October 2024 Update

Hello all - it’s been a busy time since I last emailed. I’ve been following my own advice during election/campaign season and really investing in community and relationships and prioritizing autumnal joy and awe, while finding ways to engage in resistance to the parts of this world that are so harmful right now. And even though it is a gorgeous October here in Western Mass, I’ve managed to keep myself inside enough to continue developing clinical and community offerings and to work on my ongoing research projects.

I’m particularly excited to let y’all know about a community event I’m hosting in two weeks. In my last newsletter, I shared the news about TRANSA, a 46-track album full of collaborations from some of today’s most incredible musicians - trans and non-trans, honoring transness. I’m not at all affiliated with this project but I’m so excited about it that I reached out to the producers to see if I could host a listening party in Western Mass, and they were enthusiastic. On Monday November 4, I’ll be hosting a listening lounge where we gather (masked) in person to listen selections from the album weeks before it is released. I’m collaborating with local trans herbalists, musicians, and artists to incorporate grounding and reflective activities centered on the concept of Envisioning and Embodying Trans Futures. The full event details and sliding scale tickets are available now. Also, you can scroll to the bottom of this newsletter to listen to and read about a couple of recently released tracks from the album.

I specifically chose to hold this event on the eve of the election to give trans community members (and myself, honestly!) a space to ground in community and radical hope. I’ve been posting updates on instagram and hope local folks will join us that evening and spread the word: https://www.instagram.com/trans.futures.wmass/

I’m also honored and excited to be getting a chance to talk with some high school students at a local performing arts school on the day of the election to discuss the duality of honoring our fear/hurt/anger and investing in the joy/hope/awe that can sustain us. Related to this, my interview with journalist Imara Jones is now available on her TransLash podcast. And you can see a brief clip of me speaking about using a trauma framework for understanding the impacts of oppression on the TransLash instagram account.

Building upon that podcast interview and the substack post I shared with y’all last month, I created shareable instagram post that summarized 10 strategies for coping with election-related distress. Feel free to share this.

With all of the work I’ve put into these election/sociopolitical distress-focused areas, I am only just finalizing and really recruiting for the family estrangement group I mentioned last month and the facilitated peer supervision group I hope to start this winter. After some expressed interest and consultation, I’ve shifted the family estrangement group to a facilitated support space (as opposed to group therapy) and moved it further into winter.

The group is titled The Love We Keep: Healing From & Navigating Family Estrangement This Winter and will run from November 26 to February 25, mostly biweekly on Tuesdays (full schedule here). Here is the description from my website:

Across biweekly sessions, we’ll share our stories in supportive and trauma-informed ways, engage with and challenge social norms about families and estrangement, address the reasons we may stay connected to harmful family, discuss the concept and practice(s) of real love, reflect on grief experiences related to distancing from family, and collectively imagine other pathways to belonging, ancestry, and identity. This is a facilitated group that is not designed to be a stand-in for therapy, but will include space for personal reflection and sharing/receiving support.

This group is for you if you are working to set boundaries with harmful family members, navigating complex feelings related to distance from family of origin, and/or want to be in community with other trans and nonbinary people who are facing similar experiences related to family estrangement particularly during a season associated with family in mainstream society. This group is also designed to be facilitated through readings and discussion, which might be a particularly good fit if the idea of a support group is overwhelming, intimidating, or generally unappealing to you.

This group is exclusively for people who identify as part of the trans community, including nonbinary people who identify as trans. Group members will commit to completing short readings for each session and occasional reflection exercises. We will meet virtually so participants must have access to reliable internet. Because this is not a therapy group, there is no geographic limitation to where participants join from. In order to allow for a meaningful experience, this group will be between four and ten people.

Please send clients or friends my way for a screening/consultation call if you think they’d benefit from a group like this. And shoot me an email if you have any questions!

For folks who signed up to express interest in a potential facilitated consultation / peer supervision group, I will be following up at some point in November. If you’re interested in hearing more and haven’t signed up yet, please do so: https://transpsychologist.com/sign-up

I also want to highlight two articles I contributed to that were published since my last update.

The first, published in Journal of Counseling Psychology, is a publication stemming from Arizaon State University Phd Student Alex Colson’s thesis. Alex thoughtfully built upon my model of non-affirmation and anti-trans bias as traumatic stressors. They examined the associations between nonbinary-specific bias and non-affirmation experiences and traumatic stress symptoms of a racially diverse sample of nonbinary adults. An additional important expansion of my previous work, Alex also included symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress in their outcomes. The study is well done and the paper is strong - I’m proud to have played a small role and honored to see the next generations of psychologists expanding on my early work!! Please let me know if you’d like a PDF of this.

Second, please check out this commentary colleagues and I published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. I worked with ten esteemed clinicians and researchers to provide a concise evidence-based rebuttal to some of the challenges to gender-affirming care for youth. The PDF is available here. I continue, along with many other folks, to try to use my training and expertise to challenge the misinformation contributing to horrific restrictions of rights and medical/psychological malfeasance.

I’ll close the newsletter with two songs from the TRANSA project that were recently released as a part of TRANSA: Selects. The full album comes out November 11th, but this Selects release includes the already released tracks Ever New by Beverly Glenn Copeland and Sam Smith and I Would Die 4 U (Prince cover) by Lauren Auder and Wendy & Lisa, as well as a wild 25+ minute instrumental track by Andre 3000, and these two pieces from L’Rain and Sade:

L’Rain (featuring NYC Trans Oral History Project with Imara Jones, Mojo Disco, Ceyenne Doroshow, & Francois) - People Are Small / Rapture

L’Rain is a critically acclaimed musician and the current artistic director of Performance Space New York. In this new track, she covers two songs by ANOHNI: People are Small and Rapture. ANOHNI is an award winning singer, songwriter, and visual artist, whose first albums in 2000 and 2005 were released under the artist name Antony and the Johnsons - in homage to trans activist Martha P. Johnson. I would describe her music as heartbreakingly and hauntingly beautiful; her lyrical content often deals with concepts of oppression and transformation. ANOHNI’s original versions of People are Small and Rapture come from an archive of work that she did with a collective of “fellow artists, drag queens, punks, nightlife veterans and students” from 1992 to 1995, amid the AIDS crisis in NYC. That collective was called the Blacklips Performance Cult and they would perform a new play every night at 1am at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. You can listen to and buy that archival album here. ANOHNI also released versions of Rapture on her debut Antony & the Johnsons album and the live album, Cut the World. L’Rain’s track joins these two songs in a transformative way and includes powerful excerpts of audio interviews with trans people from the NYC Trans Oral History Project. The track is included in Chapter 4 of TRANSA, which is Awakening, but also comes just before Chapter 5, Grief. Being at this juncture is fitting given the mix of vitality and sorrow contained in this song. The lyrics to Rapture include the line “Is this the Rapture?” repeated; excerpts from the Oral History Project include Imara Jones stating that places hold memories and since trans people have always existed, spaces like new york have memory of us and thus we belong in these spaces now, but we deserve to belong everywhere, as well as Ceyenne Doroshow reflecting on how many loved ones from the community she has lost to AIDS, botched gender-affirmation operations by unlicensed providers, and violence and ignorance. It’s an emotional journey.

Sade Adu - Young Lion

Sade’s original song Young Lion is a tribute to her transgender son Izaak. The lyrics include an emotional apology from a mother for failing to recognize her child and the weight he was carrying, as well as messages of celebration of all that he is and the future that lies ahead of him. Here is what Izaak said about the song:

Kaye Loggins, of Time Wharp, who contribute an as-yet-unreleased song to TRANSA agreed, saying: “You never get that catharsis of your parent putting themselves where they were at the time [before you came out], realizing the mistakes and genuinely apologizing for them. I know personally that would mean a lot to me, so I’m biased, but it’s exceedingly rare to have that kind of understanding.”

Sade herself had a really powerful message about the song and the overall album, when she announced her participation earlier this year:

If you’ve found these songs meaningful, you will definitely appreciate what we have in store at the envisioning and embodying trans futures listening lounge: https://transa-western-mass.eventbrite.com/