Today, in an official blog post, Google continued their trend of publicly supporting LGBT pride. June is officially LGBT Pride Month, and Google obviously wanted to make a final push in support of the cause before it’s over.
And they also reminded us of the official term for a gay Googler:
We encourage people to bring their whole selves to work. And this month Googlers, Gayglers (gay Googlers), and their families and friends took this spirit to the streets in Pride parades and celebrations around the globe.
Google tells us that dozens marched as part of a Sao Paulo pride parade for the first time ever. They also got over 1,000 Gayglers and their allies to participate in a San Francisco pride celebration, while is almost twice as many as participated last year.
Google also represented in Sydney by hosting two “Queer Thinking” seminars.
They remind us that they made a big move earlier in the year by expanding their transgender benefits:
In addition to supporting the LGBT community outside of Google, we made some changes to our benefits offerings to support our Gayglers. Earlier this year, we enhanced our transgender-inclusive benefits to cover transitioning procedures and treatment in accordance with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care, which includes coverage for procedures like facial feminization for transgender women and pectoral implants for transgender men. We also increased our lifetime maximum coverage for these benefits to $75K—more than double what it had been previously.
Google has always been one of the staunchest supporters of LGBT issues, dating back to their public opposition to California’s anti-gay marriage initiative Prop 8. For a few straight years, Google has also showed their support for gay rights with colorful designs that accompanying LGBT-related search terms.
In a climate where such open support can see quite a bit of negative feedback (just ask Oreo), their continued support a testament to just how much Google cares about this issue.