Therapy from the heart: Psychotherapy in the WPATH Standards of Care for transsexual, transgender and Gender non conforming people
The psychotherapy section of the WPATH Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender and Gender nonconforming People (SOC) is the most obvious component of the SOC that has to do with “heart”, the theme of this conference. Psychotherapy, to be good, requires empathy and imagination, connection and relatedness, and listening to story.
In this talk, Dr. Fraser will tell her story of coming full circle from the land of her childhood, Brazil, describing its influence on the path she is on today as President of WPATH and on psychotherapy and the SOC. From a childhood and puberty in Brazil, and with the impact of this “heart-filled” country on her developing psyche, she became a psychotherapist and gender specialist. She is finally returning to Brazil after many years to give this talk about psychotherapy, giving an overview of both the content and the “feeling” part of that section, noting her Brazilian roots along the way.
Psychotherapy with trans people demands a comfort with diversity, working with people on a gender spectrum who have self-representations and experiences for which there is sometimes no language. Gender itself is said by many to be a language. Brazil is a land of vibrant peoples of all colors, mingling and celebrating diversity with a language of feeling, creativity and imagination and with words untranslatable into English (such as saudade), which may approximate the trans experience. Listening with a bicultural and bilingual ear, particularly a Latin one, can be particularly helpful to doing the kind of psychotherapy with heart that may be useful for trans people.
