Brandi Ayaan Beckett

Brandi Ayaan Beckett Speaking Topics

• Understanding Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Gender Performance!

  Consider the following, you are not looking at my gender-identity, and I am not looking at your gender-identity. No one can ever “see your gender-identity” because your identity is within you and you’re the only person who has access to it. What I am seeing when I look at y’all is your gender-expression, and what y’all are seeing when you look at me is my gender-expression. Our gender-expressions are reflections of our gender-identities, and these expressions are viewed through the lenses of our gender performances. My gender-performance, and your gender-performance, is how we interact with, not just the society we live in, but also how we interact with our own gender-identity. To simplify all that jargon, gender-identity = your inner self, gender expression = how you project that identity from inward to outward, and gender performance = how you interact with society and yourself.

  People will come away from this talk with a more clear understanding of how gender identities and gender expressions are cultural constructions that are linked to our cultural understanding of gender and not dictated by our sexual characteristics, or sexual orientations. During this talk, Brandi will challenge you to think about gender-identity, gender-expression, and gender-performance as constructs that are best described on a spectrum, and not through a rigid binary box system, and not by whether a person has, or has not, a dangly part between their legs.

  During this talk, Brandi guides us through a journey of self-exploration and self-discovery while being completely open and honest with herself. This journey took her around turns she did not anticipate, or expect, and over hills she never dreamt that she could climb. Through rigorous and earnest questioning of herself, and through the painful process of ardently and honestly answering those questions, Brandi discovered herself; and for the first time in her life, Brandi started to feel comfortable in her own skin, moreover, for the first time in her life, she started to like her self. Brandi's story will move the audience to tears with honest pathos, and bring waves of laughter throughout the crowd with her palpable charm and cutting wit. Her unique journey and timely pointed message is just what we need in today's feverish and combustible social climate.

• Transgender Rights!

  Brandi is driven and highly motivated to help educate the general public on why transgender people should have, and deserve, RIGHTS within our society that have always been inscribed within, and held firmly by, our founding and forming principles of these United States of America; rights such as, the right to exist and to participate within our society with the equality and normality that is allotted and systemically granted to other American Citizen.

  Brandi will steadfastly and earnestly fight for transgender rights until, socially and systemically, transgender people are pulled from the margins of society and openly welcomed into the folds of acceptance, equality, and normality within our society.

  People will leave this talk with a better understanding of why transgender rights are human rights and why that is vitally important to maintaining a healthy and productive society. Moreover, people will understand the importance of advocating for transgender rights and why it is crucially important for all empathetic cis people to be good transgender allies. people will take away from this talk facts about our transgender rights movements, and why are human rights movements, and all human rights movements, require allies and support systems to succeed.

Affirmation and Structured Support Systems for Transgender Children!

In today's feverish political climate surrounding transgender people, we need to focus our attention to help young transgender people find and express their identities in a safe and loving supportive environment. Transgender children are at greater risks of death by suicide than any other group of young people. At an alarming rate, transgender kids are being targeted and persecuted for expressing their gender-identity.

In 2023, there have been more than 500 bills written and targeted at transgender communities and many of these bills directly affect the livelihood and wellbeing of transgender children. Transgender children are among our most vulnerable people within our society, and we need to protect them! We need to support transgender youth with empathy and love.

People will gain insight and perspective on how and why transgender children are being targeted and their identities are being demonized in their schools and across social media outlets.

Transgender People and The Work Environment that Doesn't Accommodate them

Brandi talks about her experiences of stepping into the workforce as a transgender woman, and the shocking paradigm-shift that accrued after being established within the workforce while being read as cis-gender heterosexual white man for more than three-decades. She talks about trans discrimination within the workplace. The intersectionality of transgender expression and workplace inner-relationships and trying to maintain a sense of balance between business professional presentation and gender expression while juggling professional boundaries and personal attributes.

How does one express their transgender identity while navigating through a cutthroat business environment, and when is the right time to "come out" to your boss and co-workers? These are some of the questions that Brandi addresses within this talk. She also talks about what it is like to be fired for being transgender, and how getting fired for the first and only time in her life affected her outlook on transgender spaces within the workforce.

Transgender Identities, Expressions, and Performances Through the Lens of Anthropology

In 2018, Brandi graduated from Mount Holyoke College and became the second transgender woman to ever graduate from an Ivy-League all women's college. While at Mount Holyoke, she studied anthropology with a concentration on hominin evolution. During this talk she takes the audience on a journey of human evolution and how cultures across the globe and across temporal barriers have expressed gender identities and gender expressions flexible identity boundaries and everchanging cultural expressions.

She talks about cultures such as the Aztecs, Pueblo, and many Native American tribe cultures who had traditional gender roles that challenge, and uproot, our western-style cultural concepts of gender as a binary labeling system. She talks about human history and human evolution and how gender has been a flexible and boundless concept that gets interpreted and expressed based on that culture’s construction of gender identities and gender roles. People will take away from this talk a clearer understanding of gender identity, gender expression, and the influence cultural construction of gender concepts have on individuals within that culture.