Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 5

Trauma Superconference Talk

I recently did an interview for The Trauma Super Conference, which is running from December 3rd to December 9th. It looks set to be an amazing event covering a huge diversity of trauma-related topics, and including talks by some of the people I regularly mention here, and in my free book on trauma.

In my interview I spoke with Jaia Bristow about

The importance of understanding trauma across multiple levels (existential, cultural, relational, internal), Trauma as a combination of the experience (or accumulation of experiences) and the way it is (or isn’t) held and heard, The relationship between developmental and cultural forms of trauma and the importance of working with traumatised inner and outer systems,Plurality as a way of making sense of how trauma operates in us, Identifying traumatised parts, Cultivating containing parts, and Working between plural parts to heal trauma

You can read more about all these topics in my free books on trauma and plurality, and they’ll all be covered in much more depth in my new graphic guide to mental health, which I’m currently in the process of writing.

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Beyond Boxes

I was recently interviewed for Jaia Bristow‘s excellent new podcast series, Beyond Boxes. We talked all about going beyond binaries of gender and sexuality, about plurality, intersectionality, inbetweeness, the pros and cons of labels, the harm binaries can cause for everyone, whether you fit the binary or not, how to be a supportive ally to the trans community and much more.

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

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Relationship Super Conference talk

I recently did an interview for The Relationship Super Conference, which is running from October 4th to October 10th. It looks set to be an amazing event covering a huge diversity of relationship-related topics, and including talks by some of the people I regularly mention here: Alex Iantaffi, Sophia Graham, and Justin Hancock, as well as Ruby B. Johnson, Kevin Patterson, and Liz Powell who I met at the Poly Dallas conference back in 2018.

In my interview I spoke about how we need to understand relationships – and relationship struggles – through the lens of cultural and developmental trauma. I covered relationship diversity, and why this model is more helpful than binaries when it comes to relationships. I spoke about why I think we need to focus more on how we relate, than who we relate with or what relationship style we subscribe to. I also explored how our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world are interconnected.

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Bisexuality and biphobia

Earlier this year, Carla Merino from El Pais interviewed me about bisexuality and biphobia. You can read the article here. Below is the full interview in honour of Celebrate Bisexuality Day. For more on all of this check out my book with Jules Scheele: Sexuality: A Graphic Guide.

How much does social acceptance or rejection define our sexual identity and orientation? It’s curious to see that Generation Z is the one with most LGBTQIA+ members, and, going back, there’s less and less in each generation. What’s the correlation between the two factors? 

Social acceptance has a big impact on how open people feel able to be about their sexual attractions and how free they feel to act upon them. It’s likely that shifting proportions of LGBTQIA+ people across the generations reflects how socially acceptable diverse sexualities and genders are in wider culture, as well as how possible it has been to act upon them without stigma, discrimination, or restriction. Another factor is how important it has been seen over the years to identify your sexuality and gender.

It’s also important to remember that the proportion of people who identify with a particular sexuality is the tip of the iceberg. For example, with bisexuality, far more people will have sexual experiences with more than one gender than identify as bisexual, and even more will experience attraction to more than one gender which they don’t act upon.

Are sexual orientation and identity biological or a social construct?  

Both! Our sexuality is biopsychosocial, which means that – like most aspects of human experience – it comes down to a mixture of the social context we grow up in, the experiences that we have through our lives, and the ways in which our body and brain function. All of these things interact with each other in complex ways that we could never really tease apart. For example, the ways in which our body and brain function impact how we’re treated by others in our particular culture, and also the wider culture shapes the experiences that we’re able to have, which – in turn – shapes our bodies and brains.

You might think about the ways in which certain body shapes and sizes, and mental abilities, are deemed ‘sexually attractive’ in our culture, leading those who have them to have radically different experiences of sex and relationships. Or you might think about the ways in which culture enables and restricts certain forms of sexual expression, meaning that we’re more or less likely to have access to those experiences, which will impact how our bodies and brains will respond to those possibilities (e.g. with pleasure, joy, fear, shame, etc.).

What impact does fear of child sexuality have on how we develop our sexual identity and preference? 

Fear of childhood sexuality has a massive impact at the moment. Few children receive anything like a good education around sex and relationships because there is so much anxiety about talking with kids about sex. Tragically this actually results in more young people have abusive, unwanted, and risky sexual experiences, not less, because they are so ill-equipped to talk about sex or to navigate sex consensually. Certainly most sex education and advice assumes that people will be heterosexual, or only includes LGB sexualities very briefly. This restricts how able young people are to explore the full range of possible sexual and asexual identites and experiences.

It is often said that everyone is bisexual or that no one is, which are biphobic expressions. Why does society have trouble accepting bisexuality specifically. Could it be a human need to categorize everything in extremes? (black and white/ good and bad)

This is an idea that my co-author Alex Iantaffi and I explore at length in our book Life Isn’t Binary. It certainly seems that humans – particularly in western cultures – are drawn to these kinds of binary polarisations when, of course, so much about human life is diverse rather than binary. It wouldn’t make sense to divide people into short and tall – clearly height is a spectrum. A similar thing could be said about various mental capacities, we can’t divide people into a binary of unintilligent or intelligent, rather we can locate people in different places on a number of spectrums of various abilities (mathematical, linguistic, spatial, etc.). So why, when it comes to sexuality and gender, do we assume a binary?

You’re right that, many times over the years, people have tried to argue that either nobody is ‘really’ bisexual, or that everybody is bisexual. Both of those extremes risk erasing actual bisexual experience, as well as limiting human sexuality to one dimension (the gender of the people we’re attracted to), when really there is a lot more to it than that.

It is often said that putting labels on ourselves or others can be damaging, but by not calling something by a name, you can deny its existence. Do we really need labels to identify ourselves and what we’re attracted to? Why?  

This is another non-binary! There are many arguments for and against people labelling their sexuality. I find it more helpful to ask what labels open up, and close down, for people, assuming that they probably do both. For people whose sexual attractions – or absence of attractions – are marginalised, labels can be important in claiming their experience, communicating it to others, and finding supportive community within a world that harms them. At the same time, labels can come with a set of expectations which can be limiting and rigid, and it can be difficult to let go of labels – and all that they bring – if things change for you.

Culturally we’re in a place where the only accepted way to fight for equal human rights is generally on the basis of identity labels. It’s very hard to fight for the rights of a group to be treated in just ways unless that group identifies under a label and can prove, through research, the negative impact that marginalisation has upon them. This has been a key tension in discussions of the labels around attraction to multiple genders. Some argue for the dropping of labels entirely, or embracing multiple labels like pansexual, queer, omnisexual, plurisexual, and so on. However, most governments and organisations only recognise the ‘B’ for bisexual, so there are strategic reasons for people to use that term, even when it may not feel the best fit for them.

At least in the United States, bisexuals comprise more than half the LGBTQIA+ collective, but that’s not what it looks like. It seems that they’re actually a minority. Why could that be?   

There’s a long history of bisexual people being treated with suspicion in the wider LGB movement and community. This dates back to the fact that ‘gay rights’ were often fought for on the basis of the idea that sexuality was binary (straight or gay) and that gay people were a minority group who were marginalised and oppressed within that binary. Anybody whose sexuality didn’t fit that binary model were seen as ‘muddying the water’ and potentially jeopardising the fight for gay rights. 

Many theorists and scientists now recognise that human sexuality is actually diverse and fluid across many dimensions, and that the proportion of people attracted to the same gender or more than one gender is probably at least equal to the number of people who are attracted to the ‘opposite’ gender only. However it is taking a long time for this way of seeing things to find its way into mainstream culture and governmental policies.

Have the different definitions of bisexuality through history influenced biphobia and formed misconceptions on what bisexuality is?  

Yes certainly they have. The most widely accepted definition of bisexuality within the bi+ community today is ‘attraction to more than one gender’, with some also using ‘attraction regardless of gender’. However, early definitions of bisexuality mixed gender and sexuality and saw bisexual people as people who had more than one gender. Later definitions assumed that bisexual people were attracted exactly equally to men and women. We see the legacy of these kinds of definitions in the assumptions that bisexual people will also be androgynous, and in the equation of bisexual with attraction to only two genders. As The Bisexual Index points out, if people are concerned about the ‘bi’ in bisexual meaning ‘two’, they can understand it as ‘attraction to both people of the same gender as themselves, and to people of different genders to themselves’.

It’s not common to hear about bisexual characters on the history of LGBTQIA+ rights although they’re there. Why are they not that visible?  

This is particularly striking when you think that one of the most famous sexologists of all time (Alfred Kinsey) and the woman who co-ordinated the first Pride march in 1970 (Brenda Howard) were both bi! However people who identified as bi or had attractions to more than one gender are often erased from LGBTQIA+ history. I suspect this is for the same reason that I mentioned above: that a lot of gay rights has been fought for on the basis of a straight (majority) / gay (minority) binary, and the existence and prevalence of bisexuality seems like a threat to this.

What is the reason that bisexual women are the ones to experience the most sexual violence? 

Bi women seem to experience higher levels of both sexual and relationship abuse than straight or lesbian women. One reason for this is the stereotype of bi women as hypersexual and sexually available, which means they experience higher levels of sexual harassment of all kinds. Another reason is that so many people find the idea of bisexuality threatening, and sexual violence can be used as a way of policing and punishing that. In relationships, the stereotype of bi people as promiscuous, suspicious, and lying means that bi people are often wrongly assumed to be more likely to leave – or cheat on – a partner. This can lead to biphobia in relationships where bi people are encouraged to hide their sexuality, and may be treated in controlling – even violent – ways by partners who are insecure about their bi-ness.

How do we work towards ending biphobia? 

I’d like to see far better awareness and education in wider culture, and for young people, about the diversity of sexuality, moving away from binary models which see it as being all about the gender of the people we’re attracted to. In my book Sexuality: A Graphic Guide I draw together lots of theories and research which suggests that there are many dimensions to sexuality, including the amount of sexual attraction that we experience, the kinds of erotic desires we have, the other features of a person that we find attractive beyond gender, and much more. We need to get to a point where we see all forms of erotic experience as equally legitimate and beautiful, so long as they are acted upon consensually.

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Free book 3: Consent

I’ve recently added a new page to my website for free books. These are collections of blog posts and other things I’ve written over the years on specific topics. I figured that a lot of readers would prefer everything collected together in one place rather than having to go searching through old blog posts and articles elsewhere online.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Consent

The third free book is all about consent. It starts with my consent checklist zine and then goes on to all the recent writing I’ve done, particularly focused on sexual consent and social scripts, how we can make all our relationships more consensual, the importance of boundaries, the impact of gaslighting on consent, and applying consent ideas to various contexts.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

ConsentDownload

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Free book 2: Trauma

I’ve recently added a new page to my website for free books. These are collections of blog posts and other things I’ve written over the years on specific topics. I figured that a lot of readers would prefer everything collected together in one place rather than having to go searching through old blog posts and articles elsewhere online.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Trauma

The second free book is all about trauma. What do I mean by that? As I say at the start of the book:

In this collection the focus is on trauma as the impact of what happened to you. As Steve Haines points out in his great little overview Trauma is Really Strange, bodily trauma responses such as mobilising into fight or flight, or going immobile or dissociating, are the same whether we’re talking about developmental trauma from the past, a recent traumatic event, or the cumulative impact of stress.

When we consider what causes us to be traumatised, I like this definition used by Bonnie Badenoch in her book The Heart of Trauma:

‘Any experience of fear and/or pain that does not have the support it needs to be digested and integrated into the flow of our brains’

This helpfully highlights the point which many trauma experts agree on that there are two elements to traumatising circumstances:

A key event, or accumulation of events, which is frightening, shameful or otherwise painful to us (whether or not it would be to other people in similar circumstances, it’s about the meaning for us)Not receiving the support we need in order to process the event or events (which usually means having somebody to hold us and hear us in our distress, reflecting it back to us in ways that reassure us that it is understandable and help us to tolerate it)

The book considers personal forms of trauma as well as cultural forms, and the interconnection between the two.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

TraumaDownload

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Madzines 2: Self Care zines

Recently I had a long written dialogue with my friend and colleague Helen Spandler about the ways in which zines, comics, and graphic books can be helpful ways of communicating about mental health. This is happening as I continue working on my next Icon graphic guide which focuses on mental health (and hopefully another zine along the way also).

You can read the second part of our conversation at the MadZines project website here. We focus on radical self-care zines and how they relate to MadZines.

HS: Our project is about zines that ‘craft contention about mental health knowledge and practice’. That could mean all kinds of things, but it’s essentially about challenging what is commonly understood about madness or distress, including from the so-called psy professionals (psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, etc).  I know your background is in psychology. There’s been a lot of ‘critical psychology’ these past few decades and we’ve seen quite a bit of change. Given all this, how far do you feel challenging these ideas and practices is still important?

M-JB: Oh, I think it’s still very important. The people I mostly speak to are therapists and readers of my work, most of whom have never come across these more critical ideas. I think the standard perspectives you get around mental health – if you take a counselling course or if you pick up a self-help book – are still very basic. That’s partly why I’m so passionate about getting these more critical and social justice ideas – about mental health and other topics – out there in accessible ways like comics, zines, self-help books, and podcasts.

HS: Are there particular issues/experiences around mental health that you think need to be challenged or contested right now?

M-JB: I think the mainstream understanding of mental health is still very binary: you’re either someone with mental illness, which means that it’s not your fault, but you need expert help in order to get ‘better’. Or you’re not someone with mental illness, which means that your struggles are your own fault and you need to pull your socks up – do mindfulness, have better stress management, that kind of thing. I’m very keen to challenge that binary in my work. Read more…

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MadZines 1: Crafting contention

Recently I had a long written dialogue with my friend and colleague Helen Spandler about the ways in which zines, comics, and graphic books can be helpful ways of communicating about mental health. This is happening as I get cracking on writing my next Icon graphic guide which focuses on mental health (and hopefully another zine along the way also).

You can read the first part of our conversation at the Graphic Medicine website here. We focus on how the comic graphics in zines can ‘craft contention’ about mental health: opening up different possibilities to mainstream ways of understanding mental health.

HS: Can you remember how you went about making your first zine?

MJB:  I can. It was back in 2014 or so. I was part of a network, which you’re also engaged with, of Buddhists and mindfulness practitioners who are critical of the ways in which mainstream mindfulness is often co-opted by capitalist systems and doesn’t engage with the social aspects of mental health. I wanted to explore what a more ‘social mindfulness’ might look like. 

I wrote a zine by that name in which I worked through how we might understand suffering as operating on multiple levels of experience (cultural, systemic, relational, and internal). So when we are ‘mindful’ it might involve being aware of those other ways in which suffering is exacerbated, as well as just that sense of how we exacerbate it with our own internal thought processes. The second half of the zine is open, like a workbook, encouraging people to incorporate this into their meditation – or other – practices, and make their own notes about how it works for them.

Since then my zines have become more integrated – words and pictures. This one was a bit more like a series of short blog posts, plus comic illustrations to go with each one. I hadn’t got creative with the format at that point. I was still making that move from more conventional forms of writing to zineing.

HS: Oh yes, I remember you talking about that zine at a social mindfulness event. I loved the way it illustrated the two-way dynamic between our internal and external worlds. Rather than just seeing ourselves as either internalising social norms or externalising our feelings, it’s like understanding that whilst we may be implicated in our own suffering, it’s usually through no fault of our own. These ideas can be hard to get our heads around, so it’s helpful to have a zine which distils this into something useful and meaningful to people’s everyday lives. I think the diagram really helped with that. It’s hard to show complex dynamics through text. Read more…

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Free book 1: Plurality

I’ve recently added a new page to my website for free books. These are collections of blog posts and other things I’ve written over the years on specific topics. I figured that a lot of readers would prefer everything collected together in one place rather than having to go searching through old blog posts and articles elsewhere online.

Free Books

The first three free books I’ve created are largely based on the writing I did last year as I navigated learning about trauma (personally, and in general), and considering how my relationship with my (plural) self, and other people, might work (consensually) under this new understanding – all during a global pandemic! So there are now three free books on these topics of trauma, plurality, and consent.

In future I hope to add free books of my best writing on gender, sexuality, love, and mental health, along with one about writing itself.

I thought I’d announce each free book over the coming weeks for people who follow my blog or twitter but don’t regularly check out the website.

Plurality

The first free book is all about plurality. This is the idea that we can usefully conceptualise ourselves as systems made up of interrelated parts, rather than as a singular whole ‘individual’.

The book is mostly made up of written conversations between my own parts about the concept of plurality, and how it relates to trauma, mental health, mindfulness, attachment, and more. Hopefully, along with my zine about plurality, this would be a useful introduction to people who want to engage with these ideas, or who are wondering about how to explore their own plurality. I – or rather we – are currently working on a follow-up zine about plurality as a way towards self (selves) love. Plurality and systems will also be major themes in the next graphic guide on mental health.

We hope you enjoy this first free book. More about the other ones to come…

PluralityDownload

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Letting go of gender reveal parties

I was recently interviewed for Vogue about whether gender reveal parties are something we might leave behind in 2020. You can read the excellent piece they wrote here, and my full interview below…

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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