Queering Care

By

Rumaisa Ahmed

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Table of Contents

• Welcome
• Practice of Care and Intersection with Religion
• Cultural Positioning and Personal Motivations
• Understanding GSRD
• The Genderbread Person
• SOGIESC
• IPPF Declaration on Sexual Rights
• Differentiating Sex and Gender
• Understanding Sexuality and Gender of Attraction
• Relationships
• Reflections for the MHP
• Recommendations from MHPs
• On Allyship
• On Offering Support
• On Self- Awareness
• On Neurodivergence
• On Language
• On Normativity
• Exercise 1.0
• On Gender Diversity
• Issues of Power
• Exercise 2.0
• List of Acknowledgments
• Step 0
• Your Emotional Needs Audit

Welcome!

It is often emphasized as an integral component of therapy to show empathy, respect, and unconditional positive regard in the therapy room but there is a caveat in socially conservative societies where mainstream identities = normalcy = goodness and all else is either a failure to perform, an abnormality, or a sin.

 How is it possible for a mental health practitioner (MHP) to make room for gender, sexual, and relationship diversity, (GSRD) or neurodivergence (ND) when they have been conditioned to assign these under the category of nor normal, not acceptable, and therefore not good?

There is no singular standard way to train mental health practitioners on empathy and mostly it is assumed to be an inherent quality procured after years of learning, training, and experience. My experience, however, in the social sector allowed for a deeper learning into the struggles of MHPs belonging to the “mainstream” working with GSRD.

Insights into any community cannot be hypothesized. They have to be read, lived, or witnessed firsthand and even then only a fraction of their dynamics becomes available for analysis. In this short and brief book, we will do the following things:

• Discuss the role of religion in therapeutic practice and the cultural fitness of the therapist
• Explain gender, sexual, and relationship diversity. It’s an uncommon topic because it is very rarely discussed and the biggest contributing factor to this aversion is that GSRD was (or is) criminialized, stigmatized, or pathologized.
• Share insights, pose questions, and work through some exercises devised after a consultation with MHPs that worked closely with GSRD and ND.

All of the information presented to you is what we have learned so far and by no means definitive so please continue your professional development as you see fit and foster a practice of respectful care for those who trust you with their emotional and mental health.

Practice of Care and Religion

Despite my awareness of queerness and neurodivergence, it took me some time to resolve the inner conflict that diverse gender expression and sexuality invokes in a lot of us. We inherit a religious identity passed on to us by our families. Also, societies have a firm hold on our expression of faith and religiosity.

And that is OKAY! It is very natural for our religious and cultural positioning to take up space and we cannot distance ourselves from these realities. It only becomes a problem when that gets in the way of you delivering effective and equitable care.

Assuming that your religious belief does not align with the notion of GSRD, how can you effectively deliver respectful care while not turning against yourself or inevitably harming your client? Here are three conversations you need to have,

1. with yourself ii) with a supervisor or MHP that has processed this inner conflict

• Religion: Personal Choice vs Political Identity

Personal Choice: A personal opinion, quality, or thing belongs or relates to one particular person rather than to other people

Political Identity: Political identity is a form of social identity marking membership of certain groups that share a common struggle for a certain form of power.

If religion for you is a personal choice and you are aware that you can, or rather should not, force that choice on anybody else, you can visit any place of worship, subscribe to any sect, and perform your favorite religious duties without concerning yourself with what somebody else is doing. It can be assumed that your religiosity is a personal choice and you would believe the same to be true for others. A personal choice is exercised without any fear of retaliation from others. In psychology terms, your locus of evaluation is internal rather than external and that allows for all sorts of religiosity (or non religiosity) in your therapy room.

But, if religion for you is part of your political identity, then reflect on whether or not that identity asserts its power in the therapy room. It is important to ask this of yourself because power does not exist in vacuum and in “your” therapy room, you are likely to have a one-up position whereby your power will be consciously or subconsciously exerted onto the client. If you believe that your religious belief system has more value than your client’s and should be adopted as a resolution of all their personal, social, emotional ailments, you will cause more damage that good.