Trans issues and sexual health: Therapy, Intimacy and Transgender People.
This talk will seek to move beyond a focus solely on discrimination in terms of mental health practice, in order to incorporate a focus on how mental health practitioners can work with transgender people to facilitate healthy and positive intimate relationships. Specifically, the talk will cover transgender people’s own accounts of intimacy and the ways in which they negotiate caring and meaningful adult relationships. The talk will also document the needs of gender variant young people, in terms of service provision that equips them with knowledge specific to their own experiences of embodiment, both in the present and into the future.
As a whole, the talk suggests that it is the role of mental health practitioners to be informed about the lives of transgender people, to acknowledge the diverse range of experiences that fall under the umbrella ‘transgender’, and to operate from a strengths-based perspective in terms of recognizing the often considerable resources and skill sets that transgender people bring with them into the therapeutic setting.
