~ Bobbi Pickard ~
Bobbi Pickard is a highly experienced, senior project and programme manager with an extensive track record of senior management in investment banking, trading, multimedia and eCommerce environments. She also happens to be transgender and one of the worlds leading trans role models.
Bobbi is incredibly active in the transgender awareness and education space. She is the award-winning co-founder of the multi company transgender awareness collaboration “Trans in the City” which currently has over 250 major organisations participating including the armed forces, BP, Tesco, Microsoft, Amazon and many others.
She is a Diversity Role Model and founder of Transknowledge.co.uk. She was voted #1 in the 2019 Involve/Yahoo Finance LGBT+ Future Leaders List, was listed at #14 on the 2020 Pride Power List, was awarded the Rainbow Honours 2019 Diversity Champion Award and was listed as one of PWCs Stonewall 50 inspirational Role Models. She is the 2020 Nestle British LGBT Awards winner in the Diversity Hero category.
As Co-Chair of BP Pride’s Transgender Group she has been instrumental in changing BP’s level of awareness and education around Transgender globally. She also regularly runs training and awareness sessions in schools, organisations and other companies, appears on panel events both in the UK and abroad and actively shares how to successfully introduce trans inclusivity and education within all organisations.
The approach Bobbi takes is one of complete openness and honesty in all her training, discussions, articles and videos. This is especially true about her personal story - and this has led to coverage of subjects usually avoided such as depression, the effects of social pressure on trans individuals and families and suicide.
Bobbi started transitioning at the end of 2017 and came out in the workplace a little afterwards - she identifies as transgender, her pronouns being She and Her.
Bobbi sings and is the bass guitarist in a very busy functions band. She has, and is supported by, two amazing grown up children.
On a Personal Note
One of the great things about being old, well 50 (and that seems really old to someone that was very surprised at the time that they'd lasted until they were 30), is that I've spent an inordinate amount of time reading and learning about being transgender, listening to people's views (good and bad) and understanding how it all relates to me.
I say me because I, like 5% or 0.5% or 1.6% of the population or whatever statistic you'd like to believe am transgender - I have been all my life, I was born like it as far as I'm aware and my earliest memories are sitting underneath my mum's ironing board hating the fact that I was being made to be a boy and do boys things.
This is usually the point where people expect me to go floating off into some fluffy pink cloud and describe how I wanted fairies riding unicorns to sweep down and make the world right for me or go through in intense detail every stress and strain of growing up with a mind and body that are constantly arguing with each other. I'll refrain. I've written about some of it and you can find it in the articles section but only to illustrate points that I want people to understand; I've written, or started writing at least, the whole and complete narrative of my early life but I doubt I'll ever publish it because frankly who cares about the time I felt rubbish being made to go to a football club or how I bombed out of sixth form because I was an utter mental wreck.
All you need to know is that almost 50% of transgender children attempt suicide and almost all of them have a miserable, tough and lonely time; my childhood was no different. The internet is a better place without my moaning about it. Go and read Watership Down instead, preferably in the sunshine where there are primroses.
One of the things that constantly annoys me about being transgender is that so few people truly know what it is and how it effects individuals - its this that I want to change and it's this along with wanting to stop anyone else taking the long and challenging journey I have made that drives me to do everything I do.
I take an open minded and pragmatic approach to both training and trans inclusion in the workplace - its absolutely possible to make transgender in the workplace a positive and affirming experience not just for transgender people but for everyone.
|
|
|
|
|