Coming up in 2023 – Books I’m in

Cover of Bloody Hell! And other stories

Well, it’s been a year. Such a year, in fact, that I haven’t blogged since last Christmas.

This is a quick post to tell you about two books I’m in in 2023.

Pink Therapy: Erotically Queer

Pink Therapy are adding two more publications to their existing collection of books for GSRD Therapists, Erotically Queer and Relationally Queer. Edited by Pink Therapy founder Dominic Davies and psychotherapist and author Silva Neves, both books contain a wide variety of topics and approaches.

My chapter, in Erotically Queer, is about working with LGBTQIA+ menopausal clients.

These books will provide a very thorough grounding for anyone working with, or planning to work with, Gender, Sex and Relationally Diverse clients. These two books will be published in 2023. This is great news for our profession!

Bloody Hell! And other stories – Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum

Edited by feminist author, speaker and powerhouse Mona Eltahawy, this anthology will be published by Unbound in the next year.

In Mona’s words:

‘Too often when feminism takes that brave dive into the deep end of a taboo, it takes along just a select few: white, wealthy, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women.

Bloody Hell! And Other Stories is the antidote. […]

‘It is not just cis women who experience menopause. Non-binary people, trans men and other gender non-conforming groups also experience menopause and do so under even greater levels of silence and taboo.

‘This anthology aims to expand the Menopause Moment/ Wave/ “Movement” beyond white and cis women.’

I am super excited to be part of this project! Watch this space. And fuck the patriarchy.

My Research is now Published!

Read about the experience of LGBTQ+ menopausal clients in therapy

I am delighted to announce that my research, ‘How can therapists and other healthcare providers best support and validate their queer menopausal clients?’ is published.

You will find it in the journal Sexual and Relationships Therapy, which is published by Taylor & Francis. SRT is the in-house journal of COSRT, the UK-based therapist organisation College of Sex and Relationship Therapists.

You can read more about this research on my other blog here.

Please check out my site queermenopause.com for more information on the project as a whole, and the resources page.

I started this project two years ago. I am incredibly grateful to the friends and colleagues who helped me shape my ideas, and to the participants who gave me their time and told me so many important stories.

If you are struggling with anything to do with menopause and would like to explore more deeply what is going on for you, you can contact me here.

Queer Menopause now has its own website!

Blogging silence

First off, I’m aware that I haven’t been posting on here much during lockdown. I keep starting things, and then experiencing a sense of extreme pointlessness. Each time I decide to write about opening up relationships, or peak experiences, or sexual and non-sexual BDSM from a therapists’s perspective – (or for that matter, the urgency of queer haircuts in a time of Covid) – I remember that we have an incurable virus at large at the beginning of winter, people dying, fascism everywhere, and the earth going up in flames.

Menopause takeover?

A Martian dropping by might think this site was really all about the subject of menopause, or that menopause had somehow taken over. Perhaps, along with the murder hornets, walking sharks, and some nervously awaited geese, a further horror come true of 2020 will be the entire population being forced into menopause until a vaccine is found. This would be most interesting.

Queermenopause.com unveiled

Menopause has not taken over, but, while my research goes through the peer review system, I’ve been working on a project that I hope will be helpful in the future. The project is a new website which I am delighted to reveal: queermenopause.com.

Menopause happens to people. Trans men, non-binary people, and intersex people are excluded when menopause information is restricted only to cisgender women. The site has an LGBTQIA+ focus, but I also want to offer resources that apply to anyone whose experience of menopause is excluded from, or not sufficiently acknowleged by, the mainstream. There is a lot of work to do. First blog post here: Welcome to queermenopause.com. You can also find this project on Instagram @queermenopause.

I am also seeking to inform practitioners of all kinds about the LGBTQIA+ experience of menopause, and about menopause itself.

Queer Menopause in the media

I have been seeing my clients online all the way through lockdown, and I’ve also contributed to a couple of books. One is an interview for Still Hot!, a collection of 42 interviews about menopause experience. I’m also happy to say that Diva’s queer menopause feature from December 2019, which I took part in, is now available online: This is the end… of your period.

Moving forward…

I’m very glad to have this project off the ground, and I will be adding to it as time goes on. Please get in touch if your work is relevant to this project. I welcome suggestions of practitioners, trainers and researchers who are working in this area.

I hope to return to non-menopause blogging soon.