Affirmative Therapy: Exploring Sex and Gender

Catalog description

This course will help students learn how to address the clinical concerns that arise for transgender, gender nonbinary, and intersex clients growing up in an endocisheteronormative world. Students will learn how to confront the cissexist and endosexist parts of themselves in order to avoid harmful enactments in the therapy room. Students will learn to be able to address internalized shame in their transgender, gender nonbinary and intersex clients. Topics will include understanding the biological, essentialist, socially constructed, and behavioral parts of identity, helping clients manage microaggressions, assisting clients with transition (social, legal, and medical), and application of affirmative theory to clinical work with transgender, gender nonbinary, and intersex clients. Exploration of how intersectionality with other minority statues (race, ethnicity, ability, class, etc.) will be addressed throughout the course. The course will primarily include lecture and discussion with occasional role-plays.