As a transgender person, I naturally work with a lot of trans folks who are undergoing social, medical, or psycho-spiritual transitions. This often entails navigating dysphoria, transphobia, and healing wounds from childhood. Transition can often include grieving, facing fears and doubts, and learning to embrace joy.

For my clients who are not transgender, gender is still often a huge part of the healing journey: in what ways have you been trying to fit into ideas of what a woman or man is supposed to be, instead of being yourself? Often this question can lead us into the core of what needs healed.

I have lived on both sides of the binary, but throughout my life I have always been nonbinary: just myself. To me, a nonbinary perspective on gender is about seeing the specificity of the individual as well as the entirety of their context. You, for example, have received specific messaging about who you are based on how the world sees your gender, and this has effected you in unique ways; perhaps it has made you people-pleasing, or deny certain qualities in yourself. Perhaps it has strengthened certain relationships and destroyed others. We each relate to gendered existence in an entirely unique way, based on which messages are targeting us (eg. “boys don’t cry”) and which ones we personally deny or accept. Mapping out these narratives can get us on the route back to authenticity. We are all uniquely ourselves, beyond ideas of who we are supposed to be.