that. When you have doubt about a particular community, don't move towards fear and hate. When you have doubt, move towards kindness and love rather than leaning towards hate. Because it's very hard to come back to the Dao and to start loving someone when you have developed that hate in your heart. Bible doesn't teach you to hate people who are different. Bible always taught you to love people. Samaritans, they were the outcasts of those days. A lot that's got you when you really read Bible in the right context that was written for those audience. It sometimes baffles me that people have used religion to, for their own good, power, like you said.

Mm-hmm.

And also to create hate and fear. They can control and keep that fear. Right. I don't like to worship a Jesus that is Norwegian Jesus. I don't like to worship a Jesus who is blonde because I cannot relate to a blonde Jesus. And that's what we were introduced in India. Here you go. Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and there you see Jesus in blonde hair. And I'm like, I don't think that's Jesus. So interesting how the Middle Eastern religion was taken by the Westerners and now spread across to The Easterners and the Southeast Asia and a lot of Africa and so many countries, it's basically because they wanted to maintain control. Of course, there were a lot of missionaries who actually did the right thing, but predominantly they used it to use control over the religion. Right.

Yeah.

I mean, that really woke me up and I saw a documentary called White Savior. It's an, uh, Amazon Prime. An amazing story of how people from different cultures grew up and they still feel that they can be a Christian and not really sing hymns and choruses like what we hear from, you know, the Methodist Church or the Evangelical Church, but in our own language, in Indian language, we are able to worship God the way we want in our language, and God still listens to us. Because that's how heaven is gonna be, my friends. Heaven's not gonna be speaking English there. You're not gonna sing hymns and choruses and it means, you know, walking around in white robes. Yeah, it's great. I like that, but it's different. It's gonna be diverse. You can throw the DEI under the bus. I don't give a damn to it. But heaven is a place for all human beings. That is heaven.

I appreciate that visual very, very much. And I think that's a great segue into my next question. But I am curious about your work within DEI since you brought that up. That is a big piece of the work that you do. And I'm wondering how you're experiencing how that's being affected right now and what you see moving forward in the DEI space.

DEI was always in the culture. It was part of the community. It was always part of companies, but they didn't give life into it. It was just there. They— DEI wasn't given prominence because there were no policies. If a woman comes back after pregnancy and then someone has taken a job, there was no policies for a person who is black, support, and when they ask some questions, derogatory questions, there was nothing like that. And so there were policies and frameworks and training and consciousness and bias, a lot of trainings that were good for people. Sure. The problem that I saw in DEI was it became a buzzword because when I, when you look at the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities and veterans, they are part of all intersectional identities.

Right.

When you go to race, it's completely different. You know, Asian, Indian, um, there are indigenous communities. So race was also a part of it, but race took a lot more visibility and prominence that avoided a lot of white people also in the process who were allies, who were parents, who were actually coming to the office and saying that I want to be an ally to the LGBTQ community. Because my child is gay, my child is trans. Now, that created a problem because I feel that inclusion caused exclusion even within the LGBT community. The trans community has been always in the sidelines and marginalized for various reasons, right? Because it was very different. So We have so many issues that we see today, even within DEI, which have not been addressed. When I see a women's conference and they're talking about DEI, and I tell them, have you invited trans people to speak, trans women to speak? They said, no, we don't. We have not invited because, you know, I think Susan can cover that because she has a trans child. Susan can cover that, which is important, but do you know the policies that we are actually going through? Right. So I think there were a lot of, um, gaps in, in the understanding of that. Sure. It's not just about restrooms, but beyond that policies and not just about recruiting, but creating a framework within the companies, which was actually missing in so many areas. The one thing that I always tell companies is when you I want to hire a trans person and want my California license when I have an X on it. Why are you only having male and female? I'm not talking about this executive order. This was like 10 years back, right? When I came out and I started looking at companies and they said, yeah, we're still working on it, right? They will never work on it because the companies have been only led by compliance. The companies wanted to make this happen because they want to be just compliant and happy. To function as a business. They didn't want to be proactive. They didn't want to be moving the needle in terms of how they want to include people. I did see a lot of issues with that 2 years back, not just now. I changed the title, the conversation in most of my DEI conversations to humanizing workplace, not DEI. The reason I did that is because one, my friend He said, "Celia, I lost my wife. I have 2 children. And I come to the office. I don't have a place to go. My Black friends, my friends who are LGBTQ, they have a group to go to." Right. "And they can talk about it. They talk about mental health issues. They talk about trans issues. They talk about veteran issues. I don't have anything to do." Right. "And they always look at me as the white man, the white man, the cis white man." I have problems too. I'm a human too. And it hit me so hard. And I was thinking, have we got this all wrong? Because have we actually ostracized people in the inclusion while we are in this journey of inclusion? Have we excluded people who really want to be included in some aspect as an ally, as a parent, as a voice for the community, as a person who can make a change in a company, as a person who can really make a difference in the city hall meetings and as a politician. He actually ostracized a lot of people. And to me, that made a big difference. And so I rebranded my DEI to humanizing workplaces, humanizing where everybody is an ally to each other. I'm an ally to my friend who is white and cisgender. In fact, I have a lot of allies and white friends who really care about me, who really care about trans community more than my Black friends, more than my Asian friends. And like yourself, sometimes you are invisible in these conversations because you think that you're a white woman and that's all they can see. But when you really share your stories, I think we make a difference. And I see this all, you know, I'm just gonna Summarize this in one way, in one word, I would say that this is a time for allies. It's the— I'm saying this with great boldness, with compassion, with love in my heart for my allies because the trans community and the gay community have fought the battle so hard that they are hurt. They are ostracized. They've been— so they just need to say, okay, I don't know what to do. Why don't you lead the way? Why don't you do the way you do it? We need to start relying on our allies. We need to start building allyship more and more. I think the only way we can counteract all these conversations with the DEI being a nasty word is humanizing it.

Right. Absolutely.

That would change perception. More than 40% of the decision makers are white men in some of these companies. The board is a lot of, you have a lot of white men. And that's why when I felt like DEI is important, I started talking about humanizing workplaces from the bathroom to the boardroom. Yep.

I love that. I love that. Well, and I, I really appreciate The way that you've changed, just changing out DEI for humanizing makes a huge difference, right? I mean, just in my brain when you said that, I was like fireworks going off, like the possibility, because you're absolutely right that, and I think it was this, it became this sticky, like trying to include. And make places for and acknowledge pain and have a place for that and a lot of validation. And it just, not only did it get difficult, there also, you know, there were a faction of people who took advantage of that and ran with it and were like, well, that's just bad because all now these people over here, we, we don't feel included. They're not included. They're not included. They're not included. So DEI bad, right? But humanizing is something totally different. It's something I completely agree with you on that. I mean, I agree with all of these things that you're saying, but the approach is so good because that's what brings people together.

Very true. It's not that we are going to overlook the issues the marginalized communities are going through, but we have to do it in the right manner.

Right.

I think that's where we have missed out this and—

And I think too, like the call, I'm sorry, I just think what you said really quickly about allies, calling allies is super important. And I want the listener to pay attention to this. That this is the time that we, we do need to step up. All of the, you know, I want to be helpful. I want to do something. Well, it's time. Now is the time. And, um, and it's as easy as saying, what can I do? Where can I be helpful? And where am I needed? Where is my voice needed? And I've been saying this for a couple of months now. Um, it doesn't have to be difficult. It doesn't have to be You know, this multi-layered 15-page plan.

It's simple. Absolutely. And one thing that I usually say in my conversations is being trans is not my goal in life. It's who I am. I'm a parent. I'm a parent. I'm an entrepreneur. I love music. I love blogging. I'm a hiker, blogger. I have Written songs and I, I had cats in my house, like 8 cats at one point. And I'm an immigrant, I'm Asian. There's a lot going on in my life. And yes, it's so funny when they're like, Celia Strand, Celia Strand. I get it. It's like, I got other things too. I'm a parent. You do, you want to talk about, I'm a foodie, right? I love food. I love food and I love finding all these restaurants and my wife and I, we go and eat. I'm married to a beautiful cisgender woman. So I get it. I'm part of a family. I'm a Christian. So there's so many identities in my life, but we tend to gravitate towards certain identities which are actually not, doesn't completely define me.

No.

So I believe that we also need to look at our own lives in that way. Saying that, oh, I'm a CEO of a company that doesn't walk around. I can walk around every community. I'm now going to the pier. And I want to be a CEO, I'm going to put a badge saying that I'm a CEO, you know. No, it's not the place. So that's why it's important. Now you're a human being, you're outside, and you are a parent, you know, you're raising a child. So I think it's important for us to remember that we have so many intersectional identities, and I want our listener to Now, I want to leave a thought for the listener, and it's the word ALLIES, A-L-L-I-E-S. So A means acknowledge your privilege. L means listen to the community. Another L is learn to unlearn. And I is to instigate tough conversations and decisions, like what we are having. This is a tough conversation. Yeah. E means educate yourself and educate others. And S means be supportive by getting involved. So that is the one that I want to leave the audience with. E-L-L-I-E-S. That has so much of packed information because I wanna be an ally to you, to the listener who's there today. You may have gone through some of the experiences that I have gone through or may not have gone through, but I'm still willing to listen because we all have stories. We all have something interesting going on. It's called that Celia has a, It's a great story. We wanna listen to it. I wanna listen to everybody. I wanna listen to your story. I wanna listen to your interests. And to me, that's what is gonna change the world.

Yes.

When we listen to each other, we may not agree on everything. Uh, my wife and I, we disagree on a lot of things, right? But we don't hate each other. We don't disrespect, we don't devalue. We kind of hug each other and we are like, sweetheart, I don't, I don't like that part of you. She's like, okay, I get it, sweetie. I'm sorry.

We move on.

Sometimes as Christians or even as a person who is a politician or whatever, you may not agree with the trans community. You may not agree with the LGBTQ community, but don't create, don't disrespect them. Don't devalue them because they're human beings.

Right.

So you can, you're okay to disagree with and say that, oh, that's what it is. I don't agree with it, but I still don't address, I mean, I still respect you.

Right.

That's the real meaning of having a mature conversation. And that's how it used to be in our country. It did.

Right?

They were, they, when, when the debates happened, it was much more open and honest. And even when I walked into so many places, interestingly, I'm hopeful because today when I go to so many places and I work in a company, I'm working in AI, I'm consulting in AI space. I'm working in a place where everyone knows who I am and they like and love me for who I am and they respect me for who I am. Though in the back of their minds they're thinking, oh my God, I never saw a trans person. Now I'm actually working with a trans person and she's cool. Now that's what we wanna do. You know, we humanize it, right? And I'm not really politicizing or demonizing it or polarizing it. That's why I believe that Any issue, let's humanize it and listen to people, give, give grace to people.

Right.

That's what changes the work.

It is. And approaching with curiosity.

Exactly. Right.

Being, asking questions with like the intent of wanting to learn and to understand. Um, something you had said earlier and I thought, yeah, absolutely. That is the way that. We did used to talk to each other and that we would approach things with how, like, this, this person is different than I am and that's cool. And I wanna understand and I wanna talk about, you know, the way that they grew up or the way that they, where did they learn that? Or, um, how are they in the world? You know, all, whatever it happens to be, or the different things that, you know, the ways that we are different and the ways that we are alike and having these conversations. In a way that is not, it's not scary. It doesn't have to be scary. I think that these are the conversations that make that change. And I'm so, I am hopeful. I too do have hope, even though I, like you, pay attention every day to what's going on and what's being said. But I also feel very deeply that there are things that are happening and in communities and, and we are, you are out there every single day talking to people and seeing how people are reacting, right? I am doing the same. And I think, okay, this is, this is not all bad. This is forcing us in a lot of ways to have these difficult or uncomfortable conversations where we don't know the answers, or we walk in not really knowing how we want to approach it or what we want to to know, we just know that there needs to be a conversation. And so I think when we can model that and when we can encourage others to do that, it makes it far less scary.

That's beautiful.

So thank you for doing everything that you do. Oh my goodness. I am wondering what wisdom you would offer to specifically young trans people right now who might be feeling, not feeling the hope that we're feeling or are in positions where it is a little scarier? What would, do you have advice or wisdom that you could offer? Absolutely.

I think it's important for the youngsters to do what is right and in those circumstances and the places where you are. Because as much as I'm an advocate, I'm also cognizant of the situation that I am in. So as much as you want to be politically active or you want to jump around and do stuff, which is what I do, it's not for everybody. So if you— first thing is you need to take care of yourself, take care of your health and your mental health, and you need to stop thinking that the world is on your shoulder. You have your moms, you have your dads, you have your friends, you have your allies who need, who can actually carry that for you. And it's important for us to give that and say, you are not a trans person, you may not understand. Oh, I totally get it. I tell this to my wife all the time and my wife told me, you need to stop saying that because I get it. And I know what you're going through. The younger generation, I want you also to know that it's not because of Stonewall that we are visible. It's not because of all those battles that the trans community came out. We've been visible right from Stone Age to Stonewall and beyond. And that's the kind of community we come from. Always been part of community in the civilizations across the world since the dawn of humankind. We have always been there and we will always be there. So whenever you feel discouraged, reach out to elderly trans folks in the community and ask them how did they come out? How did they manage the crisis through AIDS? And talk to people. Find a Black person, a Black friend, and talk to them about how did you overcome some of the challenges in your community. Try to learn about other communities because you will get to know more about other issues too. While I am battling with the trans issues today, I'm also fighting for the immigration rights. I'm also fighting for gun violence. I'm also fighting for so many gun control, I would say. I'm also an advocate for women, women especially. So it's important not just to focus on our issue and keep the spotlight on us, but also there are times when we need to advocate for others as well. That'll help you. Lastly, to the parents and to the elder trans folks like myself. I usually say this, that I don't want to build monument for myself, but I want to create pathways for the younger generation. And so as trans folks who are probably like me, uh, I always want to encourage the younger generation to be bold, to speak up, and understand that there are a lot of people who are not educated. They're willing to listen. They will listen to you because you can educate people who are ignorant, but you cannot educate people who are arrogant. I've not seen so many arrogant people in my life. I have seen, but it's only like 5%. And trust me, I have gone through a lot in this country since '97, coming out in different places. I'm not just based in California, though I'm now, but at the time I was in different parts of the country.

Mm-hmm.

So for me, I have learned the last thing I wanna tell you is travel. Traveling is so important and travel and eat, you know, eat good food, travel, eat and learn the clothing. And that kind of enhances your mind to be much more open to different cultures. And it really opens your mind. I found that. Yeah. And I definitely encourage you to do that. So last year we went to UK. We have never been to London. We went to Oxford. I enjoyed Oxford more than London. It was interesting for me to learn, but it also gave me an idea to see the diversity in UK versus the diversity in New York.

Oh, yeah.

London, New York. So, so much of diversity. The people, it's just people. You know, if you see a white person, they are from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and race. I'm like, wow. And the Black community, Asian community, like tons and tons of people from various backgrounds. It's not like all of them are from India. They're from different parts. It's nice. So travel and always know that the older folks and your allies have got your back, but you have to move aside right now. I'm telling you honestly, move aside, step aside, and let them take the lead. Because we have done that far too long and look where it's got us. So it's important for us to have these allies and let them fight our battle. Let your parents fight your battle. Let them hear, let the country hear the voice of parents. Let the country hear the voice of friends and allies of the community. Not just our, not just us, not just our voices, but also the voices of others.

Absolutely.

That's the only way we can change the things that's going on.

Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much for being with me today, for being with all of us today and sharing of your heart and your thoughts. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Heather Hester. Appreciate it.