I was invited to imagine a world without heteronormativity for the podcast. You can also hear amazing interviews with people imagining worlds without injustice, ableism, single-use plastics, private transport, and many more to come. This is the trailer for the whole series:

The Parallel Effect

You can listen to my episode on The Parallel Effect Substack on the following links, as well as reading a summary there, and watching a video about the wonderful creation artist Audax Mrozik Gawler made in response: A kit to help young humans find their nodes of belonging and steward world-making between species, the KINNECT.

Substack link

Apple podcast link

Full transcript link

Below are the notes I wrote in preparation for my interview with Daz Chandler on the show. Read on for a little more written detail if you’re interested…

Just before we take a deep dive into the world you visited, how it looks and how it functions, would you mind elaborating a little on the concept of “benign variation”? How does it relate to the idea of normativity?

Benign variation is a concept from Gayle Rubin’s classic paper, Thinking Sex. It’s the idea that – instead of there being good and bad sexual identities, desires and practices – humans naturally have a whole range of sexualities (including asexualities) which are all equally valid & valuable, so long as they’re only ever acted on ethically and consensually.

Dominant cultural normativities create hierarchies between supposed normal and less normal sexualities, as well as genders, relationship styles, appearances, bodyminds, and all kinds of other things. Actually, the ways our bodies work, combined with the world we’re born into, and what happens over the course of our lives combine to form a vast array of different ways of experiencing and understanding things, including sex.

Benign variation is aligned with approaches like open normativities or pluriverses. In such approaches we recognise that people and communities will all have their stories, understandings and ways of doing things. But these are never imposed on others, and other stories and ways of doing things are held as equally valid and valuable. We might connect this to the ways in which ecological diversity is essential for ecosystems.

Sahana Chattopadhyay writes that pluriversal approaches regard many diverse, interconnected worlds, or ways of being, as coexisting, rather than a single, unified reality. Pluriversal approaches emphasize the value of multiple perspectives and experiences.

Alexis Shotwell defines open normativities as collectively crafted ways of being that shape our experiences and understandings, and are oriented toward widespread flourishing.

In terms of parallel worlds and alternative timelines, we know that many of the worlds we’ve visited so far have been almost identical to this one, until something happens that sets it on a different course. In this parallel world you’ve just arrived back from, were there any historical or cultural events that inspired this shift away from heteronormativity, or has it always been that way?

The world we visited was very much like ours until the point where people recognised – much earlier than we have – the links between personal and social disconnection and ecological crisis. They realised that if we didn’t address disconnection we would lose everything

This disconnection included any sense that some people, experiences, or ways of being were inherently more normal, valid or valuable than others. People realised that there is benign variation at all levels of experience. They woke up to the violence involved in disconnecting into better/worse, normal/abnormal, good/bad, etc.

In order for people to really get this – and to want to do something different – it was necessary to make it both global and personal. People had to see that we’d all lose everything if we carried on this way and they had to realise that normativities hurt them personally. 

This latter point involved understanding that normativities hurt both those who are excluded by them and those who are caught up in them. For example, normativities around sex hurt those who are sexually marginalised, they are a huge part of why so much non-consensual sex happens, and they are why people feel so unfulfilled sexually and have so much shame around sex. Normativities around gender hurt gender divergent people, and they hurt men and women who are trying to fit norms of masculinity and femininity. Normativities around how bodyminds should work exclude disabled and neurodivergent people, and they hurt those who conform to norms about how bodyminds should function, for example in education and in the workplace.

In the world I visited, people recognised that easing our suffering, others’ suffering, and the suffering of the planet were utterly interconnected.

What challenges has this world faced in implementing the benign variation model? Was there any significant resistance or unexpected consequences?

Two major challenges were around:

• Bringing new people up with this model, in families and education systems, and 
• Enabling those who had been brought up with the old model to shift to the new model

It was particularly challenging for everyone to face and forgive the personal and collective harms that had been done to them in the old model, and the harm that they had done or been complicit in themselves. 

Everyone was given a period of at least five years – over the course of a twenty-five year transition process – to really focus on making these shifts internally, with deep support from the people and systems around them, and flexibility to do this work in whatever way fitted best for them. Support included space to engage in solitary practices, mentorship from those who had already been through such periods, peer-support with others who were focusing on this work, and regular meetings in groups and communities engaged in similar practices.

Practically this period was enabled by things like: universal basic income, recognising all work as valid and not requiring unnecessary work, community living, and people downsizing to a much smaller sense of what counts as ‘enough’.

There’s so much to ask but I suppose my first question relates to your initial impression of the place. How did you know that you had travelled somewhere different? What immediate clues did this alternative realm provide?

I was immediately struck by the way that, in this world, people were encouraged to find the kinds of relationships, intimacies, life projects and so on that were nourishing to them and enabled them to flourish. They weren’t expected to fit others’ expectations, or cultural assumptions about how best to live, work and relate.

This meant that people were much more fulfilled, and more supportive of others being equally fulfilled. They weren’t trying to make themselves be a certain way in order to fit in, or to be what would be convenient or comfortable for somebody else. Nor were they putting pressure on others in that kind of way.

People seemed much less masked, more open and curious, and more okay with having periods of not knowing, of trying things out

I want to talk now about social structures and family dynamics…In a world without heteronormativity, how have family structures evolved? Are there new forms of kinship or caregiving arrangements?

All different relationship and family structures are seen as valid in this world. Care and domestic labour are valued as highly as other kinds of work, with everybody being given enough time to be with the close people in their lives. It’s expected that most children will have several adults involved in bringing them up, and all adults will be supported in how to parent well.

Also inner parenting and inner partnering is valued as highly as the outer kinds. Everyone is supported to get solitude for, and support around, their inner work. This means they learn how to be intimate and loving with themselves, honest and kind about their capacities and limitations, and able to ask for – and access – the support they need.

Everyone is seen as both needing of care and capable of offering care. They are supported to discover – and to communicate – what they need, and what they can offer. Again there’s a shared understanding that there’ll inevitably be benign variation in people’s needs and offerings.

How does this model affect parenting? What changes in how children are raised and educated about relationships and identity?

Children are raised that whatever shape their gender, sexuality, or self ends up taking is just fine, and it’s also fine when it shifts and changes over time. If physical or psychological support is needed for young people to feel comfortable and congruent in their bodyminds, that’s supported.

With heteronormativity gone, there’s a huge shift in how adults are with young people’s feelings. Instead of trying to programme boys not to be fearful, and girls not to be angry, for example, young people are encouraged to experience all their feelings. They are helped to learn how to be with themselves through tough feelings, instead of blaming out, shaming in, avoiding their feelings, or withdrawing from anything that risks bringing up pain.

Similarly all bodyminds and their capacities and limitations are valued, rather than some people being seen as better, more attractive, or more intelligent than others. 

What replaces traditional markers of adulthood, like marriage, in a society not built on normative ideals?

There are both celebratory and grieving rituals around key transition points. These recognise that different transitions will be meaningful to different people, and at different points in their lives. 

For example, key transitions might be major relationship formations, deepenings, changes or endings, with equal value placed on friend, family, erotic/romantic, colleague, and other kinds of relationships. Other key transitions might relate to major bodymind or life path decisions, struggles, openings or changes.

In contrast to our world where so many individuals struggle with normative ideas of desire and identity, it must be so liberating for folks – particularly children and teenagers – to be supported to grow into their authentic selves. How are young people guided in discovering and expressing their desires in a non-normative context?

This world is informed by Audre Lorde’s expansive concept of the erotic and a similarly expansive concept of intimacy.

This means that children and young people are encouraged to explore what ‘lights them up’ or ‘makes them feel most alive’ and to orient towards this in all areas of life. They don’t restrict desire to sex, or intimacy to romance. For example, this might include tuning into what gives them: a good feeling in their body, a sense of mental immersion/excitement, an experience of flow or being in the zone creatively, or a feeling of expansiveness, playfulness and curiosity, and/or safety, trust and comfort.

This has a huge impact on the world of work. All contributions that need to happen in this world do happen because there is benign variation in what people love doing, and because people are fully valued for what they contribute, including cleaning, serving, caring, and manual labour. It’s also totally okay to change direction in work through a lifetime, and just to try something for a while.

This also has a huge impact on the world of relationships. People go towards the relationship forms, and the people and other beings, that are a good fit with them and feel mutually nourishing. There is equal value placed on fleeting connections, long term ones, and everything in between. And there is a recognition of impermanence and loss in relationships without seeing this as a problem, or something to blame on others, or ourselves.

How does this world approach sex and relationship education? What does the curriculum emphasise to support the “benign variation” model?

A big shift is that relationship education is given at least as much time and energy as skills and knowledge education. It’s a cornerstone of the curriculum. 

It is recognised that people need teaching and practices about how to relate well with themselves, others and the world. Also, embodied and emotional learning is valued at least as highly as intellectual learning and learning practical skills.

It is also recognised that people have different ways of learning and different callings. Curriculums give a lot of time to play, and to helping people find the ways of learning and the kinds of work/play that are the best fit for them (e.g. learning through visual, audio, sensing, relating, etc.)

With benign variation there is no grading whatsoever! There’s just lots of support for people to find what ways of contributing are the best fit for their capacities and enthusiasms.

How does this world define and enforce the principles of consent and ethics?

This world moves away from capitalist-colonialist ways of relating with ourselves, others and the world. This is a deep shift because it means people are endeavouring never to speak or act from a place of trying to get something from someone, or to make them feel or behave a particular way.

There’s a valuing of all kinds of relationships. For example, there’s no hierarchy of biological over chosen relationships, romantic over friendship, or human over non human.

Non-consensual and unethical behaviours are understood to be rooted in personal and/or collective trauma. People are deeply supported to address this, both in themselves and in the systems they’re embedded in.

What role does language play in this society, particularly in relation to pronouns, labels, or identity terms?

With benign variation it’s possible to be more playful with language, rather than there being a sense that people have to use a limited number of words and agree on their meanings. There’s a culture of respecting the pronouns, names, labels and so on that feel the best fit for the person or community, and also of being open to this changing over time. There’s an open curiosity that asks ‘What does that mean for you (if you want to share)?’ rather than assuming. 

There’s also a valuing of non verbal forms of communication at least as highly as verbal ones: helping people to find the ways of expressing themselves that are the best fit for them.

How do art, media, and literature reflect this model of benign variation? Are there distinct storytelling styles or themes that emerge?

There’s a much more diverse range of creativity that is valued, and no hierarchies around high/low art, or what counts as ‘proper’ art. 

There has been quite a move away from linear storytelling which suggests people should be on paths towards certain kinds of ‘success’ or ‘happiness’ or ‘recovery’. Stories are often more cyclical and reflect the fact that there are inevitably times in our lives of more/less clarity, more ease and more challenge, endings and beginnings

There’s been a big move away from celebrity, towards recognising everyone’s value, and the value of small gestures, having/being enough, and easing suffering in simple ways

In a society free from heteronormativity, how is fashion affected? Do styles become more diverse, or is there a shift in how people use clothing to express themselves?

There are definitely more diverse styles and more diverse orientations to fashion. There’s acceptance and celebration of those who use clothing to express their energy or creativity, and those for whom it’s purely functional, and everything in between.

There is similar diversity in things like food and physical activity and creative pursuits: a recognition that it’s very meaningful and important to some, with support and community around that, but an acceptance that it’s fine for it to not be important as well.

How does the workplace accommodate or reflect this diversity in desires and relationships? Are there policies that support alternative family or relational structures?

Absolutely, for example there is a lot of support for people to take breaks from other forms of work to focus on outer/inner parenting or caring for themselves/others. There are some whose work is focused on these things.

People are always asked about who the close people and other beings in their lives are, rather than assuming any kind of relationship.

In housing, people are supported to find ways of living that are a good fit for them, with likeminded people. Support systems are embedded in these homes for when relational challenges inevitably come up. Such systems are viewed as vital as utilities like power and water.

How has this shift influenced global movements, such as feminism or LGBTQAI rights? Are these movements still distinct, or have they merged into broader frameworks?

With everyone recognising benign variation there are fewer movements around rights for particular marginalised groups. There are more movements towards everyone recognising and feeling their interconnectedness, and for addressing any remaining areas in the world where some are treated less well than others in any way.

Such movements are always led by those with lived experience, and the emphasis is on finding out what support they need around any challenges they still face and implementing that support.

When it comes to addressing any harms that still occur between people, and/or between people and other beings or the natural world, the emphasis is on hearing all of the stories and working together to heal trauma and to transform systems so that harm doesn’t continue.

In your view, what lessons can our current world learn from this other realm?

Everything! I want to live there! My only reservations are…

• We can’t ever really know for sure what would help. We need to embrace uncertainty and invite change, rather than creating new normativities to force on everyone in a further attempt to dominate and control. Even the kind of vision I’ve outlined here could lead to great suffering if it was made solid and static and grasped and imposed.
• Imagining such worlds can set up a gap between where we are and where we want to be. It feels really important to be with reality as it is, in order to be as wise and compassionate as possible with how things actually are. Otherwise there’s a risk that we end up constantly seeking for it to be how it was in some imagined past, or how we wish it could be in some imagined future (or parallel world). Can we recognise the deep pain and suffering that is present here without setting ourselves in opposition to this reality?

What would you say to someone in our reality, who is struggling to reconcile their sense of “normalcy” with this vision of diversity?

Start where you are. Whatever area you want to focus on (e.g. gender, sexuality, relationships, neurodiversity…), begin with deep self-reflection on the norms that you grew up with and those that are around in your culture at the moment. Explore how these have hurt you and disconnected you from yourself, others and the world. Then, instead of opposition, you can get alongside others who’re striving for justice and diversity in this area, and all areas.

The final chapter of the new edition of my book Rewriting the Rules, explores how we might take the first tender and tentative steps towards this kind of work, individually and collectively.

The post The Parallel Effect: A World Beyond Heteronormativity appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The first zine explored the meanings of queerness, creativity, and health, and what might be gained by bringing these things together. It invited readers into various queer creative health practices at the level of their bodyminds, their relationships, and their wider ecosystems.

This second zine invites us to consider what it would mean to ‘reasearch ourselves’ alongside – or instead of – external researchers studying queer experience. Many creative, spiritual, activist, and therapeutic traditions encourage such forms of self-exploration, into our gender and sexuality, and our experiences of ourselves beyond this.

Queer Creative Health 2 explores how we might research: how we identify ourselves and name our experiences, how our bodyminds work, what forms of care, creativity, and collectivity work for us, and how we relate to our wider ecosystems. Woven throughout is an exploration of collective and personal trauma, and the value of slowness.

You can download the pdf of the zine here. If you read the zine online you can click on the links to connect to all the resources mentioned.

Zeena Feldman has written a lovely review of the zines over on The Polyphony:

Zeena Feldman reviews Queer Creative Health, a zine series by Meg-John Barker produced for and with London-based LGBTQ+ charity Queercircle.

I am an academic. My professional culture is one of seriousness. It is a culture that asserts authority through empiricism and peer-review. It traffics in the language of objectivity and highly credentialled expertise. It isn’t a scene easily associated with playfulness or accessibility. Which is a shame because I like playfulness. And I don’t think one should need a PhD to lay claim to knowledge. This is why I love zines.

In many ways, zines are everything academia isn’t. They’re democratic. They’re radical. And they most definitely are not interested in respectability. Zines are teenage protest, insistent on liberation here and now, with no fucks to give. They are the antithesis of journal articles, which give middle age vibes, steeped in carefulness and a perennial insistence that more research is needed.

Or so I thought until I read Meg-John Barker’s just-published Queer Creative Health 2: Researching Ourselves (2025) and its predecessor, Queer Creative Health 1 (2023). These zines manage an unexpected hat trick: seamlessly combining emancipatory politics and a DIY ethic with research rigour and care. The zines are fun but they’re also earnest. Barker is a writer and zine maker, a former therapist and a recovering academic (my words, not theirs) who has published extensively on sex, gender and relationships. In other words, someone well-practiced in guiding people along difficult corridors of thought, tenderly.

They created Queer Creative Health (QHC) for and with Queercircle, a Greenwich-based LGBTQ+ charity that “believe(s) in the radical potential of the arts for individual, collective and societal transformation”. Queercircle calls itself an “organisation-in-process”. I like that descriptor a lot. It’s an ambitious and bracingly honest remit that regards change as life’s constant companion. This is an organisation committed to the journey, not one hung up on the destination. Read more…

The post New zine! Queer Creative Health 2 appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I thought it’d be a good time to share the write-up of an interview I gave earlier this year to the Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy conference about working with outer and inner relationship diversity.

The interview was aimed at therapists, but is hopefully relevant to anyone interested in working with their own outer and inner relationships. Alex and I will be covering many of these themes in more depth in the new book.

Who are you and where are you at in your journey?

I’m a full time writer now, but my background is in academia, activism and therapy. I write therapeutically. By that I mean that I write about therapeutic topics for a general audience (to make them more accessible than they are in a lot of books aimed at therapists) and also that I focus on writing of various kinds as a therapeutic practice.

I felt some sense of dislocation being asked to talk at a therapy conference, having spent the last four years on the other side of that room – as a client. But I have a feeling that perhaps I’ve learnt more from this recent period than from the previous twenty years, especially about inner and outer relationships.

Why are we having this conversation with you?

Probably because it was Dominic Davies – of Pink Therapy – and myself who came up with the acronym GSRD (for gender, sex and relational diversity) which I consequently wrote the free BACP resource about (hopefully useful starting point for anyone who is unfamiliar with these areas).

One of the many reasons we decided on that acronym was because we wanted to highlight that relationship diversity was just as important for therapists to consider as gender and sexual diversity – and also interrelated with them.

Relationship diversity means the diverse ways in which people understand and conduct their relationships – usually focusing on romantic relationships. For example, it includes whether people are single or coupled, monogamous or non monogamous, and whether they experience romantic attraction or not, or prioritise romantic or other kinds of relationships.

What is your approach?

I was initially a fairly mainstream psychologist and my main therapeutic learning (in my psychology degree) was cognitive behavioural therapy, with a person-centred counselling counselling certificate on the side. Then I shifted academically into a more critical form of psychology informed by feminism and social constructionism – eventually into intersectional understandings.

I trained therapeutically in existential therapy, and more recently have been mainly informed by trauma and somatic approaches. These days I see my approach as plural – I try to consider everything on (at least) four different levels, and let those understandings ripple through and influence each other. These levels are: 

• The existential level of addressing the challenges of being human and making meaning. 
• The sociocultural level of living in a world of certain norms and the systems and structures that enforce these. 
• The relational level that we are brought up in relationship in ways that impact our relationships with others and ourselves now.  
• The internal level that we are embodied beings who manifest all forms of bodymind diversity (sometimes called neurodiversity) based on the differences we are born with and the ones we develop due to our experiences.

What are we going to cover in the rest of our conversation?

I thought we might explore:

• A bit more about why we need the R in GSRD
• What relationship diversity looks like
• How it impacts mental health
• What an affirmative approach to relationship diversity might look like
• How we might engage people in ‘how’ they relate rather than ‘what’ relationships or relationship styles they have
• Relationship trauma as a form of cultural and developmental trauma
• Working with our inner relationships – as a key way of addressing our outer relationships

Why do we need the R in GSRD?

Most therapy books and trainings tend to cover LGBT issues, or gender and sexuality (often as shorthand for LGBT – focused on how therapists can work with people with minority genders and sexualities).

We added relationships because gender, sexuality and relationships are inextricably linked. Dominant culture has a binary/hierarchical model of all three: gender wise we can either be a man or a woman, sexually we can be attracted to the opposite/same sex (making us straight or gay), and we act out that attraction in the form of a romantic and sexual relationship. The normative monogamous coupled relationship is the key place in which we’re expected to play out our gendered role and manifest our sexuality.

This can also lead us to question the idea of gender, sexual and relationship minorities – as there are actually many many people who do not entirely fit this binary/hierarchical model of gender, sexuality and relationships. This includes those who don’t take on traditional gender roles, those who don’t have kids, those who divorce, those who stop being sexual in their relationship, and those who live alone, for example. It can be more useful to talk of marginalised gender, sexualities and relationships; to consider the degree to which each person is marginalised by the gender/sex/relationship norms and ideals, and whether they embrace or resist that marginalisation. Like the term neurodivergence, we could also use GSR divergence to name those genders, sexualities and relationship forms that diverge from normativity.

We can trace the roots of current dominant culture normativities – and their impact – through gender, sex and relationships and how these intersects with race, class and disability. The focus on being normal is actually pretty recent historically and has its roots in scientific projects of categorisation in the 19th and early 20th century. 

At the same time that scientists and doctors were conducting research and writing books trying to determine which races were inferior (to justify colonisation and/or enslavement), the eugenics movement was taking hold in many countries to try to stop people deemed inferior – generally by race, class and/or disability – from reproducing. Essentialist arguments were also being made for gender differences to justify women remaining in the home and looking after and reproducing the workforce unpaid – something that capitalism relied upon. 

It was in this environment that we saw the origins of detailed classifications of sexual and gender ‘deviance’, as well as the first classifications of mental disorders of course. We can’t tease these intersecting forms of oppression apart; they’re all rooted in the scientific assumption that normal is important and that anyone deemed less normal is also less valuable, less human, and less deserving of compassion – or that they need to be fixed or cured and brought in line with normal.

The legacy of such approaches continues today and has a massive impact on where we’re at now.

How does relationship diversity impact mental health?

From a trauma informed and shame sensitive approach to mental health, we need to be mindful about the relationship styles and statuses of everyone.

Shame is all about normativities. We’re taught what it is and is not ok to be and we internalise that – from the cultural messages we receive, and from the people who were around us (growing up and in the present).

Relationships are a key area where this plays out (like gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and more) because they’re  seen as so fundamental to successful selfhood. As with gender and sexuality, this impacts everyone: those who fit normativity, those who’re marginalised, and those who are invisible

Impact on those who stay within relationship normativity (whether because it feels like a good fit or because they fear doing otherwise)

As with the pressures on straight and cisgender people around sexuality and gender there is huge pressure on people in normative relationship styles to do relationships right, and often a lot of fear and shame around getting it wrong. Given the precariousness of relationships these days – and everything that gets bound up with romantic love and sex – many people are constantly in fear and shame of becoming suddenly single, of getting caught up in secret non-monogamy, or of finding themselves in a ‘sexless’ or ‘loveless’ relationship (i.e. the ‘others’ of the ideal of coupled monogamous love). Trying to fit rigid cultural or personal rules – rather than being authentic and flexible – also takes a massive toll on mental and physical health.

Impact on those with marginalised ways of doing relationships 

As with lesbian, gay and trans people, single/solo, openly non-monogamous, and asexual/aromantic people face all kinds of subtle and overt discriminations, from constantly being expected to explain themselves, through to questions raised by social services over their capacity to parent, lack of media representation in any positive way, attempts to convert them, and lack of legal recognition of their relationships (everything being set up to favour romantic couples and nuclear families). All this takes a toll on mental health, from daily micro aggressions, to having to constantly come out and educate others – or stay closeted and hide, with the sense of precariousness this involves.

Impact on those who are invisible in their relationships

Those who are non-binary or a- in their gender or sexuality are often invisible within cultural binaries, with questions posed about whether they are even ‘real’ or exist. Think about the common assumptions that bi people are really gay or straight, non-binary people are going through a phase, or asexual people are confused and just need a good sexual partner. Invisibly marginalised people generally have worse mental health than visibly marginalised people, likely due to the struggle to find supportive community (double discrimination from both normative and visibly marginalised communities), and having to constantly justify their lived experience to self and others. We’re brought up against the fact we’re not seen as valid by others constantly. For example, you might experience this every time a form or professional asks ‘do you have a partner’ and you have to say ‘no’, rather than the honest answer of ‘yes I have three’, or ‘yes, I’m self partnered’, or ‘no but I have several people who occupy the role that partners take in partnered-people’s lives’.

What does relationship diversity look like?

When I was writing the BACP resource I included a paragraph or two for each major gender, sexuality and relationship style I was aware of. In a previous book I’d only thought of monogamy and non-monogamy for ‘relationship style’, but writing this document helped me realise there are at least as many relationship styles as there are sexualities and genders. 

Like sexuality and gender it’s helpful to conceive of relationships on multiple dimensions. Some we’ve already considered are where people are at on a dimensions of: monogamy to non-monogamy, single to partnered, aromantic to highly romantic, asexual to highly sexual. We could also add dimensions  around whether people are engaging in sex and/or relationships for emotional and/or transactional reasons, and more.

Dimensions are important because none of these things are binary, for example many people occupy a position somewhere between lifelong monogamy and open non-monogamy, including monogamish relationships, affairs, dating, hook-ups, friends-with-benefits, etc.

Sexual Configurations Theory – by Sari Van Anders – is a useful theory that distinguishes between ‘erotic’ and ‘nurturing’ connections, and how these can be separate or connected, and more or less important or unimportant in people’s lives, in addition to being conducted in diverse ways with the same, or different, others.

When considering relationship style with clients we also need to be aware of the way they intersect with race, class, disability, and other intersecting axes of oppression – for instance in terms of what relationship styles are available within a particular community or culture, and how people are seen if they take up various styles. For example, Nathan Rambukkana has written about the ways in which white polyamorous people are afforded legal rights which are still denied to polygamous immigrants (polygamy actually being a majority set of relationship styles across much of the world) – with white western polyamorous people being represented as authentically choosing their lifestyle, while polygamous people are often assumed to be coerced or inferior. Forms of non-monogamy associated with people from working class backgrounds – like swinging or dogging – are also often regarded as inferior to middle class associated ones. And the ways in which disabled people navigate their sexual and intimate relationships are often denigrated – related to the view that disabled people aren’t attractive and shouldn’t be sexual.

What might an affirmative approach to relationship diversity look like?

It would recognise that different relationship styles work for different people (and at different points in their lives). 

It would treat all relationship styles as equally valid. 

It would bring these themes into the therapy room with those in normative relationships just as much as those in non-normative ones. 

As with gender and sexuality, relationship normativity can have just as detrimental an impact on people within normativity as outside of it, and they are also the least likely to have reflected on their relationships styles or to have considered other options which might be a better fit for them. So there is an argument for bringing the diverse ways of doing relationships into the room with people in normative relationships. For instance, we might ask ourselves if we would ask a polyamorous person whether they had ever considered being monogamous, might we also ask a monogamous person whether they had ever considered being polyamorous?

As with gender and sexuality, if a therapist wants to work in more relationship affirmative ways, the most vital thing is to do their own personal reflective work around their relationships. And, as with all intersecting axes of oppression, it is particularly vital that those within the norm do this work because we can be unintentionally retraumatising/oppressive when we’re in the assumed norm and haven’t examined that position and its impact on ourselves and others. 

Staying clued up about relationship diversity by reading or watching relevant material can also be useful so clients aren’t required to educate you – although, as always, it’s important to check out what a particular client’s meanings and experiences are rather than assuming.

Generally relationship diversity is taken to mean how people conduct their intimate relationships, for example whether they are monogamous or non-monogamous, but we could usefully expand the concept out to include all of the diverse ways in which people relate with themselves, with other humans, and with the non-human world. We might gently challenge the culturally dominant norms that prioritise some forms of relationships way over others (e.g. romance over friendship, exclusive over casual, with-others over with-self, with-humans over with-animals, objects, projects or passions). We could relate this to how we value some lives so much more highly than others – and the implications of this for global injustice and climate crisis.

How might we engage people in ‘how’ they relate rather than ‘what’ relationships or relationship styles they have?

Too much focus on the ‘what’ of relationships (e.g. single/partnered, monogamous/non-monogamous, romantic/friendship), can take us away from possibilities between or beyond these binaries, as well as from the more important question of ‘how’ we relate. 

There’s a free zine on my website – relationship struggles – that covers this in more depth. My sense is, that across all people of all relationship styles there is a real lack of knowledge of the ways in which people develop – and enact – relationship patterns. This means that people are often searching for the ‘right’ relationship (the one), or the ‘right’ relationship style (the poly grail) – as I did myself for many years – in order to solve the problem of painful relationships, rather than exploring what their relationship patterns are or how they might develop relationships in ways that are a better fit for them.

We’re often looking for safety, belonging and dignity from a particular relationship, or community. These come to represent – to us – things we lacked or lost previously, putting them under greater pressure and making them more precarious.

How is relationship trauma usefully seen as a form of cultural and developmental trauma?

There is significant cultural and developmental trauma around relating which plays out in relationship struggles and abusive dynamics.

We might think of cultural trauma as the normative social messages we receive about what ways of being are acceptable, good and right, and what are unacceptable, bad and wrong. Developmental trauma includes the messages we receive growing up about what aspects of ourselves are acceptable, good and right, and what are unacceptable, bad and wrong. These forms of trauma are highly interconnected, of course, as families and education systems often pass on culturally normative messages – about what emotions are acceptable to experience/express for different genders, for example, or what desires it is acceptable to feel or not feel and how it’s acceptable to act upon them – or not.

In his book, therapist Dwight Turner writes about how this operates in terms of intersecting oppressions – how we project out what we don’t want to acknowledge in ourselves onto individuals/groups and Other them (projective identification), and how we – when we are marginalised ourselves – kill parts of us in order to survive every day in normativity (internalised oppression).

In relation to relationship diversity, then, we could attend to the projections we – and others – make to those who are relationally different from ourselves. How do we/they talk about older spinsters/bachelors, for example, or the imagined relationships of young people these days, or cultural others? What aspects of our own intimate lives do we feel we have to kill off – our hide – in order to be accepted around the water cooler or at the family gathering?

To support everyone to  move towards more mutually nourishing relationships I think it’s useful to help people tune into their relationship patterns – in order that they can be more conscious of these and how they play out and gradually try to shift them (for example, we might think of patterns around fight/fawn/flight/freeze trauma responses, or blame out/blame in/avoid/withdraw shame responses).

It’s also useful to help people tune in – honestly and kindly – to the ways their bodyminds work (due to inherent neurodiversity and/or trauma and/or chosen values), and to learn what kinds of relationships – and ways of doing relationships – work for them. They could practise how to communicate this with others and focus on close relationships where there is a good fit. For example, they might consider speed of relationship development, preferences for types of social contact, boundaries around behaviours, etc. This applies regardless of type of relationship, of course, not just to conventional partnerships.

In all of this though it is vital to keep hold of the understanding of relationship diversity and the sense that all consensual relationship styles as equally valid, rather than being tempted to pathologise (e.g. thinking that people are polyamorous, aromantic, or sex workers because of their trauma, attachment style, or neurodivergence).

Why are you so keen on working with our inner relationships – as a key therapeutic process and to address our outer relationships?

One – increasingly popular – way of helping people with their trauma patterns or relationship patterns  is to work with their inner relationship diversity, exploring their plural systems, internal families, inner teams, or constellations. 

You might be familiar with Dick Schwartz’s Internal family systems model, for example, or the work of Mick Cooper and John Rowan, or Janina Fisher in relation to trauma, or Philip Bromberg in a psychoanalytic context, or Miller Mair in personal construct theory. 

This is the approach that I’ve taken to myself – or rather ourselves! – over the last decade, and particularly in grappling with the traumatic last few years – there are two free books and two free zines on the topic of plurality on our website.

When it comes to relationships we can usefully see our foregrounded – and disowned – trauma patterns or relationship survival strategies as selves or parts. For example the fight, fawn, flight and freeze ones mentioned before. It may be that we have a tendency to foreground one of those in relationships, or different ones in different kinds of relationships. We may be drawn to continually reproducing a fight/fawn, controlling/hypervigilant, or a needy/avoidant dynamic, with others – for example. Or we may find ourselves on opposite sides of familiar dynamics in different relationships

Plural work is about becoming more conscious of all parts of the self – or selves: welcoming them all in, balancing them out, and improving communication between them so we are not eclipsed by them when triggered, for example.

It can involve gradually understanding the masking mechanisms which kept the parts of us we weren’t allowed to be hidden, loosening these, bringing split off selves home, hearing and holding the feelings they protected us from, and learning who and how they can be now that they’re home.

We may well find selves that map on to all the things we’ve disliked most in others. Certainly we’re likely to find inner oppressors and abusers, as well as survivors and victims. We can also find things that we’ve delegated to others in the past (e.g. parts of us who can be strong or vulnerable when we’ve tended to try to make others into ‘the strong one’ or ‘the vulnerable one’ in relationships).

In addition to therapy, we think it can be helpful for people to do their own work/play to get to know their selves and to communicate between them. We write a lot – and try to model – journalling between selves, talking to each other, drawing our selves, exploring them in dreams, fantasies and creative writing, and inviting them explicitly into different aspects of life (e.g. cooking, inner rituals).

Plurality is absolutely not just a queer thing – straight and cis people have just as complex self systems as queer and trans people – and often also have selves who are differently gendered and/or have different erotic and/or relational desires. However people from various queer communities – in addition to cultural or spiritual communities – may have more available understandings and practices for exploring plurality. For example, some trans and non-binary people embrace multiple gender positions, some polyamorous people seek out different relationships for different selves to be foregrounded, some kinksters explicitly play with dominant/submissive parts or engage in play in order to experience child selves, or animalistic selves.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity – Pema Chödrön

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In 2021 I published free books on Plurality, Trauma, and Consent – the main themes which I’d been blogging about during the pandemic. The new free books go back further in time to cover the themes I’ve been writing about since I began blogging, particularly gender, sex,  relationships, and mental health.

As with my latest zine (which I made five years on from making the first Plural Selves zine) these free books mark an imporant anniversary for me. It’s a decade on from 2012: the year when I published the first edition of Rewriting the Rules (my first self-help style book) and started blogging.

It feels helpful, somehow, to bring all the material from this vital period of my life together, and – perhaps – to draw a line there, marking a turning point towards what I might create in the future. Whatever that is will be deeply shaped by this time of external and internal emergency/transformation/paradigm shift, and my learnings from that experience, and from others who are writing on such themes.

Caveat

I begin each of the new free books with a caveat that some of the earlier pieces may not represent (all of) my current thoughts and feelings on these topics. I’ve learned so much more from my own experiences, and from engaging with other people’s work, in the last ten years.

I hope – as with my older published books – that people will read these free books mindful of the time and context in which some of the content was written, and with compassion for the places where the language or ideas are limited and/or have now been replaced with something more inclusive, nuanced, or helpful.

The Books

Here’s a list of the new free books, and what you can expect to find in them:

Relationships

This book contains all my writing on love and relationships. It goes back furthest because these topics were the focus of most of my first blog posts after Rewriting the Rules was published. It also includes some of my most recent writing on slow relating and break-ups.

The book is divided into sections on love (mostly the impact of cultural love norms or amatonormativity), crushes and new relationship energy, slow relating, monogamy and non-monogamy, conflict and communication, and break-ups.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my published books Rewriting the Rules, The Secrets of Enduring Love (with Jaqui Gabb), and How To Understand Your Relationships (which Alex and I will hopefully be writing next year).

Download here.

Sex

This book contains all my writing about sex. It’s divided into sections on sex ed, sex advice, sex in relationships (particularly sexual incompatibility), sexual desires, sexual practices, and BDSM/kink (the theme of by far my most popular blog posts for some reason!)

This book, and the relationships and feelings ones, contain versions of several of my summary posts from The Meg-John & Justin podcast, (with links to where you can listen to the audio episodes) as well as posts from this website and elsewhere.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my published book with Justin, Enjoy Sex (How, When and IF You Want To) as well as to the next free book – and published books – on sexuality.

Download here.

Sexuality

This book starts with a general section which covers figuring out your sexuality, coming out, and the diversity and fluidity of sexuality. Then we have sections on heteronormativity and heterosexuality, bisexuality and pansexuality, queer issues (like nature/nurture and same-sex relationship recognition), further sexualities (like kink and sapiosexuality), and porn.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my graphic guides on Queer and Sexuality (with Jules Scheele), as well as Alex and my How to Understand Your Sexuality.

Download here.

Gender

Like sexuality, this book starts with a general section which deals with gender diversity and fluidity, my vision for gender affirmative and inclusive therapy, and the future of gender. Then we have sections on trans (including pieces on the trans moral panic, trans time and space, and trans sex) and on non-binary genders (including my post coming out as non-binary in 2015!) The book ends with a couple of older pieces about understanding masculinities and femininities.

This book is hopefully a good companion to my graphic guide to Gender (with Jules Scheele) as well as to Alex and my How to Understand Your Gender, Life Isn’t Binary, and the edited collection Non-Binary Lives.

Download here.

Mental Health

This book includes most of my writing about madness and mental health which isn’t specific to trauma (which has its own full book).

The mental health book starts with a number of general articles covering my thoughts on mental health, mostly focused on why we need to understand it at a sociocultural and sociopolitical level, as well as at the level of individual experience, and why we need to challenge mad/sane and ill/well binaries. After this, the book includes sections on mental health and relationships, self-help, mindfulness, and depression.

I also included a section on new year resolutions towards the end of this book because I’ve written so many pieces about this over the years, and because I wasn’t sure where else to put them! My critiques of new year resolutions are quite similar to my critiques of self-help and self-improvement more broadly. This book ends with a short piece on therapy, and a couple of pieces that touch on plurality and madness – another topic that has its own free books.

These books, and the next one, are hopefully good companions to Alex and my book Hell Yeah Self-Care!, my book on Mindfulness, and Jules and my forthcoming graphic guide on trauma and mental health (hopefully arriving 2024).

Download here.

Feelings

Linked to the mental health book, the free book on feelings covers emotional struggles and emotional experiences more broadly. It starts with a couple of earlier pieces about being with feelings, which eventually lead to my Staying With Feelings and Welcome Monster Feelings zines. Then there are a number of posts about happiness and why we might be suspicious of approaches that encourage us to strive for happiness.

After this there’s a section about other feelings include anger, failure, gratitude and more. Several of these posts are more personal reflections on my own experiences, as are the three ‘memorial’ posts on themes of loss and grief that follow. This book ends with another short piece about therapy, including ideas and practices from some of the main therapy approaches.

Download here.

Writing

The shortest free book is on writing – something that I plan to write plenty more about. But I was able to find 50 pages which seemed enough for a brief book (the others are mostly around 100 pages long).

This book starts with my essay about queer writing and writing queerly (for anyone, not just for queers!) and includes a few other pieces about how I write and my advice for people who want to start writing. In this book I’ve also included some material about journalling and zining, as well as a piece I wrote about purpose and integrity.

Download here.

You can find links to all of the free books here.

The post More free books – happy new year! appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In this episode, Ruby is exploring how their own gender feels to them, speaking to her sibling and partner as well as other gender non-confirming and non-binary people about their experiences. She also hears from Meg-John Barker about what gender even is, the ways that we all go on a journey with gender throughout our lives, and the impacts these conversations are having.

Further resources

• Gender: A Graphic Guide.
• How to Understand Your Gender.
• Free Gender Zine.

The post In Touch with Ruby Rare: Gender Non-conformity appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I worked at London Friend as a volunteer counsellor there for several years, and it has a very fond place in my heart, so I was glad to be chosen – along with 49 other people – to offer my words of celebration. I said…

London Friend is where I learnt most about therapy – as well as a good deal about myself – from my amazing supervisor, from the other counsellors, and from many extraordinary people I worked with, who I still remember with much fondness.

I’m sure you’ll hear this over and over again, but London Friend is deeply special for its friendliness! Every time I popped in, I was warmly greeted by staff who made it their business to learn about, and value, every single person who walked through the door. Read more…

Check out the words of all 50 London Friend-friends here, as they accumulate over the year.

You can also see me visiting London Friend and talking about it in this video by James Marcus Tucker and Michael Urwin from Peruvian Tree Productions.

Thanks again to London Friend for being such a wonderful home to me and to so many others. Do support their work, and get in touch with them if you’re an LGBTQ+ Londoner looking for support and/or somewhere to volunteer.

The post Happy birthday London Friend! appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The idea with all these books is to be a gentle, friendly guide to how gender, sexuality, and relationships work, and how to understand your own relationship with these aspects of ourselves. So this time we cover:

• What sexuality is and the different relationships people can have with it, encompassing diverse forms of asexuality and allosexuality
• How the world around us generally understands sexuality, and the impact that has on us
• Our experiences of sexuality growing up
• Our experiences of sexuality now
• How we can live our sexualities, in terms of identifying, expressing and practicing them
• How we navigate our sexualities in relationships of various kinds
• Finding support and community around our sexualities, if we want to

In this book, in particular, we recognise that our sexuality or asexuality can take us towards delight, pleasure, belonging, and freedom, and it can also be a place where we experience trauma, shame, isolation, and restriction. For most of us there will be elements of both, especially given the stigma around diverse sexualities, and the commonality of non-consensual sex. Hopefully one of the strengths of the book is that it encompasses how all of these things impact our relationship to our sexualities, and how we can engage with them.

We were very pleased to have Jules Scheele contribute a wonderful cover, and several drawings, to the book again. And this time another wonderful comic creator, Erika Moen, contributed a lovely forward. We hope you enjoy it

The post New book out today! How to Understand Your Sexuality appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

You can listen to the podcast here, or check out the video version below.

The post Beyond Boxes appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Gender reveal parties have been called problematic because they’ve started wildfires, but why are they problematic when it comes to how we think about gender

Wildfires aside, the main problem is that gender reveal parties reinforce several ideas about gender which are pretty bad for kids, and for society in general. Three main ones are: 

• That gender is the most important thing we can know about a person, 
• That we can know what gender somebody is going to be by knowing what their genitals are like, and 
• That gender is binary (they’re either a boy or they’re a girl).

These ideas are bad for all kids.

These ideas bad for any kids who don’t end up conforming to sex and gender norms, like intersex, trans, and non-binary kids, because they mean that those kids will have a far greater battle to be recognised in their sex/genders than they would have done if we didn’t make such a big thing of sex/gender at the start of their life.

These ideas are also bad for all kids because they set them up to believe that the division between girls and boys, women and men, is a really important one, and that they need to conform to rigid ideas of what it means to be a girly girl or a ‘big brave boy’, a feminine woman or a masculine man.

They take place before the child is born, so do they actually affect the child?  

We know that from birth onwards, and perhaps even before birth, the gender attitudes of the people around a child have a huge impact on the kid. The famous ‘Baby X’ studies found that adults who were given the same baby to look after behaved very differently towards them depending on whether they were dressed in pink or blue. Babies dressed in pink were treated more gently, given dolls to play with, and assumed to be ‘upset’ if they cried. Babies dressed in blue were treated more roughly, given trucks, and assumed to be ‘angry’ if they cried.

Scientists like Cordelia Fine and Sari Van Anders have found that such different treatment has a big impact on our physiology, including the ways our brains wire up, and our levels of circulating hormones. We’re literally shaping kids’ bodies and brains when we treat them differently according to their gender. 

The BBC documentary No More Boys and Girls showed that, by primary school, kids raised like this all believed that boys were better than girls and that girls should aspire to be ‘pretty’ rather than having career goals. Boys found it difficult to ask for support when they were struggling, and couldn’t come up for words for emotions other than anger. We can see the toll that all of this takes in later life when we consider gender pay inequalities, toxic low self esteem and body dissatisfaction in women, and the high rates of suicide and aggression in men, for example. 

It all starts with the idea that the gender of a kid is the most important thing about them.

Why do you believe that gender reveal parties no longer have a place in 2020? Did they ever have a place?

 
I don’t believe they ever had a place. Looking back in time, and around the world today, we find that this idea that people can be divided into two ‘opposite’ genders is actually a pretty new, western thing. Many places and times have celebrated gender diversity as something sacred, have had more than two gender categories, and have regarded gender as only one feature of a person among many, not something to determine their whole lifecourses.

Another reason to leave gender reveal parties in 2020 is the increasing awareness, in our culture, of intersex, trans and non-binary people. Between one and two percent of babies are born with some variation of sex characteristics. In the past, such babies often received surgical interventions to make their genitals conform to norms of what we think male or female genitals should look like. Such surgeries can be risky, can deaden sexual sensation in later life, and can lead to later struggles if the decision is made in a different direction from the way that person ends up experiencing their gender. The need to ‘reveal’ the gender of a baby is part of a cultural pressure which makes parents more likely to believe that they should ask for such surgical interventions, rather than waiting until the child themselves is able to make that choice consensually – unless there’s actually a good medical reason for surgery.

Also, now that we know that over a third of adults experience their gender as to some extent the other gender, neither gender, or both gender, and that many people identify as trans and non-binary, we should be wary of anything that puts people in a box regarding gender that it’s hard to move out of later. 

What would a better approach be?

Some parents are now raising all kids gender-free until they’re old enough to make a decision about what gender they experience themselves as being – if any. Even if we don’t go that far, we can clue ourselves up about the strong impact of rigid gender stereotypes on all kids, and work to challenge these in our own childrearing. 

For example, on the No More Boys and Girls documentary they tried providing all kids with gender diverse toys and clothes and allowing them to make their own choices, they deliberately exposed kids to people who worked in non-stereotypical occupations like a male ballet dancer and a female mechanic, and they did activities that showed the kids how equal boys and girls were on physical strength and all kinds of activities at that age. 

It’s important that schools and families move in this direction, towards raising human beings who have all the choices available to them, rather than restricting their future possibilities, and later mental health, with rigid gender stereotypes.

Trans author and educator S. Bear Bergman also suggests that, while things remain so tough for gender diverse people, we could consider having gender reveal parties for people when they come out as trans or non-binary. What might it be like – for everyone – if we saw gender creativity as something to celebrate, rather than something to commiserate? What if we regarded trans, intersex, and non-binary people as a gift – as artist Travis Alabanza puts it – who have something vital to teach everybody about the beautiful, unique, complexity of all of our genders.

Find out more

There’s more on these topics in my books Gender: A Graphic Guide, How to Understand Your Gender, and Life Isn’t Binary. There’s also a free zine for exploring gender here.

If you enjoyed this, please consider supporting my Patreon here.

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Initially I had some reticence around my involvement because, while I know plenty about gender, I’m no expert on attachment theory, which is the therapeutic approach that The Bowlby Centre focuses on. I learnt about it back in my psychology degree and taught the basics of it as a psych lecturer, but never went much further than that. My own psychotherapy training was existential, so I drew on other theories for understanding how people tick. 

While I’m always happy to do gender 101, having written Gender: A Graphic Guide with that aim, I felt like I wanted to do more than that here: to find some ways to weave gender and attachment together. While all therapists need to be mindful of gender diversity, aware of their own gender, and practice affirmatively, I wanted to explore what attachment therapists, in particular, might gain from exploring gender in depth.

Attachment

Fortunately, in the weeks leading up to the event I realised that I have actually been engaging deeply with attachment understandings over the past couple of years, just without always naming it as such. During my deep dive into trauma many of the authors I’ve been reading have been informed by attachment theory, in addition to more recent understandings of trauma. In fact it could be argued that John Bowlby was one of the first theorists and practitioners to highlight what we now call developmental trauma which is when – for whatever reason – parents are unable to regulate their children’s emotions and to help them get to the point of being able to self-regulate.

My most recent trauma read – Nurturing Resilence by Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell – sets out the somatic experiencing approach to working with trauma. This, along with sensorimotor psychotherapy, is one of the main embodied trauma approaches, and it is grounded in the attachment theory of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. So I now have a greater appreciation for how what I’ve been working with is, in fact, all about attachment. 

One way of understanding the plural work that I’ve been doing throughout lockdown is as a journey towards what’s called ‘earned secure attachment’. This is the sense that if we did not have secure attachment – and the eventual capacity to emotionally regulate – as kids, we can develop this as adults. It relates to Pete Walker – and others’ – idea that we can reparent ourselves, and be reparented by committee (therapists, groups, and/or friends with whom we practice securely attached relationships and coregulation of emotions).

The rest of this post will begin with a brief overview of attachment theory, in case you aren’t familiar with it, explaining why it’s useful to explore it alongside gender (and sexuality, and relationship style). I’ll then include my answers to the questions which Jane and I explored in our conversation at the conference.

What does attachment theory say?

I was fascinated to read in Kathy and Stephen’s book that Bowlby was spurred into his work by his own experiences as a kid. He was mostly cared for by a nanny when he was a child, and she left when he was four years old, which devastated him. He was then sent to boarding school when he was seven, which he grew to believe were detrimental for children’s well-being: something born out by much subsequent research and therapeutic work on boarding school syndrome. 

It was useful to read that, right from the start, links were made between attachment style and the wider cultural norms around how kids were treated. Bowlby also worked closely with boys who’d been arrested for criminal behaviour. I’d previously assumed attachment theory to be quite an individualistic approach: locating our struggles purely in early childhood experience.

This linked, for me, to Gabor Maté’s more recent work on trauma. Maté argues that current cultural norms of child-rearing result in the high levels of developmental trauma and troubled attachment that we see, and that we should be addressing these at a structural and systemic level, not just the level of individuals or families. He suggests that the pressures on parents in the culturally normative forms of nuclear families, under neoliberal capitalism and economic crisis, mean that most are simply unable to provide secure attachment and the kind of emotional regulation that their children need.

Parents need far more practical and emotional support themselves in order to raise kids in ways that meet their emotional and relational needs. However, our culture has moved far away from models of extended families and sustainable communities of care which might provide this. One consequence of the current system is that many kids end up looking to peers (and, perhaps later, partners) to meet unmet early attachment needs, who are ill-equipped to do so, and often act in retraumatising ways.

Attachment theory argues that children need a safe haven with their caregiver/s: a caring, protective space they can return to to be soothed when they are stressed. They need a secure base: a stable attachment relationship with one consistently available caregiver which provides a template for their later relationships in life. Over time the child becomes more and more able to move away from this secure base. It is the knowledge that they can move away and come back that means that they gradually develop the capacity to be more independent and look after themselves and their own emotions in the way they were looked after in their secure base.

Bowlby’s colleague Mary Ainsworth developed attachment theory in her research with infants who were left alone with a stranger by their caregiver. She found that those who did not have this kind of ‘secure attachment’ developed different forms of ‘insecure attachment’. An ‘anxious-ambivalent’ attachment is where the child is highly distressed without their caregiver and may be either angry or helpless when they return. An ‘anxious avoidant’ attachment is where they avoid or ignore their caregiver and don’t show distress at them leaving, or much reaction to them returning. ‘Disorganised attachment’  was added by Mary Main and relates to more inconsistent attachment behaviour.

Later theories mapped these attachment styles onto adult relationship behaviours, delineating between secure attachment (flexible, good at connection and at discerning nourishing from risky relationships) and insecure forms of attachment including: ‘anxious preoccupied’ (needy and dependent), ‘dismissive-avoidant’ (independent and not wanting intimacy), and ‘fearful avoidant’ (desiring close connection and finding it very difficult).

So both attachment theory, and the more recent trauma theories which develop it, propose that a key role of caregivers is to regulate the child’s emotional state, meaning that the child can learn how to do so themselves long term. This means learning how to calm ourselves in times of heightened emotions such as fear, sadness, anger, and frustration. Coregulation is when caregivers attune to how their child is feeling, and engage in back and forth interaction to understand – and meet – their needs, soothing them when stressful events occur. 

If we are met in such a way we learn how to soothe and calm ourselves when tough things happen and our bodies go into more reactive modes (self-regulation). We’ll also find it easier to form good connections and to reach out to them when we need to. Without such an early ‘secure attachment’ we’re likely to be overwhelmed by tough events and emotions, to engage in survival strategies to avoid them, and we may well struggle to discern nourishing from risky relationships, and to reach out to others when we need support.

Why do we need to think about attachment in relation to Gender, Sex, and Relationship Diversity (GSRD)?

Attachment theory already clearly understands that our relationships are utterly interwoven with our mental health. Mental health struggles are rooted in our early relationships because this is where we learn to be okay with ourselves and our feelings, or where we get the message that we – and our feelings – are fundamentally not okay. Mental health difficulties like addiction, anxiety, and depression can be understood in terms of survival strategies which we develop to deal with otherwise overwhelming emotions. Also our current relationship experiences are utterly interwoven with our relationship with ourselves and our emotions. Problems in those relationships – due to our attachment and emotional capacity – can easily retraumatise us, replicating those early dynamics, and reinforcing our negative experience and understanding of ourselves.

Here are a few initial thoughts about why it’s useful to think about attachment alongside gender, sexuality, and relationship diversity. I’ll go into more detail on all of these in the rest of the post.

Cultural norms

First, the culturally normative way of doing relationships and families, which is linked to attachment struggles and developmental trauma, relies on a certain – interlinked – understanding of gender, sex, and relationships. The model of a heternormative romantic/sexual couple meeting all each others’ needs and forming a nuclear family is actually relatively recent and culturally specific. It relies on a binary understanding of ‘opposite’ genders where men are breadwinner-protectors and women are caring-nurturers, which developed in a capitalist context that relied on women working unpaid in the home and reproducing the workforce. Many of the strains on relationships today can be located in the cultural ideal of getting all your needs met in one person (best friend, co-parent, hot lover, etc.) as well as in an economic system where most people in such relationships are under huge financial stress and having to work long hours in addition to partnering and parenting, or face poverty.

Doing it differently

Relatedly, many people are now doing gender, sex, and relationships in different ways to this cultural norm, all of which may afford some possibilities to relate differently with ourselves and others. For example, Jessica Fern’s recent book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Non-monogamy explores the ways in which forms of consensual monogamy may open up different attachment possibilities. Different ways of relating may work better for different attachment styles, or may enable more secure ways of relating and attaching.

Likewise those who are intentionally addressing or shifting their ways of doing their gender, and/or their sexuality, may also move in the direction of greater emotional regulation and/or more secure attachments. Consider how entwined gender is with emotional expression, and how stepping outside of the culturally normative way of doing romantic/sexual relationships may offer possibilities of slowing down and/or prioritising different kinds of relating which may be more stable and secure.

Similar things apply

It also occurred to me that many of the things that I often emphasise about gender, sexuality, and relationships also apply to attachment. 

These days most attachment theorists and therapists emphasise that attachment style is not fixed from birth, but that we can experience ourselves in different attachment styles in different relationships, for example, or ‘earn’ a secure attachment through therapeutic work and self reflective practices. Similarly, although once understood as fixed and singular, gender, sexuality, and relationship style are all fluid and plural. They may shift over time and/or be different in different relationships.

The trauma/attachment literature emphasises that attachment is biopsychosocial. Our way of attaching comes from a complex mix of the wider cultural way of doing child-reading (social), how that played out in our particular family (psycho), and how early attachment experience became engraved on our bodyminds or nervous systems (bio). Similarly, gender, sexuality and relationship style are all biopsychosocial.

All are interwoven

Finally, we can question the fact that our current culture separates out gender, sexuality, relationship style, and mental health as if these are discrete things. Many cultures, and historical times, would not separate out gender, sexuality, and spirituality – for example – seeing all these things as utterly interwoven. In the same way that we might usefully question our current normative way of doing relationships and family, we might recognise that regarding gender, sexuality, relationship styles, and mental health struggles as fixed identities that we have is a relatively new phenomenon, and possibly not a very helpful one.

Moving on to gender 101, let’s define some useful basic terms first – because lots of therapists are worried about getting it wrong…

I think it’s important to recognise that reality. Laurie Penny wrote that ‘the way we think about gender is moving so fast you can feel the breeze in your hair’. This is fraught terrain for many people. I’m always reminded of what Simone de Beauvoir wrote about how threatening it can be for mothers to see their daughters doing gender in different – more liberated ways – than were available to them, and how they may try to stop that. We see a lot that kind of thing playing out intergenerationally. There are all kinds of deep fears, losses and shames in play when relating across generations and genders: all kinds of reasons why people may want others to support – and not challenge – their gender worldview. Perhaps it gives them a sense of safety, of knowing who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are, and which side they are on, for example.

This is why I always emphasise, first and foremost, that therapists reflect deeply on their own experience of gender and how it has impacted their lives. As with all other intersecting aspects of identity and experience (e.g. disability, race, class, sexuality, age), we really need to feel how it operates within us, and through us, if we’re to work with other people around it.

What ARE some the terms therapists need to be aware of?

I would say it’s useful to recognise the multiple different aspects of gender. So gender identity is whether you identify as man, woman or non-binary, for example. Gender expression is how you present your gender in terms of appearance, clothes, voice, etc. Gender experience is your lived experience of your gender. Gender roles are the roles you take on in life and how they relate to gender: father, feminist, waitress, widower, etc. Then there is how your gender is read by other people. There may be more or less match between identity, expression, experience, role, and how others read your gender, for different people.

In terms of gender status people are generally divided into cis and trans. Cis – or cisgender – people remain in the gender that they were assumed to be by those around them at birth. Trans people shift from that in some way. Trans can be seen as a big umbrella encompassing trans women, trans men, and non-binary people. And non-binary can be seen as another big umbrella encompassing all the people who are a gender other than male or female. For example they may be both genders, or between genders, a further gender, no gender, or move between multiple gender positions. Of course the category of cis is also a big umbrella encompassing many different cis masculinities and femininities. 

People often associate trans with social transition (changing names, clothes, pronouns, etc.) and medical transition (taking hormones and having surgeries). It’s important to point out both that many cis people engage in social and medical gender transitions, and that many trans people do not. Think about name changes for choice, or at marriage, for example, or the huge gender-related shifts that can come with menopause, retirement, or treatment for prostate or breast cancer.  I personally prefer a sense that we – as therapists and medical practitioners – should be helping all people to come to a congruent and comfortable place with their gender, regardless of whether they would be categorised – or see themselves – as cis or trans.

We often think of trans people as a small minority of people, when we’re focused on social and medical transition. However, Daphna Joel’s research has found that over a third of people experience themselves as being to some extent ‘the other gender, both genders, or neither gender’.

Historically, many psychanalysts have conflated gender, biology and sexuality, and when it comes to trans, non-binary and folks with variations in sex characteristics, some still do – so can you explain the difference and the way they interact?

Intersex people, or people with diverse sex characteristics (DSD) have bodies which are difficult to categorise in the current western binary sex model. Historically medics have intervened with those bodies in order to attempt to make them conform to a binary, and heterosexual, norm (i.e. penises and vaginas of a certain length). Activists and practitioners are increasingly speaking out against this and encouraging more consensual practices.

It’s important to know that what we think of as biological sex – as well as gender – is diverse. What are we talking about when we talk about sex? Is it chromosomes? Level of circulating hormones? Bodily features like genitals, breasts, or hairiness? Or is it brain structure and capacity? On all of these levels humans are actually diverse rather than binary. 

Many biologists now prefer to talk about sex/gender rather than separating these out, because it’s really impossible to disentangle the biological, the psychological, and the social. Personally I find the concept of ‘biopsychosocial’ very useful here. Gender is biopsychosocial for all of us meaning that we can’t tease apart these three elements. All are in play and all influence each other. For example, what we now know about neuroplasticity and endocrinology suggests that the ways in which we learn gendered behaviours – from the world around us – shifts our brain and body patterns. So, as well as the way our brain and body are – from our early years – shaping how people read our gender and how we experience it, the ways in which we are read, and experience our gender, also shape our brain and body.

When we think about all the different elements of sex (chromosomes, hormones, body shape and size, brain structure and function) and all the elements of gender (identity, expression, experience, role, etc.) we can see how the concept of the snowflake might actually be a useful one, because with all of the different elements, all changing over time, we each end up with a pretty unique sex/gender. If we add in sexuality – which is about way more than just the gender we are and the gender we’re attracted to – we have even more diversity and uniqueness.

Virginia Goldener notes that historically psychoanalysts have considered working towards and/or achieving a stable gender identity as an indicator of a successful outcome – and that this is neither possible nor desirable. Consistency around gender identity is for many a cis myth or as Goldener suggests, a pathology. Do you agree? 

I’m really grateful to you for putting me onto the Goldener paper and I like a lot of what it says. I do completely agree with her argument that ‘gender coherence, consistency, conformity, and identity are culturally mandated normative ideals that (therapy) has absorbed uncritically’. Really we only have to look back through time and around the world today to see the truth of this. The current binary opposite understanding of gender is very recent, and it is utterly interwoven with heteronormativity and family structure under this particular form of capitalism. 

There have been many places and times where gender was not seen as binary or opposite, where very different characteristics were associated with different genders, where there were multiple genders, and/or where gender wasn’t considered an important feature of a person, or separable from other aspects of their personhood. It’s certainly highly ethnocentric to believe that binary gender in the way our culture currently understands it is any kind of universal truth.

Goldener takes her argument further to suggest that adhering to a consistent gender could be seen as a pathology. She comes close to my view here as well. In my BACP GSRD resource I highlight the strong links between trying to conform with rigid ideals of masculinity and femininity and significant mental health struggles. Think about rates of suicide and addiction amongst men, for example, or body images issues which are highly normative among women, or the kinds of depression and anxiety associated with women basing their identites around being-for-others, as de Beauvoir put it. This is why I always say that therapists should be talking about gender with all clients, not just gender non-normative ones. In fact gender expansive and creative folk are perhaps more likely to have already dealt with this stuff.

Goldener makes the argument that people come to a consistent gender by disowning anything about themselves that doesn’t fit with the ideological pressures of gender coherence. Think about the ways in which masculinity is defined by anything that isn’t feminine, for example, and how boys and men are encouraged to repudiate any ‘feminine’ feelings, appearances, desires, etc. This argument fits nicely with my understanding of plural selves – drawn from various therapeutic approaches. This is the idea that we are all plural, rather than singular, but have to disown, or split off, aspects of ourselves in order to survive in our families, communities, and wider culture. I think it’s useful to see gender as part of this.

I also found Goldener’s use of double binds very compelling. This is the sense that we receive confusing and contradictory messages – in families, communities, and culture – about gender which take a huge toll on mental health. Goldener gives the example of such contradictions in a woman’s family gender story: ‘Mom didn’t stand up to Dad, and she was always silently angry and depressed. But whenever I was argumentative, she would say I was ‘too masculine’ and no man would ever want me.’ So the woman faces the contradiction that if she does femininity like her Mom she will suffer as she did, but if she does it differently she faces rejection by her Mom and potentially by all men. We might also think about school messages that men need to be successful but also not show any interest in studies, or cultural messages that women must be empowered and desiring, while still seeing their worth as bound up in appearance and being in a relationship with a man.

Goldener ends by saying that a more critical therapeutic tradition ‘could promote resistance to the normative construction of gender polarities and hierarchies by documenting how the exploitation of gender distinctions in the inevitable struggle for power in society and in domestic life produces untenable relationship binds and unbridgeable psychic splits, which damage the human spirit in all of us and in the next generation.’ This understanding of cultural gender as a form of intergenerational trauma comes close to my own sense of things, and that of my co-author, Alex Iantaffi, who recently published the book Gender Trauma.

Currently people are expected to remain in the same gender throughout their lives. There is still a moral panic and ‘debate’ over people who do not, and trans people are expected to promise to remain in the same gender forever once they have transitioned. There is a huge sense that people should be consistent in their gender, despite the fact that everybody clearly experiences and expresses their gender in very different ways over time, from being a child, through a teenager, adult, and older person, and as cultural gender norms also shift radically over the course of their lives. 

I think we need to shift this whole sense that gender, sexuality, or self fixity and consistency is something to be aimed at, or somehow superior over flexibility and fluidity. All of these things can – and do – shift over long periods of our lives, and we also experience and express them very differently in different situations and relationships. Think about how you behave with the store clerk, a loved one, and a child, for example, or how you feel at this conference, out for a drink, or last thing at night.

One note of caution I would add here though is that we don’t flip the binary such that we privilege fluidity over fixity and regard that as, in some way, superior. Most of us experience some aspects of our selves, our gender, our sexuality, and more, as relatively stable, and other aspects as more changeable. I’d like us to get to the point where all of this could be equally respected and supported as somebody’s lived experience of themselves, rather than there being attempts to fix what is fluid, or to change what is stable.

Trainings often fairly uncritically reproduce cis and heteronormative value systems – so that the lens through which we’re taught in the psychanalytic or psychodynamic model is often devoid of exposing how systemic structural issues impact on clients. Why is it important for us to explore gender with all clients, not just with those where it might seem an obvious issue, such as trans and gender expansive clients? 

It’s very troubling to me how little most therapy trainings include considerations of social structures and cultural messages when we know these things are hugely impactful on people’s emotional well-being, and cannot be disentangled from individual life experiences. There’s a real danger in therapy that we reinforce a sense that mental health should be understood and addressed purely at the level of the individual and their interpersonal relationships, when it’s the wider societal systems and structures that are the problem in so many ways.

So yes I would say that heteronormativity and gender norms impact all clients, not just trans and gender expansive ones, and that it’s a vital part of the picture to unpack with clients who may not have considered normativity and how much it is part of their distress. Just to give a few more examples to the ones I’ve given already, the NATSAL survey finds that over half of people consider themselves to be sexually dysfunctional in some way. Clearly the issue here is with the narrow cultural view of what counts as (hetero) sex rather than half of individuals having this individual problem of sexual dysfunction. Few men manage to resist the cultural messages that they mustn’t show vulnerability or seek support, and we know the toll this takes in terms of their impact both on others and on themselves.

It’s very important that therapists are able to mirror, accurately, people’s sense of their own gender, given that many people will have experiences of only certain aspects of their gender being affirmed by those around them, if that. 

In your writing on gender you say that we can’t really understand gender without taking an intersectional perspective. What does that mean, and how might we work with clients in this way?  

Intersectionality is an idea from the Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw to capture how we are all impacted by multiple axes of oppression, and how these intersect. An example that I like to give was when I did a bisexuality training in a workplace context. People there were sharing their thoughts on being out as bi. A couple of white bi women said that it felt like an accepting environment to them. Some black women shared that there was no way that they would be out as bi there. They were already sexualised and harassed as black women, and to be openly bi would exacerbate that to intolerable levels. Here we see the intersection of the treatment of black women as hypersexual – and their bodies as the property of others – with the understanding of bisexuality as promiscuous and available to all. This creates a unique experience for black bi women which neither white bi women, or straight black women, had.

I think intersectionality is hugely important in therapy with all clients, because we have to understand how our clients are uniquely positioned in relation to these axes of oppression to have a full sense of their experience. To give another gender example, the experience of considering embarking on a trans journey is very different depending on age (a teenager versus a 50 year old), disability (having to downplay disabilities to access trans services and vice versa), sexuality (whether transitioning will involve you now being read as gay, for example), and race (whether transitioning will involve you now being read as a race/gender combination who is seen as dangerous and/or subject to violence, for example).

Your co-author, Alex Iantaffi, just published a book called Gender Trauma. How might we see gender as a form of historical, intergenerational, and/or developmental trauma? What are the implications of this for trauma-informed therapists?

Alex’s book is a must read for all therapists I would say. Although the focus is on gender it takes this intersectional view whereby all of those axes of oppression can be seen as having a traumatising impact. I find this understanding of trauma useful: that it is historical, cultural and intergenerational, as well as being developmental and/or resulting from specific traumatic experiences over our lives.

Alex points out that gender is a form of historical trauma in the ways that attempts have been made to eradicate certain genders through settler colonialism. We could also consider the ways in which white western understandings of gender and sexuality have been imposed on colonised countries, and the ongoing legacy of this, and the gendered sexual violence that was involved in slavery. All of these historical forms of gender trauma pass down through the generations, and linger in damaging myths, norms, and stereotypes.

Gender can be seen as a form of intergenerational trauma in the way that gendered ways of behaving are passed down through families – the kind of thing that Goldener was referring to. Gender reveal parties could be seen as a recent example whereby kids are assumed to be all kinds of things because of their genitals, even prior to birth. Consider the impact of this on intersex kids, on gender expansive kids, and on all kids who don’t entirely conform to the ideals of genders their famlies expect, or who might not if such rigid expectations were not imposed from so young.

When it comes to developmental trauma, we could wonder about the gendered ways in which babies and children are treated in relation to their emotions, from a very young age. Developmental trauma occurs when kids aren’t soothed when overwhelmed, or supported to learn how to emotionally regulate themselves. I think we could see this, for example, when boys are punished for expressing emotions other than anger, or when girls are expected to care for others’ emotional states, even as infants. I was so struck by the documentary No More Boys and Girls, where 7 year old boys could not come up with words for any emotions other than anger, and all the kids agreed that boys were ‘better’ and that girls’ main aspiration in life should be to be ‘pretty’.

Much of your writing these days is about plural selves and parts work. How does this concept relate to gender, and to attachment, and what are the implications for potentially working with all clients as plurally gendered?

For me personally, it was my journeys with sexuality and gender which eventually led me to an understanding of plurality. Initially I was aware of having several different sets of sexual desires, and enjoying sex or play the most when I could sink fully into one of these different headspaces. Then I had a sense of being non-binary, which could enable me to hold the feeling that I was masculine and man without letting go of a sense of knowing that I was also feminine and woman. These explorations eventually led to a realisation that I have a vivid experience of multiple parts, who certainly have different gender expressions and sexual – or asexual – desires, but who are about much more than that.

In terms of parts work I’m weaving together the work of people like John Rowan, Hal and Sidra Stone, Richard Schwartz, and Janina Fisher, as well as what I’m learning with people within plural communities. My sense is that everybody – to some extent – disowns parts of themselves and foregrounds other parts, in order to conform to their family, community, and culture, for example. Significant developmental trauma is not what causes people to be plural, but it does seem to result in more significant splits between the parts, such that some are inaccessible, unknown, or dissociated from.

My own experience is that I created a pretty well functioning feminine self in my teenage years, in order to survive. I experienced myself as purely that self for many years, but often with a confusing sense of incongruence that this person who was all about fitting in, helping others, and being independent, fairly regularly made it their business to tell uncomfortable truths in public, suddenly leapt into relationships and communities, or became overwhelmed by shame and fear when tough stuff happened.

So, for me, plurality is entirely interwoven with gender and with attachment, given that other parts of me hold gender-related behaviours, attachment styles, emotions, and survival strategies, which were too dangerous for me to hold or express as a child. It was confronting, for example, to realise that there’s certainly a needy ‘anxious preoccupied’ part when I would probably have checked towards the avoidant end of the attachment spectrum. It’s also been helpful, and painful, to finally be in touch with a ‘fight’ survival strategy that was almost entirely turned in against myself for much of my life.

With a plural understanding we could usefully explore how gender, attachment styles and emotional experience are highly interrelated. For example, boys are generally encouraged culturally to be at the avoidant end of the spectrum and to express feelings in the form of anger, disowning more dependent attachment styles or fearful feelings. Similarly girls are still generally encouraged to be highly relationally oriented, even dependent, and to express emotions as distress rather than anger. These things do not come together for all people, of course, given our specific family systems and life trajectories, but they are bound to be linked to some extent in terms of what we disown and foreground in ourselves in order to survive.

In addition to bringing all parts forward, and to improving communication within the system, I find the concept of earned secure attachment extremely helpful here. For me this is the idea of creating and developing inner parents, or containing parts, who can hold and hear disowned or traumatised parts, building trusting relationships with them which can – over time – enable them to feel safe-enough in the world, and to grow from the traumatised places they have been stuck in.

For me the vital thing is what Bonnie Badenoch calls ‘radical inclusivity’, Janina Fisher ‘no part gets left behind’, or Richard Schwartz ‘no bad parts’. It’s about welcoming, befriending, and forming loving relationships with, and between, all aspects of all parts of ourselves. The aim is not a kind of integrated singularity – the cultural norm – nor is it reaching that sense of consistency that Goldener warns against, whether on gender or attachment style or anything else. Rather it’s about helping all parts to be in the world, to bring everything that they have been holding and to share it, and to continue to grow and become, as a vital part of both inner and outer systems.

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Plural tag: This post was by James.

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