Current Curiosities

[Reading] Diarios de Motocicleta: Notas de un Viaje por América Latina by Ernesto Che Guevara

[Listening] ​Someday My Prince Will Come by Miles Davis

[Watching] ​Marvel Zombies 

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Summary: North Dakota LGBTQ+ Summit Professional Development Workshop

What I've researched and written below was originally part of my workshop, Queering the Labyrinth: Navigating Human Resources​, at the North Dakota LGBTQ+ Summit, but I wound up coming down with whooping cough. In 2025. Uff da. I had great plans for individual reflections and connecting circles and collaborative problem solving. The best laid plans and all that. I do hope to facilitate a version of this workshop in the future. 

Anyway, what I've written below are some tips on how queer and trans professionals can attempt to protect themselves in increasingly hostile work environments. But protect ourselves from whom??? From the colleague casually using slurs in office conversations??? No. From the supervisor telling you to ignore harassment from your team members??? No. From the department seemingly designed to handle reports of discrimination and harassment??? Yes. LGBTQ+ professionals need to learn to protect ourselves from Human Resources.

Indeed, Human Resources was not designed to address the unique needs of queer and trans people. (HR barely addresses the needs of women — and women account for nearly half of the workforce!) HR as a system was designed by and for cisgender heterosexual (cishet) white men, which means HR's only interest is protecting capital and those (mostly white male) leaders at the top of the organizational chart. In order to protect the organization, HR professionals will side with white cishet responding parties over queer and trans (or BIPOC) reporting parties — because it's easier to terminate one LGBTQ+ person than to change the system (and workplace culture). 

In HR, individual positions function as agents of power within the system. Each agent is infinitely replaceable with each new agent maintaining the upward flow of power, all while having no power themselves — except by proximity, which is inherently corrupting. This also means that self-professed allies (ahem, cishet white women) and LGBTQ+ folks working in HR should not be trusted. Their proximity to white cishet power vis-á-vis HR policies and procedures positions them as your adversary not your ally, not your advocate as you navigate the labyrinthine reporting and investigatory process. A false sense of support and safety can emerge with alleged allies and LGBTQ+ community members in HR and can cause real harm. Always be cautious and critical of all HR professionals. 

You'll notice my tone is more adversarial than usual. As a queer professional, I've experienced harassment, discrimination, and workplace mobbing on corporate and college campuses. Believing I needed to follow the process, I nearly always reported my experiences under the false impression that reporting would help make the workplace better for me and my LGBTQ+ colleagues. Instead, I often became the proverbial squeaky wheel. For example, as I was reporting a significant breach of university policy, a campus HR leader told me there was a line of people around the block waiting to take my job, so I should reconsider my complaint. These people, man. 

​You should also note that I'm neither a lawyer nor a certified HR professional. Instead, I'm writing from my own experiences and what I learned navigating HR systems blindly and without allies or advocates. I'm writing from the vantage point of previously working in a campus Title IX office and seeing cases of clear-cut harassment and discrimination deliberately fall through the cracks in the system. I'm writing from an urge to protect fellow queer and trans professionals from the harms posed by Human Resources. 
 
A Brief Note on SHRM
SHRM, or the Society for Human Resources Management, is an international professional organization for HR professionals — the world's largest, in fact. SHRM provides training and workshops for HR managers and lobbies local, state, and federal governments on behalf of corporate leaders. SHRM and its army of credential HR professionals set the tone for what is acceptable and unacceptable in professional workplaces. The outsized power SHRM possesses should not be discounted and should be critiqued.

You'll recognize SHRM from its overplayed TV ads featuring its CEO suggesting civility is the key to productive workplaces. But what does civility mean for SHRM??? Honestly, I'm not sure. SHRM has a slippery relationship with words and definitions. But for what it's worth, conversations about civility often target marginalized people by limiting reasonable reactions or responses to workplace harassment and discrimination while tolerating anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black attitudes. Civility as an emergent HR concept works to silence underrepresented folks while emboldening bigots. While civility in the abstract is a good thing, civility as deployed by SHRM demonstrates HR's steadfast dedication to its founding roots — cishet white men. 

SHRM has a troubling record, too, when it comes to equity and inclusion. At its annual conference in September 2025, SHRM featured Robby Starbuck as a keynote speaker. Starbuck is well-known for his fight to end organizational DEI policies and practices, specifically targeting initiatives for LGBTQ+ folks and Black people. In 2021, notable anti-LGBTQ+ Fox News personality Gretchen Carlson spoke at SHRM's Inclusion Conference. And in 2019, Drew Brees, who supports and advocates for infamous anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Focus on the Family, also spoke at SHRM's Inclusion Conference. What does inclusion even mean anymore??? Moreover, SHRM removed equity from its DEI strategy in 2024, claiming the organization was rolling equity into inclusion and belonging. This move, however, ignores systemic and intersectional barriers addressed through an equity lens. 

With its global reach, SHRM is setting the standard, and by extension, the policies and procedures of many organizations. If inclusion for SHRM means featuring anti-queer and transphobic thought leaders, how can LGBTQ+ professionals trust any SHRM-certified HR professional to handle matters of discrimination and harassment objectively???

Honestly, when I see SHRM in an email signature block, I immediately become cautious and critical. And you should, too.

Challenges of Reporting Harassment + Discrimination
Making a report of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination to a supervisor or HR staff member comes with potential consequences, including but not limited to termination (in North Dakota). Below are some considerations before submitting a discrimination or harassment complaint:  
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• You may be labeled or pathologized as the problem, not a culture fit, not aligned with the culture, not a team player, unhappy, having a deficit mindset, etc.

 

• Watch out for euphemisms employed to whitewash discrimination and harassment such as divergent opinions, which is white cishet code for racist or anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry.

 

• Avoid filling out climate, culture, and exit surveys. As I mentioned above, your responses will be used against you. And no survey is completely anonymous. For example, anonymous Qualtrics surveys show surveyors location information and other data on the backend that makes it easy to identify individual respondents. Yikes.

 

• Making a complaint or filing a report of discrimination and harassment or filling out any of the aforementioned surveys can prevent you from internally transferring departments, being promoted or rehired, etc. 

State + Federal Protections

• North Dakota — no statewide protections; local governments and private employers create incomplete, often unenforceable coverage 
• Minnesota — Minnesota Human Rights Act and Take Pride Act
• Federal — Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (for now)

Documentation Strategies
The time to start documenting (as simple as daily journaling or saving all communications) is during the interview process. Continue this practice for the duration of your employment. The accretion of evidence is key to proving patterns of harassment and discrimination or a hostile work environment. 

• Detailed Journaling — Be sure to include dates, times, locations, lists of those present (potential witnesses), and description of the events. (For example, I take handwritten notes in the same notebook for every professional meeting and highlight odd comments or behaviors.) Handwritten journals are better than typed because of the analog accretion of entries, which is harder to edit/manipulate than digital documents. 

 

• Safeguarding Digital Evidence — Keep digital copies or screenshots of emails, Teams messages, or other communications. (Double-check signed contracts and nondisclosure agreements.) For example, BBCing your personal email when responding via your organizational email to harassing or discriminatory messages from colleagues or organizational leaders is one strategy.

 

• Official Records Preservation — Maintain copies of all applications and position descriptions; as well as signed contracts and other agreements, signed performance reviews, and any signed disciplinary documents. 

Single-Party Consent
Both North Dakota and Minnesota are single-party consent states. In single-party consent states, you can record conversations as long as you have consent of one party. You, you are the consenting party and do not need to disclose to the other parties present. (Again, double-check signed contracts and nondisclosure agreements.) 

• North Dakota (Century Code 12.1-15-02) — can legally record in-person or telephone conversations 
• Minnesota (Statutes 2024, Chapter 626A) — can legally record oral, wire, or electronic communications 

Your iPhone will save the date, time, and location for every recording and you can add notes.

Resources

• North Dakota — Department of Labor and Human Rights (Be cautious; ND is an anti-LGBTQ+ state)
• Minnesota — Department of Human Rights 
• Federal — Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Be cautious; remember who's currently in charge of the federal government and what their priorities are)
• Nonprofit — Lambda Legal, Transgender Law Center, ACLU, Gender Justice, among others

Final Advice
Unfortunately, my ultimate advice is if you experience anti-queer or anti-trans discrimination and harassment in the workplace, begin searching for a new job immediately. (I know it's challenging in our current Trumpy economy.) Do not report your experiences to HR. Reporting will only put a target on your back. (Again, for HR it's easier to eliminate one queer or trans employee than properly investigate hostile working conditions.) Once you've secured a new position and have submitted your notice, do not participate in exit interviews or surveys. Your responses will be held against you (if you need a reference or decide to reapply at a later date). And your responses will change nothing, will not prevent others from experiencing what you experienced in the workplace. The house always wins — and HR sets the house rules.

I hope to have a more upbeat tone in my next post on interrogating my internal cop. (LOL) Fingers crossed! 

Thank you very much for your time. If you have recommendations or curiosities, please fill out this nifty contact form.

Sending y’all supportive, well-caffeinated vibes, 

Creighton 

Today’s Pen(cil): Modern Fuel Click Pencil [Mechanical Pencil] 

This response from the campus executive council was bone-chilling and highlighted the limits of allyship. Allyship is rarely unwavering, nearly always conditional. Allies have the privilege of dropping their allyship as soon as they face any challenge, any test of their mettle.

​For me, this campus executive council listening session resurfaced a question I've returned to again and again since the 2024 Election: Are allies worth the effort when allies can and often do sell you out to protect themselves at the slightest inconvenience?

I've spent my post-academic life working toward LGBTQ+ equity, inclusion, and belonging — encouraging straight folks to become allies and advocates for queer and trans communities. Over the years, I've received threats and slurs from colleagues on college and corporate campuses. But I continued to coach one-on-one and facilitate workshops on allyship because I believed the work was important and would lead to a better, more inclusive world.

But we are experiencing the regrowth of fascism at an alarming rate through Trump's executive orders, general Republican bigotry, and the indifference of good white people — and now I'm no longer sure allyship is worth the time and energy.

So in this atmosphere of rapidly rising fascism and waining allyship, I am winding down Creighton Brown Consulting, which offered individual LGBTQ+ professional development and organizational workshops, to focus on Rough-Draft Thinking, which will explore my thoughts on queer and trans inclusion and other curiosities. The next post will be (hopefully?) lighter in tone. Though I will always be me and will to a fault speak up.

Here are a few things that have exercised my curiosity, caused me to reflect, and delighted me lately:
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• Flamer by Mike Curato
• Black Friend: Essays by Ziwe
• The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• An Update on Our Family on HBOMax
• The Daddy Diaries: The Year I Grew Up by Andy Cohen
• Bitch Sesh by Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider on Garbage World

I look forward to you joining me on this journey — and would love your recommendations!

Thank you very much for your time. If you have recommendations or curiosities, please fill out this nifty contact form.

Sending y’all supportive, well-caffeinated vibes,

Creighton

Today’s Pen(cil): Sharpie [Permanent Marker]

* The listening session was recorded and distributed via campus email.