If you could choose to live without a physical body, would you?

When I ask people this question, whether my clients or my friends, the answer is nearly always yes.

To clarify, this post is not specifically about:

  • Spirituality, the spirit or the soul (although it could be, depending on your beliefs); 
  • Cryonics, or the fantasy of having your brain frozen and stored until technology has developed to the point where you can be reanimated (although it could be, depending on your beliefs); 
  • Physical disability (although it could be, depending on your situation and experience).

I am speaking about the sense of freedom you could have if your physical body wasn’t confining you emotionally, mentally, relationally, spiritually and politically.

Anyone may feel this – no matter how outwardly successful they may be, or how comfortably and conventionally their body functions.

If you are, for example, read as a woman or femme or female or feminine, (no matter what gender you were assigned at birth), you will know that you cannot move through the world without your physical body being scrutinised.

You will be informed constantly that your body (and therefore you) is either too much or not enough, sometimes simultaneously, and the goalposts move faster than you can adapt to their constant repositioning. You are relentlessly beholden to the opinions and assumptions of others. (Or perhaps you are read as not feminine enough. )

You are constantly aware of being on show, and of the consequent risk of mockery or violence, so your energy is drained and your nervous system taxed by being on constant alert.

It’s hard to challenge patriarchy (or any other embedded societal structure) when it has your face gripped in its hands and is unblinkingly staring you out.

Imagine this not happening to you.

Imagine no more comments about your weight or your face or your presumed sexual capacity. Imagine that you could go where you wanted without fear.

Actually, people of all genders have replied to this question with a yes.

And this is not just about gender. Much of society believes that others owe them their bodies – whether in terms of race, class, or disability. What if we, as individuals, could choose not to have these bodies? We could be free of so many demands. 

What if we could exist without a body, and in our chosen invisible shapes and dimensions?

What if you could shapeshift your bodyless self, and be infinitesimally small in one moment, all-encompassingly huge in another.

And what if it was up to you whether you experience sensation at all? If you struggle with the demands of sensory processing, what would it be like to be able to choose what, and how much, you experienced? What if we could choose where our imagined external boundary is – if we even wished for one at all?

As a late diagnosed neurodivergent person, I now have greater understanding of my own relationship with touch and movement, and why it was never as straightforward as it seemed to be for others. Interoception and proprioception are hard work at times – what if we didn’t have to navigate them?

In contrast to much social media output, to feel less can be a luxury.

Imagine you could feel just enough to get by and more easily navigate a world that constantly threatens to engulf us with its own needs and desires?

I spent a number of years in somatic and sexual experiential spaces where (consensual) touch was central, and participants were encouraged to be fully present. When we experimented with up-regulating and down-regulating breaths, it occurred to me that some people are already feeling more than is comfortable for them, and not all of the processes we entered into were helpful. Some of us, because of our previous experiences or simply because of who we are, already feel too present. The only way to tolerate this is through self-removal, or dissociation.

Remove the physical body and there could be so much more, so much more to do and be. And what could sex be?

I’m aware of the multitude of beliefs and philosophies that hang off this thought experiment, and how we could go down any number of roads when talking about it. (And I’m aware that my utopia becomes a little fuzzy, because who would choose to lose their corporeality and who would keep it? And what power structures might ensue?)

I’m aware that technology can partially take us there. As can meditation. As can drugs. Partially.

So let’s come back to the beginning. If you could live without a physical body, would you?

Looking back on 10 years as a GSRD therapist

Today is the 10th anniversary of my first private practice client coming through my door. I’m going to mark the day here.

Becoming a therapist was a fiery process for me. Some challenging things happened during my core training that impacted me a lot as I moved into life as a therapist. Like many traumatic experiences, while I wish these things had not happened, they gave me greater understanding of the system therapists operate in. This politicisation was very useful to me as I developed as a practitioner. Throughout that period I was experiencing similarly intense shifts elsewhere in my life.

A lot has happened in 10 years, to me and to the industry, and in the lives of my clients and colleagues. This is a blog so I’ll keep it concise! I cannot cover everything here. You can assume I could write a whole standalone piece on everything I mention below.

THE GOOD

Retraining as a therapist in midlife

If this is you, your energy levels and capacities are changing and your life choices are shifting. (See also, of course, menopause.) Your experience when training, and coming into the work, will depend on your existing life experience and resources. At midlife you have been around the block, and while your life experiences will not automatically make you a good therapist, they will be useful. 

If you are already well-resourced financially your training experience will be very different to those who aren’t. I don’t recommend juggling the final years of your training on an unpredictable self-employed income with no savings and no credit! But I did it and I’m grateful to past me for hanging in there. 

The evolution of Gender, Sex and Relationship Diversity (GSRD) therapy

I was extremely lucky, in 2013, to find the Pink Therapy community (practitioner directory here). I cannot overstate the importance of this to me as a therapist. 

Bringing LGBTQIA+ people together with people who are consensually non-monogamous and/or kinky, and/or who do sex work, makes for a larger, louder group and a wider range of experience. Particularly as many of those identities and lifestyles cross over.

When I started, GSRD was GSD (without the R), and then someone suggested that relationship diversity ought to come in, to reflect all forms of CNM (Consensual Non-Monogamy). ‘Sexual’ later became ‘Sex’, to include the experience of Intersex people. It’s been amazing to see more and younger therapists come in, and to see more and more GSRD trainings being offered. 

In terms of sex and gender specifically it’s been good to see a greater understanding and acceptance of fluidity (as opposed to essentialism or ‘born this way’) as time has passed, and an expansion of the idea of ‘queer’. 

Sexology

In parallel with GSRD, sexology as a discipline has grown in stature and become normalised. The UK has the Contemporary Institute of Clinical Sexology. There has been an explosion of sex educators on social media. When I was doing sex media in the 2000s there were sniggers – ‘LOL what do you really want to be doing?’ – as if no one could ever take sex seriously as a topic, despite its universality. I am very happy to see that attitudes have shifted a lot. People are doing research around porn, and sharing information (eg Facts of Porn), and favouring ideas of compulsive sexual behaviour over outdated concepts of sex addiction. 

Sex work

Sex work is being discussed increasingly as an issue of labour rights and of decriminalisation rather than something that brings the world in general (and the therapy industry in particular) into ‘disrepute’.

Consent

Consent has been talked about more and more and I am grateful to those at the forefront of this. I have been on a huge journey around consent, in both my personal and working lives. Many people now offer training and information around what consent can look like, and what to avoid (eg The Art of Consent‘s downloadable guides; the Consent Collective; and the Wheel of Consent).

It takes a while to absorb the fact that just because you want something doesn’t mean the other person wants it too. We do well to ask ourselves ‘Who is this for?’ before any interaction, whether instigated by you or the other person. My greater understanding has come out of my time in kink and somatic sexology. But my heart breaks for much younger me – and thousands, millions, of others.

When touch is involved, consent is essential. But consent is essential whether touch is involved or not. It’s caused me to think more and more about what consent means in the therapy room.

Trauma

Our understanding has increased and this is important. It is about the individual as much as about what happened to them. Over the years I have expanded my understanding of trauma and CPTSD – I did not realise for a long time that I was experiencing it from a young age. For sure, I knew enough about it and that others experienced it. But me? No, surely not. Many people experience chronic relational trauma from childhood and its impact is incalculable.

The rise of Counsellor Power

Counsellors have been talking back to the industry for a while now, and this movement has grown and grown. (See Counsellors Together UK) There has been increasing fightback around exploitation and being expected to work for free, and against recent changes to the industry that resemble Brexit both in their unfitness for purpose, poor evidence base, and the non-consensual way they are being implemented (see below).

Thankfully therapists nowadays have a union, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union (PCU), which also supports trainees. Founded in 2016, the PCU did not exist when I really needed them. I wonder how different my experience would have been if I had had them by my side.

THE BAD

OK, so there are a few qualifiers to what I’ve said above.

Despite GSRD now being officially a therapeutic modality, GSRD therapists are still a relatively small community. Overall, the therapy industry as a whole remains highly conservative. Also very white and middle class. I get a strong sense of a group of people holding on very tightly to something and refusing to let go.

In the case of sexology we are still not talking deeply enough about what sex means and who gets to say what it is and who has the power to create this narrative.

Also, there are still therapists who want their sex worker clients to stop doing sex work before the therapy can start. Sex workers still have to think very hard before disclosing to their therapists.

The trauma therapy industry has proliferated and trauma therapists who don’t understand trauma has become a disturbing theme. There are still, apparently, therapists who tell clients that the work cannot start until the client stops dissociating. One high profile trauma training site used to put the names of people who had purchased their products along with their home cities literally on the front of their website. A while back I pulled out of a trauma training just before it started because one of the admins (a therapist) shared all the participants’ home addresses and phone numbers with each other, without warning or obtaining consent. 

And people are still being labelled ‘borderline’ when they are actually traumatised or neurodivergent, and this label is still being dumped onto young women, queer and trans people, causing further stigma. I’ve actually seen high profile therapists on Twitter use ‘borderline’ as a way to put someone down during an argument. (Therapists on the internet is a rich and concerning topic which I will spare you today.)

The attack on Trans rights

Trans rights have been increasingly under attack across the UK over the last 10 years and more. This ongoing attack has found its way into the therapy industry, partly in the form of conversion therapy. The fact that this is happening represents a failure of human rights awareness and of feminism, a lack of understanding of patriarchy, and a lack of respect for humanity. To see this manifesting among therapists is disturbing and highly distressing.

Therapeutic harms

Harm in therapy is being discussed more and more (and I myself have absolutely been harmed in therapy) as well as harm in training (ditto). It’s important to remember that one mirrors the other. I have heard terrible stories of trans trainees being bullied, debated with by facilitators, and expected to educate other students; endless racism and classism; lack of regard for, and understanding of, systemic and intersectional issues; and breaches of confidentiality.

If it’s happening in training it’s happening in the therapy room.

Racism and white supremacy

Where racism and white supremacy are concerned, not enough change is happening. I don’t see enough will to make this profession accessible to those who are minority or global majority identified. There are a number of practitioners offering books and courses that provide opportunities for self (and organisational) reflection. For example: Race Reflections (Guilaine Kinouani); Me & White Supremacy (Layla F Saad); Working Within Diversity (Myira Khan); Dwight Turner (Training and books); Somatic Abolitionism (Resmaa Menakem). There are many others paving the way for improved education – their work needs to be built into counselling from the start.

Large scale shifts in the industry, in the form of the SCopEd project, do not seem to be addressing any of this at all (basic outline here ; many critiques here) and in fact seem to have the intent of entrenching old ideas further. Any idea that context and identity matter, and affect a person’s experience, seems still difficult to grasp. It represents a systemic failing, which is interesting because Systemic Therapy as a modality seems to have be ignored throughout.

There is still too much medical model, top down, old school thinking lurking behind a humanistic mask. Many would also say that western notions of therapy are harmful and we need less individualistic models. For more on this check out the Radical Therapists Network, founded by Sage Stephanou; and Dr Jennifer Mullan whose book Decolonising Therapy is coming out on 7th November.

On a meta level the psychotherapy and counselling world industry exists in a place of non-consent and we need to be naming it.

BEING A THERAPIST IN A PANDEMIC

This gets its own special section. 

As my supervisor put it, therapists have been helping our clients process their responses to Covid, while processing our own responses to it – in real time. 

And we have all been simultaneously processing rising fascism and climate catastrophe.

A huge amount has happened in my life since spring 2020, in the form of positive change, huge personal revelation, and profound loss. And a huge amount has happened in the lives of my clients.

In the therapy world, the endemic technophobia (yes, another failure of education) showed itself through the mass panic when taking our practices online became a reality. I was grateful that I had been seeing some of my clients online for a number of years before lockdown started. (I now work entirely online.)

The pandemic also revealed terrible ableism, which persists. There seems to have been a collective denial, and a deliberate ‘forgetting’, of the ongoing experiences of those with Long Covid, even among ‘nice queer lefty’ circles. This has happened across society. Collectively, society had a chance to change the way we relate to each other (eg wearing masks to protect everyone, for a start) but, for multiple reasons, this hasn’t happened.

Closer to home, (the therapy world mirrors outside society, as you might expect), anecdotally some core trainings seem to have avoided dealing with Covid and protecting all their students over this period. Anyone with disabilities or health vulnerabilities (or the potential for them) may be forced into shadow. Speak out and you risk being isolated further. I would love to hear about organisations (and I’m sure they do exist) that are acknowledging the realities of differing health and disability needs of their students.

NEURODIVERGENCE

This also gets its own section. This is the biggest shift for me. For many years my thoughts on mental health and psychotherapy, as well as my experiences in therapy, have coalesced in a way that I could not articulate. As time has passed, I’ve come to understand how some of the conventional therapy narrative may be actually harmful to neurodivergent people. (I am including trauma and chronic anxiety/depression on top of Autism, ADHD, OCD etc.) It can feel like gaslighting and does not take into account how ND people experience the world. It actually starts to feel like a kind of conversion therapy.

In the last few years, as I have explored and confirmed my own neurodivergence, I have started to understand these concerns. During these explorations I’ve been consistently amazed by the sheer numbers of neurodivergent people working to shift attitudes and make life better for what is turning out to be quite a lot of us.

THE EXCELLENT

With everything I’ve named above, what keeps me in this profession?

Being part of something bigger. Receiving knowledge gained from others’ experiences, and offering it too where I can. I hope I have contributed to this profession in some way. (You can find some of my work here.) Working in private practice can be isolating, so having a community around you is invaluable and important for wellbeing.

My supervisor(s). I have been with my current supervisor for eight years and I’m endlessly grateful for her wisdom and experience. My previous supervisors also brought good learning into my life.

My colleagues. I’ve met some amazing colleagues who have become close friends. The GSRD community as a whole has been an absolute fount of wisdom. There are people out there doing important work who I am proud to know and learn from.

My clients. I could not have got here without the courage and the trust of all the people who have come to work with me over the years. It’s a great feeling having helped someone find a clearer path through life. 

What a journey it’s been. And continues to be.

Trans Awareness Week – Are you still unsure about trans rights?

Trans Awareness Week runs from 13th to 20th November.

The last day of Trans Awareness Week, November 20th, is the annual International Trans Day of Remembrance, when people gather to mourn the loss of all the trans and gender diverse people who were murdered, or died by suicide, during the previous 12 months. There is always a long list of names. Many are trans women of colour.

Content note

This post isn’t ‘How to be a better ally’. And it’s not a gender explainer either (links at the bottom), nor a point-by-point bad science debunker. So who and what is it for?

This post is for anyone who is still unsure where they stand on trans rights. It’s about how to look at your feelings and wonder about them, for greater awareness and the benefit of all. I’m going back to the individual and the personal because you can strategise all you like, and read activist blogs and talk for hours about what you might do, but until you look at yourself and your beliefs, you won’t get very far.

Please note: Shaming (of yourself or anyone else) is not the aim here – we are all, no matter who we are, in a process of unlearning something.

History is repeating itself

Anyone who does not believe that trans rights are human rights, I will very gently suggest, is on the wrong side of history. Sure, it may not look like it right now, if you only get your information from mainstream media. An entire community gaslighted and abused – it ought to be illegal to say this stuff. (Oh, wait…) But remember what people said about gay men and lesbians back in the 80s – about contagion, perversity, the danger to children? Here are all the tropes again with another minority. How long do we have to wait for the current wave of prejudice to burn out?

Are you still unsure about trans rights?

This post is for anyone who still thinks trans and non-binary lives might be a debate – (but biology surely!) – and that there might be dangers here, but is not sure about that either, having seen trans and non-binary people coming into discussion threads with lengthy clarity and boundless energy, explaining, arguing, asserting the rights of gender diverse humans, pointing out the bad science, over and over and over.

There is a price to be paid for this seemingly boundless energy. You may not see the overwhelm and exhaustion from having to repeatedly respond to query after query after devil’s advocate after ‘I happen to believe…‘ from yet another cis person on yet another thread. It takes a colossal amount of emotional labour. Sometimes people tag trans people into very toxic threads, (perhaps even with good intentions), and they end up seeing yet more ‘opinions’ on their right to exist in the world, and wading through comments posted by overnight biologists talking about ‘large gametes’. Do you really want to contribute to this?

Trans rights are not a debate. ‘Debate’ is often a debased activity. It’s really about who gets upset first, making the other the ‘winner’. Either that, or it’s a theatre for false opposition (see: a lot of mainstream media content, unfortunately).

Where to start? With yourself.

You may have trans friends, but they’re okay as individuals, right? Or perhaps you think you don’t know anyone trans or non-binary? Actually, you probably do. They may be keeping quiet because they are unsure of you.

Expecting someone to debate their own right to exist – and only live a life free to be who they are after you have allowed them to – is inhumane. You likely know this, deep down.

How to move forward in understanding – some suggestions and thought starters

You could look at them in order, or just one or two. It may be that something in this list rings bells for you more than the rest – go with that. Whatever takes you forward.

• Be open about your unsureness, and the beliefs that support it: Let them out to air, write them down privately if you need to, share them with yourself or a trusted cis friend (don’t ask a trans person to do this work with you, as their labour will be double). Breathe. What else comes up?

• What do you fear? Next time you have that ‘Yes but what about’ feeling, ask yourself where it may be coming from. What causes you to see one minority group as having fewer rights than another? Perhaps you heard negative views in your family as a child?

• Think about when you saw something negative written about trans people. Were this writing by a trans person? If not, reflect on why you think a cis person would know better, however respected or high profile they may be. Perhaps you read even just one negative newspaper article when young, (particularly if you grew up before the internet) that somehow buried itself in your brain.

• Reflect on where you saw the negative commentary. Think about how much you actually trust mainstream media. Remember the last time you saw an article in mainstream media about a subject you are an expert in? I can pretty much guarantee it made you angry very quickly, with all the inaccuracies and mispresentations.

• Think about your own history. It may help to think back to a time that you were othered, excluded, had assumptions made about you, were threatened, or attacked. Think about the different intersections in your identity that others decided were unacceptable. If you find yourself saying ‘But but this is different!’ No, it’s not. Your feelings were your feelings. Imagine experiencing those feelings every day, because each day brings a batch of new attacks on your dignity, personhood, or right to exist. Again, it may help to talk or write about this.

• Reflect on your own gender. How did/do you know who you are? What stories do you tell yourself about your gender? I’ve linked below to some helpful books.

• Read or watch work by trans and non-binary authors, artists, and speakers. As more and more trans and non-binary people testify about their own experience (and many would dearly love not to have to do this, over and over again), they have created a body of work waiting for you to read or listen to. It’s all out there.

Not everyone is a big reader, or has time to be. There are many videos. Or you could start with Twitter or Instagram. Follow hashtags like #TransAwarenessWeek, #TransAwareness, or #Trans. Those hashtags will lead you to organisations and individuals who post a lot, about information and personal experience. You will see anger and frustration and you will start to understand why. Busy Twitter threads are a very quick way to understand how groups of people feel about their lives. Twitter can be absolutely terrible but, if you take care, you will find a lot. (The language around gender diversity evolves quite fast. Reading these fast moving media will show you how this happens.)

• Listen, read, and do the work. Please don’t ask a trans or non-binary friend – or stranger online – to educate you. Not unless they have very specifically offered this.

And finally…

I have kept this post within a number of boundaries or it would have been thousands of words long.

You may have read my list of suggestions and thought they could apply to your relationship with many other groups that you do not share an identity with. And you would be right. I have been inspired to write this post by many things – my own evolving identities, the wellbeing of my communities, and the appalling misinformation being spread around.

It has also been inspired by a number of Black authors who are doing a lot of public engagement around anti-racism, particularly as Black Lives Matter gains more and more traction. I am particularly grateful to Leila Saad for the highly structured and tightly held anti-racism journey she offers in her book: Me and White Supremacy.

Resources

This is a very brief selection.

Online

A Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and Nonbinary Youth. By the Trevor Project. An introductory educational resource that covers a wide range of topics and best practices on how to support transgender and nonbinary people.

My Genderation. Trans-run organisation making films for and about trans people, for everyone. YouTube channel here.

Mermaids. Charity that supports trans and non-binary children and young people under 20, and their families.

Julia Serano Tireless writer, unpicker of complexities, and debunker of myths (and biologist).

Watch

Disclosure – Documentary on Netflix in which trans actors and writers discuss the history of trans portrayal in film and TV. It will shake up your view of many popular films.

Travis Alabanza Artist and performer.

Alok Vaid-Menon Writer and performer.

Books & authors

Non-Binary Lives Anthology of 30 non-binary life stories.

Trans Like Me by CN Lester.

Trans, A Memoir by Juliet Jacques.

Kate Bornstein Author of My New Gender Workbook and others.

Meg-John Barker Author of How to Understand your Gender (co-authored with Alex Iantaffi) and Gender-A Graphic Guide (illlustrated by Jules Scheele), and others.

Lists

Seven books about trans people of colour

Books by trans writers of colour

Children’s Books with Transgender, Non-Binary and Gender Expansive Children

Trans Britain – Our journey from the shadows (Book Review)

Cover of book 'Trans Britain'

Trans Britain is an important and timely book

It stands out especially at the moment when the mainstream media is unfortunately promoting harmful and inaccurate information about trans and non-binary people.

Revision of the Gender Recognition Act

One of the reasons for the explosion in media coverage of trans lives and issues in the past year or so is the revision of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), which was originally created in 2004. If you would like to see improvements to the GRA – especially in terms of allowing people to self-define their gender without having to go through overlong and at times humiliating processes, and including the rights and recognition of non-binary people – please fill in the consultation here. (Closing date 19th October 2018.)

This excellent podcast by Meg-John and Justin provides useful pointers about the Act and the current situation for trans and non-binary people overall.

The City of London is also doing a public consultation on their Gender Identity Policy. (Closing date 14th September 2018.)

The ‘debate’ around trans identity

If you don’t know much about it, there is nothing wrong with feeling confusion when reading about gender variance/non-conformity. What you may well be responding to is a media filter, and fear-mongering headlines which have the power to lodge themselves in the mind and remain there. (And if you think you don’t know, or have never known, any trans or non-binary people personally, you very likely do.) None of this is helped when someone’s right to exist is framed as a ‘debate’.

I am somewhat suspicious of the concept of ‘debate’. What it often means is ‘a contest between a privileged person and a less privileged person to see if the less privileged person gets upset first’. (It’s a sibling to the ‘false opposition’ trope that has taken over so much media output.) Pushing someone to explain themselves over and over has less to do with information-gathering than tiring the person to the point where they have no energy to carry on, so that they will make mistakes that can be used against them.

But the good news is that there is plenty of information out there, and an increasing number of accounts of contemporary trans lives. For example, see Trans, A Memoir by Juliet Jacques, and Trans Like Me, by CN Lester.

A much-needed history

Christine Burns, the editor of Trans Britain and a contributor to it, has been a stalwart campaigner for many years and it was exciting to see the crowdfunder on Unbound build up so quickly. [Disclosure: I contributed to it.] This book is much needed – partly as a history, partly as an illuminating account of activism before the internet and after, and partly as a counterbalance to some of the transphobic material that has been going around for too long.

We are living in a time of fascist resurgence, which is creating a heightened sense of permission to attack anyone who may be considered ‘other’. But, as Meg-John points out in the podcast, so many complaints and fears about trans people have a mirror in the cisgender population. If cis people don’t have to prove they are cis, why do trans people have to prove they are trans? Just as some trans people access medical services, such as surgeries and hormones, to feel more comfortable in their gender, so do some cis people.

A book in three parts

Trans Britain comprises early history, the birth of activism, and modern day trans and non-binary life. It offers very detailed accounts, through historical stories of pioneers from previous centuries and then to living memory and the rise of the newspaper exposé, starting with a reminder that binary gender is largely a western concept.

The 1960s were a time of increased media salaciousness, but they were also a time when people started to organise on a bigger scale. However, first of all they had to find each other, and for a long time the pressure to conform by ‘passing’, and living in stealth, was an obstacle to this. Ignorance and fear and lack of legal protections meant that if a person was known to be trans they could lose their job and their home. One contributor writes heartbreakingly about their isolation in the 60s and 70s as psychiatrist after psychiatrist offered terrible help and left them struggling alone. Some spent years playing along with the whims of autocratic and idiosyncratic clinicians. Some others got lucky with the medical profession. For example, in the 1940s, one doctor helped his trans patient by using the pretext of ‘a supposed intersex condition’ as a cover for their surgery.

Christine Burns: ‘Movements often start with campaigns for what can be legislated. […] Populations en masse somehow need to be persuaded that previous ideas for what was acceptable have to be revised. It is not legal sanctions that ultimately bring about lasting changes, but shifting cultural norms.’

With profound patience and tenacity, and endless meetings and reports, activists pushed for change. The Gender Recognition Act was created in 2004, around the same time as the explosion of social media, which enabled people to communicate with each other, and share and promote ideas to a previously unimaginable extent. In 2007 came the landmark study ‘Engendered Penalties’, the largest ever study into trans marginalisation, with nearly 900 participants.

Spectrums not binaries

But challenges alone don’t define people, and the ‘born in the wrong body’ narratives of the past have given way to a more powerful and wide-ranging set of voices and platforms. Gender non-conforming people have had a major influence on contemporary culture, (eg Transgender Tipping Point, Time 2014). With this increasing visibility have come a number of supportive and educational organisations such as Gendered Intelligence, All About Trans, and Trans Media Watch. And for the last three years, the UK has had an annual Trans, Non-Binary and Intersex conference.  

With this visibility has come a sense of permission for many more people to examine their gender identity and expression. It’s well worth reading this study by Joel et al from 2013: Queering gender: studying gender identity in ‘normative’ individuals. Over 35 percent of the 2000+ people studied felt their gender identity was other than that which they had been assigned at birth. As the researchers say: ‘We conclude that the current view of gender identity as binary and unitary does not reflect the experience of many individuals, and call for a new conceptualisation of gender, which relates to multiplicity and fluidity in the experience of gender.’ If you’d like to read further about this, How To Understand Your Gender by Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker is a good place to start. Also Resources for Non-Binary Identities.

I highly recommend Trans Britain for a number of reasons, not least for recognising the sheer graft of everyone involved as they fought to live their best lives, and to ensure that others coming after them do too.

From Stephanie Hirst, who wrote the final chapter: ‘…’Generation Z’ […] are growing up with the normality of people of all genders, sexuality and ethnic backgrounds. This new generation will see fluidity in all people, and look back in total horror at how trans people were discriminated against during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.’

So what makes some people so angry about the existence of gender non-conforming people, and their right to self-determination being enshrined in law?

As a therapist working with gender, sexuality and relationship diverse clients, I reflect on this frequently. There seem to be a number of factors at work here.

  1. ‘Think of the children’

Much of the recent wave of anti-trans prejudice relates to the support and treatment of trans children. ‘Won’t someone think of the children’ is an often-used argument against the existence of anything that questions current sex, sexuality and gender norms. What is being said about trans people today was said about queer people 30 years ago. Remember Section 28 in 1988, that prevented the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in schools, and that awful phrase ‘pretended family relationships’? The thinking seems to be that where there is freedom for a person to be congruent and authentic in their gender identity and expression, the world has ‘gone mad’ and the brainwashing and abuse of children must follow.

There is a lot of anger from some quarters about medical interventions for trans children, and yet often total silence from those same quarters about the non-consensual and traumatic surgeries done to Intersex children to give them the ‘correct’ gender.

Further reading on this: Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation: A Guide for Understanding Transgender Children Debates, and the follow-up post Reframing “Transgender Desistance” Debates (both by Julia Serano), and Why ‘Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria’ is Bad Science (Florence Ashley). This post by Rosie Swayne is also good: Unqualified, middle-aged lesbian swerves abruptly out of her lane to talk about trans issues.

  1. A binary view of gender

People are hugely invested in a natal gender binary. Unfortunately, much trouble comes from looking at a baby’s genitals when it is born, (particularly if the child is Intersex), and deciding which of two genders it is going to be and therefore what sexuality the child is likely to have. From this at-birth assignment of labels comes everything from earning power to personal safety, to how much this person’s opinions will be taken seriously, to medical treatment, to everything else.

It takes a lot of reflective work and uprooting of ancient beliefs to realise that neither genitals not perceived biological sex have to define gender. And some people do not define as either of the binary genders at all, as neither feels congruent for them.

It’s worth reading the work of Cordelia Fine on gender: particularly Testosterone Rex and Delusions of Gender, and Julia Serano: particularly Whipping Girl and Excluded, and a whole range of clear and well argued essays under the heading Debunking anti-transgender myths and tropes.

  1. A sense of entitlement to define others

I cannot say this is just something specifically about British culture, but as that is the one I grew up in, I will use it as a baseline. When I was growing up, it was much more normalised for parents and teachers to tell a child what they are, particularly when it was something negative. ‘You are bad. You are fundamentally inadequate. You are a disgrace.’ It wasn’t about the child’s actions in that moment, but something much deeper – about their entire being. So the opposing idea, that someone might respond, ‘No, you don’t get to define me – I do,’ feels positively revolutionary.  

Unfortunately this drive to normalise through criticism is sometimes still mirrored in the psychotherapy world; the idea that anything that deviates from the [eg cisgender heterosexual monogamous vanilla] norm is a pathology that must be uprooted. These attitudes have not gone away, and may be echoed in the interaction when a client says ‘But it’s not like that’ and the therapist insists that they know better. At worst this becomes conversion therapy, a practice which the profession is increasingly distancing itself from.

  1. Envy of someone who is living as their authentic self

Some (many) people grow up letting themselves be what other people define them as – this path of least resistance may be the safest path at the time. But when they realise that the norms they have conformed to do not reflect their true selves, it may feel as if it is too late. This may bring out deep envy of those who appear to be demanding and getting more from life, and this envy may manifest as a desire to attack. (And of course children can be harmed by unhappy parents who are not living as their true selves.)

  1. A fixation with the purity of womanhood

There is a lot of frightened and at times Victorian-sounding rhetoric around who is allowed to self-declare as a woman. Some of it veers dangerously close to white nationalism, implying that somehow the classification ‘woman’ will be forever dirtied by allowing trans women to enter it.

  1. A deflection of something much bigger, all-encompassing, and harder to challenge: how boys and men are raised

A widely expressed anti-trans fear (specifically in relation to trans women and the revision of the Gender Recognition Act) is that cis men are suddenly going to self-define as trans and start invading toilets and assaulting women. In fact, men can and do already invade toilets and harass people – which is already illegal. And of course, a woman entering a toilet and harassing people would also be committing a crime.

From what I observe, many objections to trans women’s existence involve things that men actually do (or might do), and I see a lot of fear expressed around this. It would therefore seem beneficial to campaign about better education for boys, better sex education in schools, and dismantling patriarchal structures in general. If campaigners put their considerable resources towards this instead of attacking a small minority of human beings, they might get a lot more support.

 

Trans Britain is available from Unbound, Amazon, and Hive.

Gender and Sexuality CPD trainings

Need some CPD?  Would you like to to update your skills and knowledge?

In 2017, as part of London Sex and Relationships Therapy, I am offering trainings on Gender and Sexuality in the therapy room, and other related subjects.

In January I will be in Cambridge and Edinburgh, facilitating:

Gender and Sexual Diversity in the Therapy Room

Drawing on the book Sexuality and gender for mental health professionals: A practical guide (Richards & Barker, 2013), this training provides a basic outline of good practice when working with issues of gender and sexuality. Attendees will be encouraged to reflect upon their own ideas and assumptions about gender and sexuality, and those implicit in their therapeutic approaches. We will consider various ways of understanding sexuality and gender, and their implications for therapy across client groups. Specifically we will focus on the issues which can be faced by those who fit into normative genders, sexualities and relationship structures, as well as for those who are positioned outside the norm.

If you would like to attend, please follow the links below for bookings:

Relate Cambridge – Saturday 14th January 2017 (10-4pm)

Information about this training and about Relate

Relationships Scotland – Saturday 28th January 2017 (10-4pm)

Information about this training and about Relationships Scotland

If you would like further training

If you are looking for training on this subject or something related, please contact me and either I or one of my colleagues will come back to you.

Bisexual life – hiding in plain sight?

2000px-Bi_flag.svg

Pink Therapy conference 2016

Last Saturday I spent the day with colleagues at Pink Therapy‘s annual conference for therapists. This year’s theme was Beyond Gay and Straight. 

‘There are gay bars and straight bars, but where are the bi bars?’

Someone made this point during the plenary session. Erasure is something bi people experience on a regular basis. I’ve been told more than once that the word ‘bisexual’ is a bit of an audience killer and best left off publicity materials. This is sadly unsurprising.

Bisexuality and mental health

Dr Meg John Barker reminded us that not enough studies have been done specifically around bisexuality, but what there is – sometimes the B element has to be squeezed out of the side of a larger piece of research – is unequivocal. A bisexual person is likely have worse mental health than someone who is either gay or straight. An aside from another discussion, a good proportion of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (who are, incidentally, mostly likely to be women) also identify as bisexual. (For more research and information, see BiUK.)

Prejudice from all sides

Bisexual people experience discrimination from both straight and gay communities. Bi people are seen as fence sitters, greedy, manipulative, unstable, sex-obsessed, and indecisive, perpetually on the way from one place to another but never getting there. Women only ‘do it’ to tease or please men. It is seen as marginally more acceptable to be a bi woman than a bi man, however – bi men are either ‘gay, straight or lying.’ A bi person must experience an exactly balanced 50/50 attraction to men and women (never mind other genders), or they are fakes and must be straight. Sometimes therapists (and partners) offer to convert them, or tell them that their issues will be resolved when they ‘pick a side’.

Charles Neal, author of The Marrying Kind, talked about the lives of gay and bi men married to women, the ‘mixed-orientation marriage,’ and the misery experienced by people stifling their identities in order to remain in a socially acceptable unit. ‘Experience before identity’ was his message – but even nowadays, if you don’t identify sufficiently with one tribe over another, you may feel left out in the cold. (See also How To Support Your Bisexual Husband, Wife, Partner)

Born this way?

Current activism tends to promote sexual and gender identities as self-defined, but it wasn’t so long ago that you had to be ‘born this way’ in certain queer scenes, (and adopt one of a specific set of appearances) or you were seen as a ‘tourist’. You were ‘bi-try’ (for bi or bi-curious women entering lesbian environments) or a ‘stray’ (for bi or bi-curious men entering gay ones). And, on arriving at an event, there was that look from the door person that said ‘Your hair goes past your shoulders – are you here to write an article about us?’

Binary versus fluidity

These attitudes remind us how the desire for a binary universe is so pervasive. If you are not one thing you must be another, because of course there are only two things to be. The idea that a person’s desires may shift and evolve over time seems entirely absent. To be fair, if you have fought for years for your singular identity, you may well feel threatened by any kind of flexibility around this, but this feels increasingly out of step with younger people, for whom fluidity of identity feels as if it’s becoming the norm.

It all sounds very like the dismissive way some old-school kinksters speak of switches, ie people who are comfortable occupying both sub/bottom and dom/top roles, or have a different role depending on the gender of their play partner. And, for that matter, people who cannot accept non-binary gender identities. There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a high proportion of bisexuality in trans communities. DK Green spoke in detail about both topics. Validation from partners is essential: ‘Does your partner see you as you see yourself?’ (Trans Media Watch has a good resources page.)

Caution around labels

A therapist simply being affirmative may in fact be damaging when a client holds multiple identities, and this can apply particularly if they are intersex. And in a flurry of anti-religionism (for sure understandable given the damage that religion has done to people with minority identities), you may trample over the fact that a queer person is religious and gains comfort from it.

Multiple intersections – multiplied difficulties

Ronete Cohen spoke about the intersection of bisexuality and race, where a bisexual person of colour can be marginalised and objectified in a number of communities simultaneously. Microaggressions are multiplied, and there is far less social support and consequently worse mental health outcomes. She gave the example of a bi person of colour asking for help dealing with stress, and being told to go to yoga. There are a number of reasons why this was inappropriate – western yoga is generally white, middle class, often expensive, promotes a particular body type, and contains potential inherent cultural appropriation.

Elsewhere during the day, someone gave another example of a therapist trying, unsuccessfully, to take mindfulness into communities of colour, having not thought through the missionary implications of this. A therapist may have training around gender, sexual and relationship diversities, but they may not have any cultural competence training around race. (See Bis of Colour for more information and support.)

Queering relationships

From the other sessions I attended:

Niki D talked about biphobia in relationships, and the difficulties of being a bisexual person in a relationship with someone who is monosexual.

Meg John Barker, using their excellent zine ‘What Does A Queer Relationship Look Like?‘ talked about queer relationships, and the fact that a high proportion of bisexuals are also non-monogamous. (The ‘Normativity Castle’ is especially pertinent here.)

Amanda Middleton presented on queer identities and offered a breakdown of Queer Theory. She outlined the slippery and paradoxical implications of queer – (for example, if a queer person experiences microaggressions, it can mean they are doing queerness well) – and the fact that identity will inevitably change over space and time.

It’s an exciting time for Gender, Sexual and Relationship Diversities therapy

Thanks to Dominic Davies and the Pink Therapy team once more for a great day and an excellent learning and networking opportunity. There’s a lot of work to do – especially around training – but this community is growing.

For videos of the main talks, go here.

Contact

If any of the issues in this post are affecting you and you would like to talk further to someone, you can contact me here.