There’s a word that gets weaponized in boardrooms, nonprofits, and mission statements alike: inclusion.

It shows up in strategic plans. In panel lineups carefully assembled to hit every demographic. In the one photo on a website where someone who looks like you is smiling next to people who don’t — and that photo has been cropped the same way for years.

For a lot of people, inclusion is a buzzword. Something to put in a deck. Something to signal without having to feel.

For me, it has never been a word. It has been an experience — lived in my body, shaped by every room that made me feel like a prop instead of a person, and every moment I refused to accept that.

I’ve spent most of my life knowing the difference between being included and being the token.

And I’ve been the token enough times to know exactly what it feels like when someone hands you a title instead of a seat. It took living through multiple experiences of not quite fitting the mold to understand why so many inclusion efforts struggle to move beyond symbolism and into genuine belonging or meaningful change.

It Started When I Was a Little Girl

I don’t remember the exact lesson. I remember the feeling.

Somewhere in elementary school, it landed — the unsettling realization that the world hadn’t been built equally for girls. Those were the rules I was expected to follow, the space I was expected to take up, the ambitions I was expected to have were smaller. Not because anyone said so directly. Because the evidence was everywhere once you started looking.

I started looking.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You start to understand that fairness isn’t the default.  That belonging must be fought for. That the world will give you a version of yourself it finds convenient — and your job, if you’re paying attention, is to refuse it.

I was paying attention. I just didn’t know yet how many times I’d have to refuse.

The Room Reads You Before You Read It

Early in my career in financial services, I learned fast.

Being invited to the table didn’t mean I had a seat.  Sometimes I was there to check a box. To add a face to a pitch.  To make a room look more like the world it was supposed to serve — without changing how that room worked.

I watched it happen in real time. The way certain voices carried. The way mine didn’t, unless someone needed the optics of having me speak. The way “we value diverse perspectives” gets said with a straight face in rooms that have looked the same for thirty years.

I didn’t want to be the token woman. I wanted to belong — to be in rooms where my perspective was sought, not just my presence tolerated.

So, I started paying attention to which rooms were worth staying in.  And which ones I needed to stop waiting to be invited in at all.

Coming Out Sharpened the Radar

I thought I understood exclusion. I had years of practice.

Then I came out — and realized I’d just begun.

When you’re gay in professional spaces — especially traditional ones — you develop a kind of radar you never asked for. You learn quickly whether you’re welcome as a whole person or just tolerated as a pleasant surprise. Whether your life is something people celebrate quietly or something they’d prefer you not mention. Whether the “we support everyone” language on the website means anything when you walk through the door.

I once accepted a leadership role built around the word inclusion.

I showed up ready to build. What I found instead was a title without tools — a seat at a table where the agenda had already been set, and my job was to smile, represent, and make the organization look like it was doing the work.

I didn’t stay long.

Not out of anger. Out of clarity.

Because here’s the thing: if you hand someone a leadership role in inclusion and don’t let them lead — you haven’t included them. You’ve framed them.

I wasn’t there to be a frame.  And I wasn’t willing to be the token LGBTQ+ anything — not even in a role that was supposed to be about belonging.

That experience didn’t break me.

It built me.

Then It Stopped Being About Me. And That’s When Inclusion Got Real.

I thought I knew what it meant to fight for belonging. I had been doing it my whole life.

And then I had a son on the autism spectrum — and everything I thought I understood got turned inside out.

Because when it stops being about you, the stakes change. The urgency changes. The tolerance for performative nonsense drops to zero.

That’s when inclusion got real for me. Not as a concept I believed in. Not as a hill I was willing to die on professionally.  But as something I had to live — every single day — for someone who couldn’t yet fight for himself.

Max went to specialized programs. Special needs camps. Separate classes. Eventually a charter school built specifically to teach kids with autism the behavioral and life skills the traditional system wasn’t equipped to give him.

I made those choices. I don’t regret them.

And I held them in tension every single day with the other thing I knew to be true — that my son deserved a full life. Not a parallel one. Not a smaller one carefully constructed to keep everyone comfortable. A real one, with all the mess and richness that every other kid gets to stumble through.

That tension never resolved cleanly. It still doesn’t.

Because real inclusion isn’t always the same room, same-program, same-experience version we put on posters.  Sometimes it’s fighting like hell to make sure the separate setting is serving your child — and not just warehousing him. Sometimes it’s pushing a system that would rather hand you an IEP and call it a day to actually seeing who your kid is.

Inclusion for Max wasn’t the destination I arrived at.  It was a posture I had to hold —fiercely, imperfectly, every single day.

And it taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way: inclusion isn’t a thing you do. It’s a way you are.

Here’s What I Know After Living in Multiple “Token” Categories at Once

Performative inclusion is exhausting for everyone — especially the people it claims to serve.

The organizations, firms, and communities worth building — and worth belonging to —are the ones that ask better questions.

Not “do we have one?” But “have we listened to them?”

Not “does our leadership look diverse?” But “do the people in those roles actually have power?”

Not “are we inclusive?” But “what would we have to change if the answer right now is no?”

Those questions don’t come from the framework I learned. They come from a life I’ve lived— as a girl who noticed the world wasn’t fair, as a woman who refused to shrink, as someone who is gay and learned that belonging is never guaranteed, and as a mother to a child the world too often treats as a symbol instead of a person.

Inclusion isn’t a checkbox, and it isn’t a buzzword.

It’s not a Vice Chair title. It’s not an awareness month post. It’s not a photo.

It’s an experience.

And some of us have been living it our whole lives — long before it was a line item in someone’s strategic plan.

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