Preemptive Radical Inclusion

Creating spaces where everyone feels safe, valued, and seen is a critical task in today’s world, but inclusion has become a political battleground. Policies are being written to erase identities, restrict access, and make belonging conditional. Instead of celebrating diversity, some lawmakers and leaders seem afraid of it. The very idea of making space for all people—especially LGBTQ+ individuals—has been weaponized, leaving many wondering: How do we push forward when inclusion itself is under attack? In this week’s episode of In the Den, Sara talks with special guest CB Beal of Justice and Peace Consulting about proactively creating spaces where safety and affirmation are not just reactions, but the starting point.

Special Guest: CB Beal

CB Beal, M.Div. (they/them/theirs) specializes in facilitating learning experiences that involve issues of marginalization, oppression, and privilege, helping participants hold the complexities of our lives in perspective, to co-create a safe[r] brave[r] space within which people can be challenged to learn and grow. They are a dynamic and humorous speaker and frequent presenter and consultant in congregations and schools in the northeast in Preemptive Radical Inclusion, safer communities/congregations, and supporting gender creative and transgender/non-binary children and youth in schools and youth-serving organizations. They also support organizations, groups and individuals doing change work. CB is a white, non-binary/genderqueer, queer, mostly able-bodied fat person.

Links from the Show:

• Justice and Peace Consulting: https://justiceandpeaceconsulting.com/ 
• More about CB and Preemptive Radical Inclusion: https://justiceandpeaceconsulting.com/about/ 
• Join Mama Dragons today: www.mamadragons.org 
• Mama Dragons on FB: https://www.facebook.com/mamadragons 
• Mama Dragons on IG: https://www.instagram.com/themamadragons/ 

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Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Hello Mama Dragons. Today we are talking about inclusion! Yes, we are. We’re going to say it a lot in this episode, we are talking about it loudly and proudly. Because we know how vitally important it is to us, our families and our communities! What if, instead of waiting for someone to tell us what they need to feel safe, welcomed, and valued, we proactively created spaces where belonging is the default? What if inclusion wasn’t just a reaction but an intentional practice from the start? Creating safe spaces where everyone feels safe and valued, and seen is a critical task in today’s world and it seems like a simple enough value to which we should all agree. But we’re seeing how inclusion has become a political battleground. Policies are being written to erase identities, restrict access, and make belonging conditional. Instead of celebrating diversity, some lawmakers and leaders seem afraid of it. The very idea of making space for all people, especially LGBTQ+ folks, has been weaponized, leaving many wondering how do we push forward when inclusion itself is under attack?

That’s where our guest today comes in. We’re thrilled to welcome CB Beal of Justice and Peace Consulting. CB is a nationally recognized educator and facilitator specializing in equity, consent, and belonging. CB brings us the concept of Preemptive Radical Inclusion, a way of proactively creating spaces where safety and affirmation are not just reactions, but our starting point. CB, I am so excited to have this conversation with you. Welcome to In the Den.

CB: Thank you so much, Sara. I was just so delighted when you reached out and aske me to do that. I haven’t been on the radio since the 1980’s. Well, it’s not even the radio anymore.

SARA: It’s a podcast. It’s the new radio. And it’s perfect timing for this topic for us. And little did I know when I invited you on the podcast it would be such perfect timing because we’re watching this new administration dismantle programs and public funding and policies that support inclusion in all facets of public life. And it’s really been devastating to read about and watch and talk to folks who do this work. And so I’m just going to start right in on the hard stuff. And I want to get your thoughts on the onslaught from this new administration and all that has been unfolding.

CB: Yeah. That’s kind of the deep end, isn’t it?

SARA: It is.

CB: So, I think so many things. Part of it is, it’s not even like the dismantling of inclusion. It’s the dismantling of our very existence in many ways. Like, if I wanted to have an “X” Gender marker on my passport to accurately reflect my gender, I couldn’t do that at this point. The CDC is not allowed to research health and guidance about us. It’s not simply not being included in common life, it is as if we are being erased. And I think that the onslaught really is the beginning of a Niemoller poem, like, “First they came for.” And in this particular round of authoritarianism, the first people they’re coming for are the trans people. And we’re kind of like the testing of the waters. If there’s not a big pushback to protect trans folks, then it just opens a door a little bit wider for there to be less pushback to other things. So I think it’s intentional that it began with the trans folks.

SARA: That makes a lot of sense based on what we’re watching. And it occurs to me that this weaponizing of DEI – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, I’m going to say the words because I think it’s important to say them out loud – is also kind of coming an umbrella, a kind of cover, for who it is that is being targeted. Why do you think inclusion has become such a polarizing topic? I mean, inclusion of all things, it seems like it should just be a non-brainer. Why do you think there’s so much fear around it?

CB: I think, as an origin story, there’s this myth that America is white guys who conquered the world. That’s basically it. And in many ways, that is in fact what has created the America that we have today. And the idea of DEI, the way people use it as a slur – They started using that as a slur. That was after they were using “Woke” as a slur. I remember in the 90’s when they started using “Politically Correct” as a slur – And basically there’s this history of taking any concept that we have that means the more whole we are together the better we are together, and any time we try to start conceptualizing that, it gets wrecked. Kind of like toddlers who are playing with building blocks, right? These three toddles over here are building this great thing and the other toddler comes in and is like, no you’re not. I liked it better my way. And the real world, polarization is about power. DEI in different settings gets used as – We know that the way that one president person recently has been using it, he meant black people in many settings. In other settings when he says DEI, he’s referring to women, and that includes white women who aren’t the like of white woman that he would like to see being subservient. I think it really is about power and this fear that the world some people thought existed, doesn’t. Now, it never really did. But they had a good enough life that they didn’t realize that. Right. And so they’re now starting to learn that the world is how they thought it didn’t exist, and they need somebody to blame for it that can’t be their own history and ancestors and what we created in this country.

SARA: Yeah. Wow. That’s really helpful and really clear. What are you seeing as some of the real-world consequences when inclusion is dismissed so out of hand and this erasure is starting to happen as a result, and particularly for our queer youth?

C: It’s devastating. Particularly our queer youth, I am of an age where I lived through people being closeted and knowing how to have a life closeted. We’ve been raising young people in this world where we have been surrounding them with love and joy and telling them, “Bodies are different. And people are different. And that’s awesome. Yay, us. Go Kids.” And now, all of the sudden, from the very top of our government, they’re being told that they’re wrong, that they’re bad, that they don’t count. And that is devastating on young people. We’ve been giving them good messages. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that in their daily lives like in school or after school are full of good messages, right? And it is emotionally and spiritually decimating to be getting to a place as any young person – having to have some self-esteem as a young person is a thing all by itself, okay – but as a trans young person to be getting to a place where you’re able to really start feeling like this is me and I understand who I am. And this is how I am in the world. And there are people who love me and support me. To then find out, “No, actually, I’m illegal.” And that’s kind of the message, right?

SARA: It is.

CB: They want to talk about health care and everything. But really what they message that the young people hear, I think, is, “I’m illegal. I’m broken. I’m wrong. And I don’t count.” And honest to God, I lived through that and there’s no excuse for it. We should not be putting our children through this again.

SARA: We should not. It’s devastating because it certainly appears as though those harmful messages are overwhelming the good ones. So no matter how hard our small circles and our families and our communities like Mama Dragons try, it’s so loud. Those harmful messages are so overwhelming right now, it’s just really hard to counter them. But this is your work. This is where you situate yourself in trying to counter those kinds of harmful messages. In particular, I want to unpack this idea of preemptive radial inclusion. You actual coined this particular phrase back in 2012. Tell us about this philosophy and approach and why it’s such a powerful concept in today’s climate?

CB: I think I have to start with the story of why did I put those three words together, right? They weren’t unknown words. We talked about inclusion. We talked about radical inclusion all the time. It didn’t feel like a particularly huge brainer for me, until it did. In 2011, I was in a room with ministers and social workers and service persons, all of whom provided support and services to survivors of a particular kind of violence. And while we were there in that room, one of the official speaker people stood up and she started telling us what survivors were like. And she was saying that survivors might not want what you’re offering them, and they might be grumpy or resistant. And she just went on and on describing survivors are like this and survivors are like that. And you could feel the agitation in the room. She couldn’t. But we could. And I was at the back table. And we were like, “What are we going to do?” And I finally stood up and turned around quaker style with our backs to her. And someone finally interrupted her and said, “Do you not understand that most people who go into this work are themselves survivors of this violence?” And she figured it out and then she said sorry. But the damage had been done, right? She had othered us in the process of promising us that she was going to be giving us tools for justice and liberation. She othered us right in the process of that. And I left that experience, and the words kind of came together – she would’ve talked about inclusion, and she did probably talk about inclusion and even maybe radical inclusion. But she left off the preemptive part. She should have known before she even came in that room that she was not just talking about survivors, she was speaking to survivors. And the core of preemptive radical inclusion is this philosophy that when we have any sort of responsibility in a space whether we’re given that responsibility or it’s our job or we’re just, “Excuse me. I’m taking over now because this is nonsense.” Our responsibility is to assume that everyone is already in the room and they’re always in the room. When we do that, we can prepare for what’s reasonably able to be anticipated because we’re thinking about it ahead of time. So being radically inclusive is great. It often means that someone comes up to us after an event and says, “If you do this event again, we really need to use a sound system because I couldn’t hear.” And we say, “Oh, Thanks for telling me. I’ll do that.” When we add the preemptive piece, it’s part of our normal, everyday expectations of how we are together as humans, human-ing. That we’re going to carefully think through, if everyone’s here, how are we prepared to welcome and include them so that they experience themselves as part of this experience.

 SARA: So it sounds to me like part of that is really an invitation to do some deeper work ahead of time.

CB: Yeah.

SARA: And so can you say a little bit more. You were getting there. But I’m curious if you can give a little bit more insight into how preemptive radial inclusion is different from the way most of us would typically approach inclusion?

CB: So I think preemptive radial inclusion means that we do things, we intentionally learn about communities that are not our common and most comfortable communities, right? We intentionally accept the truth of the emerging consensus from a community, particularly communities that are marginalized and oppressed. When there’s an emerging consensus that this is how they experience the world and this is what they need to have better inclusion and equity, we don’t wait until we figure it out for ourselves. But we believe them and we put in place what is necessary.

SARA: Can you give us an example?

CB: I’ll stick with the hearing because it’s concrete. An example would be, we always use the microphone. But that is not sufficient for people with many kinds of hearing loss. And so we always use the mic. We don’t say, “Does anybody need me to use the mic?” Any more than we would say, “Is anyone here trans, because if you are, we’ll add our pronouns when we do an introduction.” Instead, we always say our pronouns when we do an introduction so that people can make a decision about whether or not this feels like a safe space for them to try on a new pronoun or to share their most accurate pronoun that they might not always share. We create a space that is so broad and inclusive, people can immediately perceive, “I do belong here.”

SARA: That’s fantastic. That’s the preemptive piece in not assuming we know who is in our audience but rather presuming all types of people who need including are in our audience and how do we think about that?

CB: Yes. And we learn from those communities what we need to learn in order to be inclusive. I don’t sit around with three other white people and think to myself, “Gosh. I wonder how to be inclusions of people of color.” I learn about racism in the history of racism. I learn about all the things that I was never taught in my all white, rural school. I increase my knowledge so that I can be preferably more inclusive, but at least less harmful.

SARA: That’s fantastic. And I’m curious just because you went there, you mentioned a little bit of your rural, white upbringing. I’m curious what led you down this career path and if you’ll share a little bit more of your story with us.

CB: I spent all of my upbringing in the Northeast. I come from 400 years of puritans. I come from people with names like, “Harbottle Grimscott.” Very fancy, puritan people who didn’t have any feelings or any feeling words. I grew up with three feelings. Sad, mad, and wait, what was the other one again? Oh, yeah. Mad. And so my experience as a child was of expected compliance and resistance to that. And in many ways an inability to comply because ADHD and tell me to sit down. And I’m like, “Okay. But that was way over there. I’m over here now.” And I grew up on a farm for most of the time. I grew up on a very small, sort of self-sustenance farm where we could support ourselves. My mom had looked for years for a religious community and ended up in a Fundamentalist tradition when I was 12. And I was also very, very into that tradition. And it was really complicated for me because that particular tradition had very clear understandings of what a man was and what a woman was. I didn’t even know that there were gay people at all until I was 13 and we were driving through Dayton, Ohio at 4 in the morning and there was these two gay guys making out in the corner. And I was like, “Oh, that’s a thing? I didn’t know that was a thing?” Right. But in my rural town, it wasn’t a thing. And I was a tomboy, right. That was the only word that we had for what I was. So I’m this Christian Fundamentalist and I’m a tomboy. And where I lived, a tomboy was like a failed girl. It wasn’t a thing. This was before Title IX. Girls weren’t doing sports. Oh, they were doing sports, but they were some sort of girly old fake sports that people didn’t really pay attention to. I mean, there was sports. I didn’t mean not sports. But not like now. And so the upbringing was this really confusing combination of trying to be who my religion and my social surrounds said I was supposed to be and not in any way being that, right? Incredibly neurodivergent, incredibly not a girl, also not a boy. So that made it a little even more confusing. And it wasn’t until college when I started being able to get out of the binary, the way Christian Fundamentalism framed my perceptions. That everything had to be this or that. It was good or it was sinful. Everything had to be binary. And so there wasn’t even room in my brain for anything else. And then, when I was in college, I spent a summer as what we call a Summer Missionary in the Philippines. And I was there, with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. And we were connected with various groups on the ground. And at one point, I was being asked to preach in English to a room full of people that didn’t speak English so that we could try to save their souls. And I found that confusing. It didn’t really make sense. And these amazing kids, Asian – kids, okay, they were young adults – from the Asian Theological Seminary were asked to orient us to the culture. What they did was they spent three and a half, four days talking to us about liberation theology.

SARA: Wow.

CB: Right. Right. And so as I moved through these tasks that I was being given as the little missionary kid, young adult, teaching people how to feed their children with food that had been sent from America. I kept perceiving that what I was being asked to do was not what people needed.

SARA: Wow.

CB: That what was harming was American Imperialism. There was an entire squatters camp that I had worked in that got bull-dozed while I was still there. And it was bull-dozed because it belonged to an American company who didn’t want to do anything with it. They just didn’t want people living there.

SARA: You were experiencing this early idea of what preemptive radical inclusion might actually feel like.

CB: I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yeah. I mean, what I experienced was this conflict between what I was experience as true and what I had been always raised to believe was true.

SARA: And how insightful of you. What I’m really landing on is how insightful of you at that moment, at that young age, with all of that input that you were bringing into this space for you to start to notice. I am here to “Help Them.” – I put that in quote – give them, feed them things they don’t actually need and what they really need is over here.

CB: Right.

SARA: Wow.

CB: Right. And I credit those young men from the seminary. They did an amazing job of just saying what is true in a way that we had to heard it. It didn’t make me not think that Jesus wasn’t a really, really important figure. It made me think that we were mistaken about what Jesus wanted us to be doing to serve him.

SARA: Interesting. So you come back from the Philippines. College has exploded your brain in terms of maybe blurring the binary that you’d been raised with. When did you come out? How did that go?

CB: So we’re talking about the early 80’s for any of the listeners that are trying to figure out where to place this in history.

SARA: Okay.

CB: I came out to myself in college, pretty much my freshman year. I looked in the mirror. I did this classic looking at myself in the mirror going, “I’m a l-l-l-l-, I’m a lesbian.” Just to see what did it look like coming out of the front of my face. Did I mention it was a Christian college?

SARA: No, but that’s interesting.

CB: So it was Christian college. And over the next couple of years, I slowly came out. And then, being me, I just burst out one day and came out in the school newspaper because I was just tired of some nonsense. And I came out for the purpose of asking people to consider some theological nuance. So by this time, I was living in the space between these huge binaries and this messy nuance. So I came out there and lots of people stopped talking to me because guilt by association. And also, I was – how shall I say this – you know there’s always the person in every school that gets the award for the most emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental growth during a period of time? Yeah. That was me. Although I did share it with someone else, which I thought was nice though. So it was not uncomplicated. This neurological, now I have friends who call I’m a neurological turducken.

SARA: Turducken, that’s good.

CB: So much going on in there and we didn’t understand what was going on in there. Because, again, in this binary world, we didn’t have this understanding of people’s brains. People are different for God’s sake.

SARA: One of my guest just recently in our episode about sex education fed me this wonderful line. She said, “Nature has no edges.”

CB: Oh, I love that.

SARA: I love that too. And that really helps. So you’ve come out to yourself. You’ve blasted it out in the school newspaper. When did you tell your family?

CB: After I graduated, I told my family. I actually invited them down to where I was living at the time and I said, “I have something I want to talk to you while I was there.” And they were like, “Okay.” And I said it. My dad said, “Well, I can’t say that I’m surprised. But you’re going to have to talk to your mother because she cares about the bible and I don’t.” And he went and watched football.

SARA: Okay.

CB: It was okay. Yep. It was great. And mom really had to talk about the bible and lots of the clobber passages. But what was really interesting was she told me the story that first she thought I was going to tell her I was pregnant. And when she said that, I accidentally laughed out loud. So that was kind of too bad. And then, she said that she did her devotions, and that God had told her I was gay. And by then, I figured out to keep my face on. I was like, “Really?” Because at this point theologically, I wasn’t so much on board with the God whispering in people’s ears quite so obviously thing. But you’re my mom and you’re telling me this is your experience. Let’s go with it. And she said, “Yes.” And then she told me that she was so sure that this is what God had told her, that she went to the pastor of her church and told him. And he said, “God wouldn’t say that.” That was pretty much the end of her being a fundamentalist.

SARA: Wow.

CB: And she went back to the United Methodist Church not too long after that. And really, both of my parents have been amazing. My dad is so cisgender, heterosexual he doesn’t really understand. But he has come to a place where he doesn’t have to understand to accept. He doesn’t actually have to get my experience in order to me like, “Yep. That’s your experience. Okay. Great.” And my mom became a great ally. And did things, like she went to the district meetings when the Methodist were first – in the 80’s when the Methodists were first starting to vote on whether or not to ordain lesbians.

SARA: Alright. Mom!

CB: I know.

SARA: So you mentioned you were already on your own theological deconstruction, perhaps. Perhaps because of the whole story, where were you? Did you follow your mom to United Methodism or had you already kind of left Christianity behind?

CB: I didn’t ever leave Christianity behind so much as I kept theologically moving and looking for communities that were aware I was. I joined the Metropolitan Community Churches when I was in Philadelphia. After graduation, I did this activism thing and I joined the Metropolitan Community Churches and considered being a minister with them.

SARA: And CB, just for those in our audience who might not quite know the Metropolitan Community Church, would you say more about who they are?

CB: Sure. The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches is an evangelical denomination that is sort of centered around the lives and experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender folks. There are lots of heterosexual and cisgender people who are part of MCCs. But it provides a pretty solidly evangelical place for folks for whom an evangelical understanding of faith is really important and they’re not willing to have to choose between their sexual orientation or gender identity and their evangelical belief.

SARA: Thank you. That’s awesome.

CB: Sure. So I went to seminary in New York at Union Seminary in New York. And by the end of my first year, I figured out that I didn’t want to be part of MCC for different reasons. And I toyed for a little while with going into the United Methodist Church because the theology, it fit me very well at that time. And sort of going in and being the lesbian that came out in the school newspaper, right? I’m out, you get to ordain me. Ordain me now. But the reality was that in that early 80’s – and at this point now we’re in the late 80’s – the sliver of time at that point when lesbians were being ordained, they were usually not the kind of loud, stomping, people I was. That’s just how it was. I wasn’t that person. While I was there, I figured out that I was theologically Unitarian and Universalist. And I was like, “Oh, look at that.” They were theologies that make a lot of sense to me in which I can live out. But at the time, I wasn’t part of a community. I wasn’t part of a congregation. And I wasn’t familiar enough to consider being involved at all.

SARA: And was your own queer identity also changing at this time?

CB: So we were still in this place where gender was conceptualized pretty broadly as binary. So when I had been in Philly, my community was full of white and black, queer and gay and lesbian and trans people. The trans people were binary trans folks. And by that what I mean is, people who are assigned female at birth and understood themselves and moved through the world as men or the vice versa. There wasn’t yet a sense that we could blow up that binary too, that that binary was also imposed on us to control us. So I went through all of these trying to articulate who I was. I’m a masculine of center-ish person. I’m a butch dike. I’m a tomboy farmgirl. I went through all kinds of them just trying to find what kind of woman am I because just calling myself a woman was not doing it. And so that wasn’t until the mid-2010’s that I finally was able to get rid of that binary frame which so deeply buried and have that, “I could’ve had a V8” moment. “Oh, I’m nonbinary. Oh.”

SARA: Thank you for that because I can imagine that that reflects many people’s stories of not yet having the language or the concept because it hasn’t been part of their world or their upbringing to articulate what’s really going on inside. I hear that story a lot from a lot of guests on the podcast as they’re sharing their story. Now your story has done a beautiful job of helping us understand all of the things that occurred on your journey that unfolded to push you into this idea, this path, of inclusion, of radical inclusion, of preemptive radical inclusion. So thanks for sharing that with us. And you’ve also referenced your own ADHD and your own neurodivergence. And I know that you make a particular effort in this work to focus on neurodivergence. And I’m wondering if you can tell us about why that is an important aspect of the work and what does it look like if we’re practicing preemptive radical inclusions in thinking about neurodivergence?

CB: The more we can understand, deeply understand, how many different ways there are to have a brain. There’s different ways to have a body, right? Bodies are awesome. Everybody should get one. And there’s so many different ways to brain. And I’m of a generation – I’m technically a boar although people like to say, “No you’re not really.” Which is just think is nice of them – but I’m of a generation that you were either normal or somebody was going to put you in an institution somewhere. There wasn’t really a sense of differences in how people concept. You were either smart or not smart. You were good at one thing or not good at another thing. And I went to school at time when – and this is probably mostly true still – school was about control and compliance and getting compliance out of young people which is bad for a neurodivergent brain that really needs a body that can move in order for the brain to function properly. So, to your particular question, why it’s important for preemptive radical inclusions is the more people who believe themselves to be neurotypical can understand the wide variety of brains and how people interact, the more we’re able to be meaningfully inclusive. So if we think about a meeting or a church service or a PTA meeting, it’s long been acceptable that some people knit during those meetings, right? But somehow giving kids pipe cleaners is bad.

SARA: Oh, interesting. Yes.

CB: And the reality is the more we understand that some people listen by giving full eye contact to a person and some people, if they’re giving eye contact, they’re ears are kind of just buzzing with nonsense. And in order to hear well, they have to not look. And when we can understand that, we stop saying things to children like, “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

SARA: Wow.

CB: Some children are, in fact, trying to pay attention to us. And having been raised with this idea that you look at me with respect or to show respect, might mean that I’m not actually getting through to a child who’s so busy trying to act respectful that they’re not really able to take in what I’m saying.

SARA: That’s very helpful and we see that so often in all kinds of spaces. In schools, but even reinforced in families. I’ve heard myself say those words until I realized that my own child was, in fact, one of those who could not make eye contact and receive all that connection and words that were coming at her. Thanks. What does it look like to proactively create spaces that accommodate neurodivergent people rather than, as you said earlier, waiting for them to ask for adjustments.

CB: Part of our learning  is that we learn that we do things like, when we have a meeting we say to people, I want you to take care of your body. If you need to stand up in the back, if you need to lie down because your back hurts or you have to do yoga stretches, you can totally do that. If you need to move your body, if you need to flap or you need to tap your toes, go ahead and do that. It would be great if you didn’t maybe do your yoga stretches right in front of me because I would find that distracting. But there’s lots of space in the room. If these chairs are uncomfortable for you, let me know because we have some cushions that I can get you. And over there, on that corner, there’s a whole bunch of art supplies and anybody is welcome to use those.

SARA: CB, you’re really good at this. I’ve watched and experienced meetings you’ve facilitated or influenced that are really beginning to adopt some of these practices. Do you ever get any resistance when you invite that at the beginning?

CB: Yes.

SARA: Because I’m curious about that.

CB: So it’s interesting because it’s not as much as I used to. It used to be that somebody would say, “If somebody’s flapping, that’s going to distract me.” And I would have to say to them, “I wonder if you’re capable of moving your body in the room so that whatever is distracting you is no longer in your view.” Right. There’s less of that now and part of that is probably because most of the people I work with have been trying to practice this for a while. I think I work in my faith tradition, in my communities, I work with progressive private schools. So I’m working in settings where this is much more the norm and the Harry Chapin, “Red Flowers are Red” song is not the norm.

SARA: Do you ever imagine that we might get to a day when we’re no longer even using the language of neurotypical and neurodivergent, and that there isn’t any typical but rather this wide, wide array of brains and difference in terms of how people interact with the world, receive information, communicate?

CB: I so hope so. I think because the idea of neurotypical is a made-up idea. Somebody made a description of what is typical. And of course, when you’re growing up, do you want to be regular, or do you want to be weird? And so the description, people cram themselves into the description of what is neurotypical and maybe never notice that they’re not because the description itself is made up. And so it would be great if people could just say, “I’m autistic and I have PDA and also ADHD. So maybe don’t date me.” – Okay. Sorry that was about me – Or it would be great if people could say, “I need it to be really quiet when I’m concentrating” and somebody else could say, “I need a lot of noise around so that I can concentrate.” And people can talk about the specific needs that they have and how to get those needs met rather than having this idea of what’s normal. I grew up, if you wanted to study you were supposed to go to the library and be quiet. What a ridiculous, useless thing.

SARA: I appreciate this because I’m laughing in personal recognition as being someone in a household, someone who writes a lot for a living who needs total silence in order to allow the words and the thoughts to come together in my brain. And I have multiple family members who need the very exact opposite. But what I appreciate about what you just said is it’s also about a nonjudgmental space. One way is not better than the other way but articulating our needs. Say more about that.

CB: So I have been learning so much from some of the younger neurodivergent people. Just so much about how people can say that. So if we continue this same thing about the noise, about the sound and whether or not there’s sound, in my head, if I’m thinking, there are also four or five conversations going on and I’m noticing the birds outside the window and I’m wondering if I remembered to shut off the stove. So for me, adding noise means I don’t have those conversations, particularly if it’s a sound that I’m used to. So I will watch the same Dick Van Dyke show seven times in a row because it keeps me focused on what I’m doing. It occupies the distract-y part of my brain. What we do is explain that to each other. When we can figure out, this is why. This is what happens when I make noise happen so that I can concentrate. Then we can say to each other, “This is what I need. This is why I need it. Tell me what you need and why you need it so we can figure out what will work for both of us.”

SARA: That sounds super helpful. And I’m curious if you have some ideas or language around what that might look like in a classroom setting, for example?

CB: So the first thing that I think is that you want to have this amazing person who’s on Facebook under the moniker of NeuroWild on your podcast.

SARA: OK.

CB: That’s the first thing I think because beginning this conversation means figuring out where people’s starting points are. I have an education degree, is what I have. And what I was taught about autism is basically useless. But you know how our automatic reactions are that we automatically go to what we learned earliest? Right. We see it when we’re parenting. I’m going to parent totally different than my father. And then one day his voice roars out of the front of my head.

SARA: Yep.

CB: Right. So when we’re talking about things like teaching and supporting children, we have to basically overwhelm those old, not useful, messages to get new ones. And I think that when we can do that together with our peers and our colleagues and our family friends, that’s really useful. When we can do it by following people on social media and really thinking hard about the material that they put down, it can be really useful. And then there’s just the concrete ways of being able to change how we are with kids. And instead of just yelling at them, saying, “I see that you’re having a hard time staying in your seat. And I’m wondering if you know what’s going on?” Which is really different than, “Sit the heck back down.” It says, “I see you. I hear you. And I want to meet you where we are.” But we can’t say that until we actually acknowledge what is happening.

SARA: So I hear you saying it’s useful when we can get curious about someone’s behavior, a child or an adult’s behavior and start to ask questions leading with that curiosity rather than with our own expectation.

CB: Yes. You are so good at going to the general. I appreciate that.

SARA: That’s really helpful.

CB: Yeah. Because if we say to a kid, “I notice you haven’t started your work” That leaves open a whole range of responses from, “Yes because I have to go to the bathroom so bad” to “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear the instructions” to “The guy behind me won’t stop poking me in the head.” Because when you observe something and you’re curious, you become trustworthy and  a child is much more likely to tell you the truth or at least as much as they know – because it’s hard to know what’s going on. Sometimes we just don’t want to. But that curiosity makes us trustworthy and judgements make us not trustworthy.

SARA: I like that.

CB: But most of us were taught – well, most of us of my generation. I can’t speak for you younger folks – but we were taught that it’s all about getting compliance out of children and yelling at them when they don’t comply.

SARA: I think even in my generation, there’s that struggle that exists. So I’ll name for our audience, I’m a GenX-er. So there was that struggle that exists that there’s a better way, that progressivism and this conversation around inclusion, around neurodivergence, there’s a better way. But the culture of conformity was still so strong that it was often this push/pull kind of experience.

CB: Yes.

SARA: What do you think are some of the biggest barriers to practicing preemptive radical inclusion?

CB: Well, one is we’ve got to want to. We, as a culture, have to decide – I mean “We” as a broad American culture which is a giant paint brush, but there you go – we have to decide that we are willing to do the work of not expecting the whole world to be just like us. Because when we’re doing preemptive radical inclusion, when we’re doing it right, everything’s going to change, right? That’s what makes it radical. It’s not like we do inclusions and so, look, there are seven of us here doing this exact thing and now there are twelve of us here doing this exact thing. If we’re doing this radically, those four new people who have come to join us change what happens, and what we’re doing next isn’t what we used to do. It’s a little bit different. Maybe we’re singing different songs. I don’t know what it is. Sorry, I went to thinking about a worship service there for a minute and how becoming more inclusive can radically change what is understood to be what we expect in a worship service.

SARA: Yeah.

CB: So that’s the first one is we have to want to . . .

SARA: That’s a big one.

CB: . . . if we’re going to change in order to do it, and that is a big one. And then, if we are willing and if we want, I think the next big barrier is that it is part of how brains work that we center ourselves in the world. And it’s part of how brains work that we’re constantly assessing things for safety and danger. And that’s like old evolutionary parts of our brain. And we have to be willing to override that and say, “Well, actually, I’m going to learn about this person or this situation and figure out if there’s actually danger or if I’m just uncomfortable.”

SARA: Wow.

CB: Right? We have to be willing to recognize that the systems and structures that created oppression and divisions in the first place are often systems and structures that benefitted us in our ancestors. And we can’t duck that in order to do it, which might be part of why that man in Washington doesn’t really want us to be doing this kind of work because it means telling the truth about history and telling the truth about our lives and being vulnerable enough to say, “Wow. I’m so sorry I hurt your feelings. I said a wrong thing. And I’m going to try not to do it again.” Which can be really vulnerable for people who are really nervous about getting yelled at.

SARA: Those are great. And I noticed that you practice that in your work in many different ways. But in particular, I noticed that in your bio on your website, you make a point of naming all of your own identities. You write, CB is a white, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, queer, neurodivergent fat person. Why is that important to you to name all of those identities so clearly?

CB: Well, I left some off.

SARA: OK.

CB: But yes. It is important to me because those identities have to do with, not just my body and my personal identity, but they have to do with my social location in the world. They have to do with what people perceive when they meet me. I can’t tell you, I’m often invited to churches to preach on Sundays. And I can’t tell you, as sad as this is, how many times I’ve gone to a church with my short, fat, bearded bosomed body, and been ignored until somebody figured out I was the speaker. It is just a reality of who I am in the world and how people perceive other people based on categories. And it’s really important to me to not pretend any of that’s not true. And to join with other folks who don’t fit the mold of the arbitrary, “This is what people are supposed to look like” or “This is the kind of person that would preach here” or “This is the kind of person who would teach our kid sex-ed” or whatever.

SARA: Thanks. And I appreciate you naming all of those identities. I think it is a helpful reflection about what one tiny way it might look like to practice preemptive radical inclusion, to clarify for people, I may not be who you’re imagining when you read all of this. And, there is space in this work for all of these identities.

CB: Yes.

SARA: And more. And more that you didn’t name. But I think it opens that possibility up of helping us remember the preemptive part of imagining who’s with us. What’s something in your work that you’ve learned that has surprised you or challenged you?

CB: Today?

SARA: Well, I mean, you could go all the way back. It could be just today. But is there a story or a moment that you look back on because it really did something to you?

CB: Something that surprised me or challenged, I mean I was making a funny but it’s also true that something surprises me and challenges me every day. One of the things that surprised me is when I notice that I had a thought that I don’t believe in anymore.

SARA: Oh, like what?

CB: Often pops up as a surprise. I try to practice noticing what I think so that I can figure out if it’s true or if some nonsense person from my past taught it to me. And I am frequently surprised by how often those thoughts will pop up. And I’m like, “Oh my gosh. That’s total bologna. Where did that come from?” So that’s the me answer. I think the outside answer is that I am constantly surprised by the ways that people are able to offer one another grace, particularly when they figure out, “Oh, when I do this I’m offering grace.” When people can figure out this is not you, other person, trying to control me. This is you meeting me in the space where humans meet each other and collaborate and create something new and beautiful. And in order to do that, people give other people grace. And at the same time, they let go of somethings that were like, “It’s not going to be exactly the way I want it to be.”

SARA: That’s great. That’s really helpful. I know a lot of your work in this preemptive radical inclusion space, and in some of the other consulting work that you do, is around helping folks understand what it looks like to be a good ally and a good advocate. And so I wonder if you have a nugget of wisdom for us, for people who want to be better allies, better advocates. What’s one step we could take today?

CB: So I’m not sure when this is going to broadcast. But right now, five or six phone calls a day to the people who represent you in the federal government saying that we need to return all existing federal policies that protect transgender people from sex and disability discrimination. That’s a really concrete thing. And that’s on the political level. On the being an ally on a local level is things like showing up to the school board if we think there’s nonsense, or in case there might be nonsense. It’s reaching out to the trans youth that we know, to the parents. Your folks are parents, so in your case, it is really doubling down on how do you support each other on doing the – I don’t want to necessarily say activist-y things – but the things that are more out there than somebody might be used to. How do we support each other in doing that, right? Somebody who can make the phones calls, but now feels like the next thing is probably to go to the school board. Find three other people and you all go to the school board together. Find people with whom you can really show up. And the other thing that I would say is don’t let a single day go by that you don’t tell your kids that you love them, not one single day. And use the right name. Use everybody’s right name.

SARA: Use everybody's right name. Thank you for that. That’s simple and so big. So big.

CB: So big.

SARA: Thank you. Gosh. This has been an extraordinary conversation. I could just keep going – I know you could too – for hours and hours and hours. I feel like we only scratched the surface. But we’re wrapping it up and so there are two questions that I like to ask all of my guests at the end of every episode. And the first one has to do with the name Mama Dragons, which was born out of this idea of fierceness, the fierceness of a dragon and the fierce protection for our queer kids. So I like to ask my guests, what are you fierce about?

CB: I am fierce about bodily autonomy. Bodies are awesome. They’re sites of pain but also pleasure. Everybody has a body. Every single human has a body. And I’m fierce about the idea that we need to be educated about our bodies. We need to have autonomy and choices about how to take care of our bodies. We need to have really serious and meaningful consent whenever other people are interacting with our bodies. I will go to the mat over that. And that’s everybody. Every single body needs that kind of fierceness to be able to have their bodily autonomy.

SARA: Indeed. Because it isn’t autonomy if I have it and someone else doesn’t.

CB: Right.

SARA: Thank you for that fierceness. I know that about you and I love it so much. And my last question is what is bringing you joy right now, especially in these times when we really need to be finding, accessing that joy? What’s joyful in your world?

CB: It changes pretty regularly, particularly in times like this when we’re under incredible pressure and distress. This last week, what has brought me joy was rewatching the television show Firefly, which your listeners may or may not know is basically cowboys in space, good guys against bad guys. The good guys win. Which I like that. It’s a good story. I  like it. I know how it goes and it’s funny as all get out. But also, there’s this little joys in tending my plants, or walking out on the other side of my building. There’s a deck that faces a mountain and going out there and looking at the brand new snow in the blazing sun this morning reminded me that everything is not suffering, or suffering is not everything, right? There is always more. And there is always light. And there’s always possibility.

SARA: Yes.

CB: Yesterday we had a snow storm. Today we had possibility. And that gives me joy.

SARA: That was so beautiful, really spoke to my heart. Thank you for this amazing conversation CB. Thank you for the work that you do in the world. I know you know this, but I know you don’t always get to see it. You have transformed lives. And I hope in the folks who have listened to this conversation today will take some of that wisdom and take it out into their circle and those ripples will keep expanding and expanding. Thank you so very much.

CB: Thank you so much. I feel awkwardly grateful. Thank you.

SARA: Thanks so much for joining us here In the Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at Mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

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