Opportunities for Joy, Resistance, & Education

June updates and reflections

Author

Sebastian Barr
June 16, 2025

Hello comrades in care and liberation. I’m grateful to be writing to you all with a new month’s worth of updates.

[If you’re new to this newsletter because you took a training with me, welcome! I use this platform to send out a monthly update with offerings, resources, links to my writing, and usually some brief reflections and/or music recommendations. I totally understand if you get too much in your inbox and don’t want this. Scroll down to unsubscribe.]

In This Month's Newsletter:

A Visit to Stonewall in 2025

I’m writing you from a train after a very moving experience. This morning, having the good fortune of being in New York City (and specifically Greenwich Village), I walked over to the Stonewall Inn. I walked slowly around Stonewall National Monument Park. There are historical photographs of the Stonewall riots and of subsequent liberation movements that centered in the village. I was listening to a playlist a friend of mine made around their coming out as trans, and I was so moved looking at these transcestors and other queer ancestors. My intention was to spend my time there meditating on the gratitude I feel for all they did that allowed me and the rest of their descendants to live the way we do today. I did feel that and also pride to be connected through this lineage of queerness and gender/sex transgression to amazing and surely complicated but also powerful humans. I also wondered if they had awareness at the time of how powerful they were, how important these photos and their stories would be to people decades into the future.

Stonewall Monument Photograph of Zazu Nova

And life right now (and always) is never purely good feelings or difficult feelings (forgive the oversimplification of these categories of good vs. difficult). I also experienced heartbreak. Heartbreak at the reasons people have had to take to the street. And heartbreak as I went to scan the National Park Service QR code to take the guided photo tour and found that the webpage no longer existed. I knew it was removed as a part of the widespread queer and trans erasure undertaken by the Trump administration, but was so relieved to see the images still up and had this glimmer of hope the NPS tour would somehow be there on the other side of the QR code. It was a gut punch to see the error page.

And also. Those images were still up. And since I last visited years ago, they now had stickers that had been put on to spell out “WILL ALWAYS BE HERE.” And there was an NPS Park Ranger stationed in the park educating people about the history. And there was a person going around replacing the weathered rainbow flags that adorn the cast iron fence posts with new ones. I spoke to them briefly and they said they’d been doing this for 9 years. They appeared to be an age that probably means they’d survived the AIDS crisis. What a meaningful act of service to the community.

Stonewall Monument photograph of Sylvia Rivera with the words Will Always Be Here stuck on.

Sitting with this mix of powerful feelings, I temporarily paused my friend’s playlist and put on L’Rain’s cover of ANOHNI’s AIDS-era songs People are Small and Rapture, which also features excerpts from the NYC Trans Oral History Project.

The legacy of trans and queer people cannot be overstated. All of our lives our better because of the rage and action and joy and pleasure and community-building of the trans and queer people of earlier eras. Trans and queer people may feel especially aware of what we owe our ancestors, but the liberation they built has also benefited non-queer and non-trans people. (I’m working on a substack post about this.)

This pride month and beyond, consider how you can honor the suffering, struggling, pleasure- and joy- and rage-filled action of those who came before us. And as an extension of their legacy, consider how you can engage in actions toward liberation for communities in near and distant tomorrows, as well.

Neon sign in the window of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center: “In the name of those who came before me, I pledge to be brave, to be true to myself, and to fight like hell for equality.”

And now some announcements:

Upcoming Trainings I’m Offering

This training expands upon my May 2025 webinar by presenting clinical vignettes and discussing with more depth how to apply the approaches I discussed in the first webinar. This training also focuses more on clinician experience and needs, including working on countertransference and reactions to clients, managing our well-being and sociopolitical distress, and engaging in advocacy. If you’d like to watch the first training, a live recording is available for purchase here: https://transpsychologist.com/training-may2025

Save the date for a low-cost letter-writing training I’m offering virtually in July. This will likely not be recorded and will need to be attended live. The training includes access to the questionnaire I developed for clients, letter templates, and suggested resources for further learning. The training will take place august 9th from 4-5:30pm Eastern Time. Registration opens on July 15 with early bird pricing for only $20.

Join me this summer for a 15-hour CE course on working with trans and nonbinary adolescents and young adults. This is my second time offering this course and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to teach it again. Cost for the course, spread across five mornings Monday through Friday, ranges from $380 to $640 if you use my discount code (BARR20). Cost is dependent on whether you attend in-person or online and whether you’re a student or a CE-seeking licensed professional. In addition to mental healthcare providers, CEs are also available for some educators. More information here: https://www.cape.org/courses/trans-and-nonbinary-adolescents-and-young-adults-sebastian-barr-2025

My Writing & Writing I’ve Contributed To

I haven’t sent a substack rundown since late April, and I’ve written a lot since then! Click on any of these headlines and images to be taken to the substack post.

And be on the lookout for a collaborative zine dropping later this month that will share findings from Joonwoo Lee’s and my research on the healing processes of trans and nonbinary survivors of parent-perpetrated relational trauma. Learn more at transpsychologist.com/trauma-healing-zine and keep an eye on instagram and next month’s newsletter for links when it is published!

Opportunities & Writings Offered by Others

A Little More About My Summer CE Course!

There’s still room to join my 15 CE-credit course on affirming and effective work with trans and nonbinary adolescents and young adults. Working with young trans people and people sorting out their relationship to gender is some of my favorite work. Yes it is important work, and yes trans and nonbinary youth are living in a time where their federal government is incredibly hostile toward them and they are thus at more risk of suffering than has been true in many many years. But honestly the story of this work is not just that it’s hard and life-saving. The story is also that trans and nonbinary young people are so freaking awesome, and earning their trust and being a part of critical developmental periods in their lives is an honor and also frankly sometimes really fun.

The course is July 21-25, takes place via the Cape Cod Institute, and can be taken in-person if you want to put together a trip to one of my favorite places to be in the summer or live-online via a highly sophisticated set up that really commits to fully integrating online and in-person learners. I taught this last year and was so impressed with the setup, which for a class of about 30 included two in-person assistants, one of whom was fully focused on hybrid integration, and a full-time tech assistant.

The course takes place Monday through Friday 9am-12:30pm, with a mid-morning 30-minute break. This can allow for a nice vacation on the Cape in the afternoons and evenings and/or for taking it while continuing to work the rest of the day.

I am pretty sure you can still use my discount code for 20% off: BARR20.

Closing Reflection

Milo Todd, author of acclaimed new trans historical fiction book The Lilac People, likes to say that “the ghosts of history are watching, kissing our foreheads.” I love this expansion of the idea that we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. As I looked at the faces in the photographs around the Stonewall monument, I thought about what they were fighting for and what they envisioned when they looked into the future. I believe they would be relieved and thrilled to see our communities’ survival, the liberation steps we’ve made (walking on their shoulders). And what about the challenges we still face? Would they be disheartened? Maybe. But I also imagine them caring for us, knowing what oppression feels like. Kissing our foreheads. Soothing our hurts and weariness so we can keep surviving and thriving and pressing for better lives for ourselves and for those who will come after us. I also like to imagine the trans people of the future, living lives that are perhaps our wildest dreams, looking back at photos of us or sharing and listening to stories of us, feeling our care.

In solidarity and with gratitude and care,

Sebastian