This month is Pride Month. June is chosen due to the Stonewall Riots in the US from June 1969, and is being celebrated and recognized all around the world. This month, we have chosen to incorporate the Pride flag in our logo, in support of all those within our community who continue to be vastly under-represented in life, and to show our support for their right to individuality.

Changing a logo is all well and good, and sadly there are a number of companies who do so as it ‘looks cool’. We believe actions speak louder than words, or in this case logos, so we wanted to re-iterate how our core belief is that RaceSpot is ‘For Everyone’.

We’re not naming names, however we are proud to work with LGBTQ+ individuals from around the world. We don’t like making a massive fuss over it, as we see everyone for who they are. Individuals. We have worked with individuals who are happy to share their status freely, those who are struggling to be public with their identity, and some who don’t really know how to identify themselves. This makes no difference to how we work with individuals at RaceSpot, but we do our best to support those wishing to make decisions about their identity in public or in private. Of course, we never ‘out’ anyone, and respect everyone’s right to identify as they so choose.

We have, and will continue to call out homophobia, transphobia, and any other attack on a person’s identity, the same way we would around xenophobia, racism and any other attack on a person’s true way of life. We recognize that some within our community have reasons for disagreeing with how individuals identify themselves, and everyone has the right to have their own views, but we believe that no one should be bullied, remarked upon or made to feel unwelcome because of who they are.

We are working to make our community and our broadcasts more inclusive. We are removing gender specific phrases from our introductions and engagement points, such as removing the phrase ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, to more gender neutral phrases such as ‘Sim Racing Fans’, ‘Folks’ and so on. We are working on training our talent to use gender neutral phrases in commentary, using the phrase ‘they’ as standard, especially where we do not know pronouns by which individuals wish to be addressed by. We are also offering alternative methods of completing interviews both with voice and video, where individuals do not feel comfortable in using their natural voice / likeness on a broadcast.

Most importantly, we do not wish to prescribe a set of terms on an individual. It is very easy for us to refer to individuals in a certain way, not knowing the true identity of those whom we are commentating on. Individuals in the past have commented to us that use of gender specific pronouns makes them feel categorized and less included in our broadcasts, and we want to eliminate that as much as possible.

We know the community holds us to a high standard in everything we do. We hold ourselves to even higher standards, and little changes to the way we do things can make a massive impact on an individual’s quality of life, especially remembering the fact that for some, Sim Racing and Esports is an escape from environments where they don’t feel included. We can do our bit, and hopefully continue on our pledge to make RaceSpot inclusive for everyone.

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