About Dr. Leo Taylor
Overview
Dr. Leo Taylor, formerly of Ohio State University’s CFAES office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (closed 2025), is an independent DEI educator, workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, consultant, life coach, antiracist, and founder of Imagine DEI LLC. He brings more than two decades of experience teaching about LGBTQ+ identities, transgender and nonbinary inclusion, implicit bias, privilege, neurodiversity, disability accessibility, allyship, bystander intervention, difficult conversations, and the ways socialization shapes how people understand themselves and others. He currently resides in Central Ohio offering live in-person and virtual workshops nationally and internationally.
Although Imagine DEI became a formal business entity in 2024, Dr. Leo’s work in education, advocacy, and identity-based inclusion began in the mid-1990s. As an undergraduate student at Ball State University in small-town Indiana, he began speaking publicly on LGBTQ+ panels at a time when being openly queer carried significant personal risk. Since then, his work has included founding several transgender support groups, offering guest lectures on transgender and queer identities, developing and teaching college courses, leading hundreds of workshops and webinars, and supporting organizations across the U.S. and Canada.
Background and Education
Dr. Leo’s approach is shaped by a rare combination of lived experience, scientific training, and extensive educational practice. He holds a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University, an M.S. in biology from Ball State University, and a B.S. in psychology with minors in women’s and gender studies and interpersonal relationships. While his doctoral degree is in entomology, his research interests have long centered on questions about behavioral ecology, evolutionary ecology, conservation biology, mating systems, communication, and the ways sex and gender are interpreted in both human and nonhuman systems. This scientific background helps set his work apart: he approaches DEI education with the recognition that nothing about human behavior makes sense outside of our evolutionary history.
Professional Path
Professionally, Dr. Leo has held roles in higher education that bridged science, teaching, and social justice work. While at Cornell University, he founded a transgender support group in 2010 that served students and community members and received support from Planned Parenthood’s Out for Health program in Ithaca, New York. After completing his Ph.D. in 2015, he served as Program Coordinator in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. From 2012-2016 he served as adjunct professor at Ithaca College where he taught his original course, Biology of Sex.
In 2018, Dr. Leo relocated to Columbus, Ohio, to join The Ohio State University in a joint role as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Entomology working in Dr. Mary Gardiner’s Urban Ecology lab and as Program Director in the Office of Equity and Inclusion in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES). In 2019, he pivoted fully into diversity, equity, and inclusion work in CFAES. He remained at Ohio State until October 1, 2025, when he left to pursue his independent business full-time. His decision to leave was independent of state legislation affecting DEI in higher education; however, that legislation did eliminate DEI offices and programming in Ohio higher education, including the office where he had worked. Today, Dr. Leo is no longer affiliated with Ohio State and offers his workshops, trainings, keynotes, and consulting independently through his business.
Personal Journey and Lived Experience
Dr. Leo has lived through multiple social realities based on how others perceived his gender and sexuality. Because he was assigned female at birth (AFAB), before beginning his gender transition, he was perceived as a girl or woman who had a boyfriend. He later lived as a gender-nonconforming lesbian and experienced the discrimination that comes with visibly breaking gender and sexuality norms. After beginning his transition, he married a woman and was perceived as a straight man. That moment in his life was profound and confirmed something he’d already come to understand from his own experiences in the margins—men, especially white men presumed to be straight, are often* granted privileges others are denied. He especially noticed how quickly his credibility changed, particularly with men who had only ever interrupted, dismissed, or challenged him until they started to view him as an equal. Later, as someone perceived as a gay man, he experienced another distinct form of bias. These shifts gave him a powerful, firsthand understanding of how privilege and prejudice are not based simply on who a person is, but on how others perceive them and what beliefs they attach to those perceptions.
That perspective is central to his teaching. Dr. Leo helps audiences see that bias is not abstract. It shows up in everyday interactions, institutional practices, assumptions about credibility, gendered expectations, and the subtle ways people are granted or denied equity. His personal story offers compelling evidence of how socially constructed systems of gender, sexuality, and power shape people’s daily lives.
Dr. Leo’s commitment to this work is also rooted in survival. He was raised in the Apostolic Pentecostal church, a tradition with strict gender rules and severe condemnation of homosexuality. At age 16, church members laid hands on him to “rebuke the demon of homosexuality,” the Pentecostal version of an exorcism. Not long afterward, he attempted suicide, becoming part of the sobering reality that more than 40% of transgender people in the U.S. have attempted suicide at some point in their lives. At 17, he experienced a summer of homelessness after being kicked out of his childhood home because of his sexuality.
Despite these barriers, Dr. Leo worked his way through college and graduate school without family financial support. His life and work are grounded in the belief that people can survive harmful systems, unlearn what they were taught and learn to love themselves, and build more authentic and compassionate ways of living, working, and relating.
Neurodivergence and Advocacy
Dr. Leo is also openly neurodivergent. After years of being misdiagnosed, he was properly diagnosed with ADHD in 2022, CPTSD in 2024, and autism in 2026. Understanding himself as AuDHD and living with complex trauma has profoundly shaped his approach to facilitation and empowered him to advocate for other late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults. He is especially committed to creating environments that are compassionate, accessible, and grounded in psychological safety.
In 2026, he founded a support group for neurodivergent adults in Clintonville, hosted at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus. The group meets on the first and third Thursday of each month and is open to anyone, not only church members. People interested in learning more may reach out through the contact form on this website.
Decolonizing the Mind: A Process of Learning and Unlearning
At the heart of Dr. Leo’s DEI work is the practice of decolonizing the mind**: questioning the status quo by examining the learned biases, inherited assumptions, cultural scripts, and beliefs that shape how people understand identity, difference, and worth. This process asks a critical question about all beliefs — “Who decided, and why?” — and moves toward antiracist action that dismantles systems of oppression and confronts bias in everyday life. Whether he is facilitating a workshop on transgender inclusion, implicit bias, microaggressions, neurodiversity, disability inclusion, allyship, or difficult conversations, his goal is to help people move beyond political correctness and into deeper self-awareness, accountability, and authentic human connection grounded in empathy.
Personal Life
Originally from Muncie, Indiana, Dr. Leo now lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his dog, Roxy, and cat, Friend. In November 2025, he proudly celebrated his 26th tranniversary: the anniversary of beginning his gender transition.
*This qualifier accounts for intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 essay "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," which examined how Black women's experiences of discrimination could not be understood through race or gender analysis alone. Privilege is never experienced uniformly within a shared identity group, so a universal statement about all men cannot be made. The privilege any individual man experiences is also shaped by intersecting identities such as socioeconomic status, disability, citizenship, language, neurotype, race, etc.
**The phrase “decolonizing the mind” is used here in conversation with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature(1986), which examines how colonial languages shape consciousness, culture, identity, and power. Dr. Leo extends this framing beyond language to include the broader socialization through which people inherit beliefs about identity, difference, worth, normalcy, and power. In this context, decolonizing the mind means asking of any belief, assumption, or cultural script: “Who decided, and why?” This simple question opens deeper inquiry about history, power, privilege, and whose interests are served when one way of thinking becomes the cultural norm against which all others are measured. The practice then continues through action that confronts bias, resists oppression, and reclaims more liberated ways of thinking, relating, and living.