The Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling prohibiting workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity (Bostock v Clayton County) offers new legal protections for LGBTQ+ employees and allies and new opportunities for academic medicine to advance LGBTQ+ inclusion at their institutions. In this perspective piece, the authors examine the history of LGBTQ+ community recognition, tolerance, protections, and ongoing inclusion and the advocacy efforts led by LGBTQ+ patients, community activists, and medical colleagues. They also examine the current limitations of the court’s ruling and recommend future actions to advance workplace and health equity. While recent advancements in equality have not erased chronic barriers to inclusion and advancement, they can pave the way for leaders in research, education, and clinical care to shape national health guidelines and policies that impact the health of all Americans.

Alternative approaches within evaluation increasingly allow space for evaluators to bring themselves to their work. As queers, we are gifted‐partially as a necessity for our survival‐with deeper understandings of and navigational capacities to work within complexity. Furthermore, existing as queer empowers us to think and operate outside what is the norm, known, familiar and comfortable, and thus enables us to challenge normative systems for purposes of social change. Our chapter offers situated insight into what queer evaluation practices look like and empowers us to practice bringing ourselves into different contexts, including uncharted spaces. We illustrate principles of queer evaluation through cases of our unique identities, contexts, landscapes, and evaluation experiences, within a process that is iterative, dialogic, and relational. We argue that the exploration of ourselves is critical as evaluators and invite readers to wander alongside us while actively searching their identities. Rather than hiding these biases and perspectives, we believe in the importance of knowing oneself and our connections to the histories of those who came before, which serve as our guides. Only from this point can we begin to unravel the unknown into the known and transform the inequitable into the equitable that has yet to exist. We argue that by embracing our identities we are better able to navigate the complexities that exist in our work and deepen our understanding of the contexts around us.

In February 2019, OUTSaskatoon, a 2SLGBTQ+ resource centre in Saskatoon, SK, received 1.1 M in federal funds to support a five-year project set to intervene in the instances and societal perpetuation of gender-based violence toward the 2SLGBTQ+ community. The project involved partnerships between OUTSaskatoon and the University of Saskatchewan, including a comprehensive research and evaluation stream to accompany the delivery of front-line services and educational activities. During the project’s application to the University’s Research Ethics Board (REB), members of the ethics review committee expressed heightened levels of fear and discomfort not only with the subject-matter, but with the role (and centrality) of the community organization within the research process. The documented experience explores pressing barriers to effective and ethical community-university research partnerships. To this end, the authors explore their communications with the REB alongside the themes of “vulnerability,” “risk-aversion,” and more broadly regarding the timelines of community work versus university processes. Together these themes maintain a culture of academic exceptionalism that causes significant barriers to the development of reciprocal partnerships between community partners and universities. In this case, the outcome was hopeful, as a formal complaint to the REB received a documented apology. In documenting this specific, though not unique, experience, we aim to highlight the possibilities for leaning in and building ethical space between and through community and academic environments to foreground both needed critique and collaborative pathways forward.