Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 6

Gender, Attachment and Trauma

Today I was stoked to be asked to be part of an online conference at The Bowlby Centre therapist training institute. The event focused on gender, hence inviting me to speak. My conversation with Jane Czyzselska kicked off the day with the aim of providing attendees with a bit of a gender 101, prior to more in depth conversations around gender and attachment through the rest of the day.

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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Opening up from lockdown

This week I was on the Culture, Sex, Relationships podcast with Justin Hancock (bringing the old team back together again) to talk about the personal and political implications of opening up from lockdown, and how we might do it in ways that are as kind as possible with ourselves and each other.

You can listen to the episode here.

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Trans sex

My new book with Jules Scheele – Sexuality: A Graphic Guide – is out now, following up on our previous book Gender: A Graphic Guide. So it seemed a good time to bring the two topics of sexuality and gender together in one place, and write up the workshop I did for Glasgow LGBT Health & Wellbeing a couple of years back on trans sex. Thanks so much to the participants in the workshop for agreeing that I could share some of their answers here. 

This post is mostly aimed at trans people – and those who have sex with us – who want to think more about sex. Using both ‘trans’ and ‘sex’ in the broadest possible ways of course. For more of a basic overview about the topics of trans and sex for everyone, check out this post I wrote last year. Hopefully there’ll be something useful here for everyone – whatever your relationship to gender and sexuality – though.

This post is based around four questions which are useful for us all to reflect on. For each question I’ll give you the opportunity to make some notes of your own answers before reading other people’s responses, and my thoughts. The post ends with some further resources which can help you to tune into your erotic desires, and to communicate them to others.

Question 1: How do I feel when I’m most alive?

I borrowed this question from awesome mental-health activist Sascha Altman DuBrul. I think it’s a perfect starting point for thinking about sex, just as much as it is mental health. 

Generally when we think about sex – perhaps particularly as trans people – we make so many assumptions about what we should be doing, and how we should do it, that we lose track of what we’re doing it for. That is because of all the cultural baggage about what sex is, how it is gendered, and how bodies should work.

So let’s put all that aside for a moment and think about the feeling we might look for from sex – and from aspects of life beyond sex.

Consider the times in your life that you’ve felt most alive. These may not necessarily be sexual times. How did you feel at those times? For Sascha and myself, for example, we came up with answers like ‘I notice I feel keen to make eye contact with people’ and ‘I feel comfortable in my body’…

How do I feel when I’m most alive?

Here are some of the answers that came up in the trans sex workshop I ran, in response to this question:

Expansive, taking up space.Bouncy, moving.Competent.A surge of energy.Creative, motivated.Relaxed.Trusting.Connected to everyone.Free.Spontaneous, like I want to laugh out loud.Like I’m uncovering the truth.

What would it be like for this feeling to be the starting point for thinking about what we want to do erotically? How might we invite this feeling into our sex lives, and everywhere else for that matter? 

The problem with much sex advice is that it’s not about inviting that kind of feeling at all. It’s much more about how to do what wider culture defines as ‘sex’ in the most ‘normal’ way, and how to achieve a specific goal such as erection, penetration or orgasm. As Juno Roche points out, this approach can leave trans people feeling deficient, because it’s based on a cisgender ideal of what sex is, and how bodies should operate. Also this approach doesn’t actually work so well for many cis people either. 

Starting with pursuing the kinds of sex – and other activities – which make us feel most alive is way more helpful. It helps us to tune into whether we even want sex at all. For many folks on the ace spectrum, other activities bring this feeling way more than sex does. You don’t have to have sex at all, unless it does bring that feeling for you or you want to do it for other reasons. 

This question also helps us to tune into what kinds of sex we enjoy, instead of feeling we have to do certain things. It puts solo sex on a level with sex with other people, rather than thinking that sex with other people is somehow better. 

It also helps sex to be more consensual, because we get familiar with checking in with what we – and anybody else – actually wants, instead of doing what we think we – or they – should do.

As Black feminist Audre Lorde – and many who have followed her – have pointed out, this question of how we feel when we’re most alive could be a useful starting point for much more in life than just sex. If we took it seriously, we’d be inviting life in general to be pleasure-giving and consensual for all, and challenging the ways in which it isn’t.

Question 2: What blocks me (in general / as a trans person) from being open with myself about my desires, and from tuning into what turns me on or gives me pleasure?

Sascha Altman DuBrul says that two things are vital when it comes to mental health: Cultivating the capacity to communicate well with ourselves, and with others. The same is very much true for sex, but this is an area where many people struggle hugely. 

In the next two questions we’ll explore what blocks us from being open with ourselves about our desires, attractions, turn-ons and turn-offs, and what blocks us from being open with other people about these same things.

Let’s start with what makes it difficult to be open with ourselves…

What blocks me (in general / as a trans person) from being open with myself about my desires, and from tuning into what turns me on or gives me pleasure?

Here are some of the answers that came up in the trans sex workshop I ran, in response to this question:

Body dysphoria.Peer pressure from others outside or inside the trans community.Internalised transphobia.Shame.Overthinking things.Wanting to be politically correct.Pain from physical conditions.Disability.Confusion.The way these things can change over time.Being monogamous.Other people’s perception of gender.Lack of feeling.Worrying about a partners’ pleasure.

For trans people in particular it can be hard to grapple with cultural ideals about what bodies ‘should’ look like and respond like, given that these are cisgender ideals. We can feel pressure to be ‘normal’, and fear that we might not be. On the flip side there can be a sense of pressure to be ‘trans enough’ or ‘queer enough’ which can make us feel bad if we do want ‘normal’ sex, or if we have discomfort with our trans body. It’s fine to enjoy what you enjoy, to have the body you have, and to feel how you feel about it. Whoever you are, you are trans enough.

It can be hard for us to accept dysphoria and to allow that we might want to avoid touching certain parts of our bodies, keep certain clothes on, etc. It can also be difficult – if we don’t feel dysphoria – to allow ourselves to enjoy parts of our body which don’t fit cultural assumptions about our current gender. It’s fine to be anywhere on the spectrum from dysphoric to euphoric about any parts of your body, and for that to change over time, or not. It’s fine to use your anatomy sexually in culturally expected ways, or in culturally unexpected ways, for your gender.

In order to access medical services, many trans people have had to distance themselves from the idea that their transness is in any way erotic for them. This can make it hard to really tune into what we enjoy, especially if it does involve eroticising our gender in some way. It’s important to remember that many – if not most – cis people find it a turn-on to be desirably feminine and/or masculine, and to ‘perform’ their masculinity or femininity during sex. It’s fine to be turned on by your transness, or femininity, or masculinity, or non-binary-ness. And it’s also fine not to be.

We can feel pressure to be sexual in ways that map onto our current gender rather than our birth-assigned sex, in order to affirm our transness. It’s fine for everyone – trans or cis – to enjoy things sexually which match the stereotypes of how their gender is sexual, and which don’t. For example, whether you are a woman, a man, or a non-binary person, it is fine to be active or dominant, or passive or submissive, sexually – or both, or neither, or different things at different times. 

Question 3: What blocks me (in general / as a trans person) from communicating my desires, turn-ons, and pleasures with others?

This isn’t just an issue for trans people. Research on cis people has found that even those who have been having sex together for years know under two thirds of what each other enjoys sexually, and under a quarter of what they dislike. People are also unlikely to communicate openly about their turn-ons and turn-offs with people they are dating or hooking up with because there’s so much stigma and fear about being ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘abnormal’ when it comes to sex.

However, there are reasons why communicating honestly about our desires and attractions can be particularly risky for trans people. Let’s reflect on these here…

What blocks me (in general / as a trans person) from communicating my desires, turn-ons, and pleasures with others?

Here are some of the answers that came up in the trans sex workshop I ran, in response to this question:

Fear of rejection.Worrying about losing a partner.A sense of scarcity which means you feel that you have to stay with a person if you’ve found someone who wants you, even if the sex/relationship isn’t good.The struggle of finding people who aren’t either transphobic or fetishising of trans people.Avoiding conflict.Fear of upsetting people.Not wanting to interrupt the flow of sex.Lack of confidence.Internalised transphobia.Other people not holding space for our needs, just going after what they want.The impact of hormones.Not having the vocabulary or language to communicate with.

The current cultural moral panic about trans people makes this such a troubled area. As the documentary, Disclosure, pointed out, trans people are demonised in relation to their sexuality. Trans women – in particular – are frequently depicted in the media as sexual predators, despite the fact that they are statistically far more likely to be the victim of sexual assault, and other violence, than they are the perpetrator. It’s important to be very kind with yourself about the challenges of navigating your sexuality during this moral panic. It can help a lot to develop communities of support, if possible, and trusting relationships in which to be sexual.

Most trans people carry experiences of trauma which also tend to impact our sexual experience. If we have been painfully rejected, or assaulted, in the past, we may be very fearful of being open with partners in the present about our sexual needs and boundaries. Therapy with a trans affirmative therapist, and/or queer peer support, can help us to learn how to tune into our needs and wants, limits and boundaries, and to communicate these with others if we find this hard.

There can be big power imbalances in play with cisgender partners, which can also make it hard to communicate openly about sex, and about other vulnerable topics in our relationships. It’s important to talk about these power imbalances as part of a consent conversation. Of course other aspects of our experience comes into play here too, so it’s useful to consider how our transness or cisness intersects, for example, with our race, class, disability, age, HIV status, survivorship, immigration status, etc.

Communicating about sex can also be vulnerable when we’re with trans partners given that both/all people are likely to carry trauma, and we might want to be particularly careful to affirm others, and be fearful of hurting them more. Partners – whether one-off or long term – should want the sex we’re having to feel as safe and free as possible. The resources at the end offer some suggestions for how to start having these kinds of conversations if you find it tough.

Hopefully these answers help you to see that you’re not alone in finding this tough. Juno Roche’s book, Queer Sex, is a great resource outlining various ways in which trans people have found safe-enough and free-enough relationships and situations in which to enjoy their sexuality.

Question 4: Why is sex with trans people so awesome? 

It’s sad that when we think about trans sex, the things that most readily comes to mind are these blocks that we face to having good sex. It’s certainly important to be mindful of how tough things are at the moment, and to affirm that the struggles we experience are very real and understandable, and not our fault. However, it’s also possible to flip this and to ask what might be particularly great about trans sex, which everyone could learn from. 

Most people who are not trans are actually having unsatisfactory, mediocre, or even unwanted or non-consensual sex. That’s certainly the sense you get from the annual NATSAL survey which finds that at least half of those surveyed see themselves as having one or more sexual problems. This is because most people are trying to conform to a very limited idea of what sex is, what bodies should do, and how the different genders should be sexual, and failing at that.

So perhaps trans people might have something valuable to offer everyone when it comes to sex, given that we have stepped outside – to some extent – the rules and norms about bodies, sex, and gender. That’s certainly a key theme in Juno’s book, and it relates to Travis Alabanza’s idea that trans people should be seen as a gift for the rest of the world, instead of a problem. So let’s consider it…

Why is sex with trans people so awesome? 

Here are some of the answers that came up in the trans sex workshop I ran, in response to this question:

We think and talk a lot about gender, bodies, and sex.Communication skills.Expertise around consent.We are storehouses of knowledge around bodies, hormones, the impact of medical stuff, etc. (which actually impact all people, not just trans people).We’ve had to discover or redefine gender roles.We have less assumptions and expectations so can see the full, unique person in front of us.Opening up creativity and freedom.Humour and playfulness (which takes away ‘performance anxiety’).Acceptance of awkwardness and things not working as anticipated.We’re more up for the process of sex rather than aiming at a particular goal.Generosity.

When sex and relationships educator, Justin Hancock, and I wrote our book about sex – Enjoy Sex (How, When and IF You Want To) – we deliberately didn’t have any separate material about how to have sex with trans people, or as a trans person. This was because we figured that the way we’d want people to have trans sex is actually the way we’d want all people to have any sex. For example:

Don’t make any assumptions about the body and desires in front of you, whether that is your own body and desires in solo sex, or somebody else’s in partnered sex. All our bodies and desires work differently, and change over time.Approach everyone – including yourself – with curiosity, openness, and ongoing consent check-ins.Don’t focus on genitals and orgasms. This body may experience different forms of pleasure, in different parts of the mind/body. Leave the genital sex/orgasm script behind and consider all the different things that could count as sex (mentally and/or physically) and explore which of these you might want to try.Drop the gendered script as well. There’s no reason you have to have particular sexual desires and behaviours just because you’re a woman, man, or non-binary person. Everyone has a complex, changing, relationship with their gender, body, and desires.Resources

If you want more on all of this, check out my book with Justin. We also have a zine – Make Your Own Sex Manual – which takes you through a number of activities to figure out what you do – and don’t – want, and how to communicate that with others. It can be a great idea to create your own living document about your sexuality which you can share with others to explore what you might do together. If you want to explore your sexual fantasies more, we also have a zine on that.

Another recommendation is the Gender Stories podcast by our friend Alex Iantaffi which focuses more on trans issues. Alex and I wrote How To Understand Your Gender together, and are now working on How to Understand Your Sexuality. Also check out the So Many Wings podcast by Sascha Altman DuBrul (mentioned above), and his collaborator, genderqueer writer and artist, Jacks McNamara. 

For more on consent, check out Justin’s latest book, Love Uncommon’s resources on how to develop self-consent, and my Consent Checklist zine.

Gender GP also has an excellent series on trans sex education. And Scottish Trans and Waverley Care have recently brought out an awesome report on trans sexual health.

If you’d like to support my writing then feel free to drop me a dollar or two on my Patreon.

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What is queer?

Last month Jules Scheele‘s and my new comic book – Sexuality: A Graphic Guide – came out. I’m also thinking and planning towards a fourth book in the series, on mental health, particularly after having such a tough couple of years with my own mental health, and continuing to learn so much through that process.

Thanks to an invitation by colleagues at the Scottish Parliament, I was recently drawn back to the question that started me working on this series of graphic guides back in 2014. That is how we can understand the word queer. You can check out our discussion here and I’ve written a few more thoughts below.

One of the reasons that my editor at Icon approached me to write Queer: A Graphic History, was that she came across presentation I’d once been asked to give about what the word queer meant. In that talk – and in the book that followed – I began by unpacking all the different meanings that the word can have, how these have shifted over time and location, and how the different meanings can co-exist as well as being contradictory in places.

While the Sexuality, Gender, and (hopefully) Mental Health and Love graphic guides don’t have the word queer in the title, they all take a queer approach, and they all dig deeper into themes and topics that were touched on in the first book. The word queer is often taken as a catch-all reclaimed word for marginalised sexualities and genders, but queer activism and queer theory have generally had a wider remit: to challenge any cultural ideals around what is ‘normal’, to reveal where they come from, and the systems of power these serve.

Queer approaches also question whether a person can have any kind of individual identity separate from the systems, structures, and cultural messages around them, and the impact that the sense that they do has on us. Like intersectional feminism, queer approaches recognise that the ways in which we experience ourselves are inevitably impacted by how we’re positioned in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, age, and much more – and that these aspects cannot be disentangled.

For these reasons it makes sense to me to be equally queer when it comes to writing about mental health and love as about gender and sexuality, and hopefully other writers in this series will take a similar approach to some of those other interconnected themes.

For example, the idea – and ideal – of being normal is pivotal to the way we’ve come to understand what is mentally healthy. Also we’re impacted by the legacy of the individualising of struggles which are due to social injustice or toxic cultures. Similarly, cultural norms of what love should look and feel like impact which relationships are, and aren’t, seen as acceptable and afforded legitimacy, and these are deeply connected to colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. This is something that I explored a while back in my queer relationships zine which takes each different meaning of queer and applies it to relationships.

There’s more in this recent blog post about how we might question the cultural separation of gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality (as well as race, class, disability, ways of doing relationships, and so much more, of course). This one tackled how queerness can apply to creativity. Perhaps we can benefit from considering all aspects of identity and experience a little more queerly.

You can check out more of my posts, vids, and podcasts about queerness here, here, and here.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support my Patreon.

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Heteroflexibility and bicuriosity

Thanks so much to Paisley Gilmour for including me in this recent Cosmo article about being heteroflexible: an awesome interview with sex educator and podcaster Hannah Witton about why and how she uses this word. Cheers also to Paisley for including a plug for my new book with Jules Scheele – Sexuality: A Graphic Guide – which unpacks the understandings of sexuality which make space for heteroflexibility and bicuriosity, as well as those that don’t.

Here’s what I had to say when Paisley interviewed me about these terms…

My question is always what labels like ‘heteroflexible’ or ‘bicurious’ open up and close down – both for us personally – and for the wider world. My sense is that any label can be very helpful if it helps us to name our experience in a way that feels like a good fit and/or find community. But any label can also be risky if we hold onto it too tightly when perhaps it doesn’t fit us so well any more. Labels are also problematic if they risk excluding others or making their experience seem less valid.

What does heteroflexibility open up?

So what does heteroflexible open up and close down? It opens up the idea that sexuality can be flexible and fluid – which is far more accurate for most people than the wider cultural sense that it is something we’re born with which is fixed for life. It also opens up the sense that hetero people can experience attractions to other genders without that necessarily meaning they have to now class themselves as gay or bisexual. The word homoflexible does a similar thing for people for whom ‘gay’ is an important identity, but they do experience some attractions to genders other than the ‘same gender’. 

What does heteroflexibility close down?

However, the risk with both heteroflexible and homoflexible is bisexual erasure. We still live in a culture that is highly skeptical and demonising of bisexuality. Bi people are represented as greedy, suspicious, dangerous and threatening, or dismissed as not real, immature, going through a phase, etc. So it could be that people prefer to adopt words like heteroflexible or homoflexible because saying that they are bisexual feels too risky. The danger is that that supports the cultural assumption that everyone is ‘really’ more-or-less gay or straight, and there isn’t really any bisexuality (even though most studies find that actually most people are somewhere between the extremes of gay and straight in their attractions). 

Missing other aspects of sexuality

Finally, any sexuality term that defines people in terms of their gender of attraction can risk missing all the other components that make up our sexuality (like the other aspects of people that we find attractive, the roles we enjoy taking sexually, the kinds of sex we enjoy and don’t, the communities we feel affiliated with, etc.) This zine goes into all of that in detail.

Bicuriosity

I’d say pretty similar things for the word ‘bicurious’. It very helpfully opens up the sense that it’s okay to be curious and questioning around our sexuality, which is something that wider culture denies: expecting everyone to be certain about having a fixed sexuality. However, it can also be seen as suggesting it wouldn’t really be okay to be fully bisexual. We might ask why we have the word ‘bicurious’ when we don’t have ‘heterocurious’.

Should I use these terms?

For anyone considering these terms I’d suggest asking what they open up and close down for you. I’d encourage you to embrace them if they feel like a good fit, if they help you find communities of like-minded people, or if they help you to make sense of yourself.

But try to hold the terms lightly so that you can let them go if things change for you, or if you find a word which is an even better fit. And make sure that, in using these terms for yourself, you don’t try to put them on anybody else, or exclude or erase anyone else’s experience in the ways you use them.

To find out more check out the Cosmo article and the new book Sexuality: A Graphic Guide.If you liked this – or the free sexuality zine – feel free to support my Patreon, and Jules’s Patreon.

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Hell Yeah Self-Care Podcast

This week me and Alex Iantaffi went on Justin Hancock‘s Culture, Sex, Relationships podcast to talk about our new book Hell Yeah Self-Care.

It was so good to be back on the rebranded Meg-John and Justin podcast which Justin is now taking forward with some great new formats including sex jams (where he discusses sex in pop music with historian Eleanor Janega), advice episodes, reviews of relevant media, and interviews with various sex and relationship experts.

You can find the epsiode with me and Alex here (free feed) and here (extended Patreon episode). Our chat included why self-care is such a problematic concept and why we named our book for it anyway, what it means to take a trauma-informed perspective and why that’s important, why collective care is so vital under capitalism, and who even is this self that we’re trying to care for.

If you want to buy the book please consider doing so via an independent bookshop like Hackney Pages.You can find previous episodes of the podcast with me and Alex here and here.If you want to support our projects check out my Patreon, Justin’s Patreon, and Alex’s Patreon.

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Sexuality: A Graphic Guide Book Launch

Thanks so much to the folks at The Bookish Type in Leeds for launching Sexuality: A Graphic Guide last week. Here’s the video if you want to hear me talking about the new book and what it means for me. Much gratitude to Joe Thompson for the excellent questions. And if you want to order it from The Bookish Type you can do so here.

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Facebook/LinkedIn announcement

Just a quick announcement to say I’m going to delete my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts soon in order to have fewer social media platforms to engage with. If you follow me on there and want to keep receiving updates, posts, and resources, please follow me on twitter, or subscribe to follow my blog instead (at the bottom right of this page).

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New sexuality book out! The real sex education!

My new book with Jules Scheele – Sexuality: A Graphic Guide – comes out today. One of the ways we’re launching it is that I spoke about the book on The Real Sex Education podcast – also coming out today.

The podcast asks contributors to reflect on the sex education they received themselves, and to talk about what would’ve been more useful for them and more relevant to the real world. It occurred to me that the main sex education that I received were three books left in my room when I was around the age of eleven. I’m now nearly done writing a trilogy of books which would be the ones I wish I’d received instead:

Enjoy Sex (How, when and IF you want to) with Justin Hancock: This book contains all the advice I wish I’d received about how to go about having sex with yourself and others, as well as knowing that you never have to unless you want to. Justin’s follow up book Can we Talk About Consent is also a great companion to this. Sexuality: A Graphic Guide with Jules Scheele (out today!): This book explains ‘with compassion, humour, erudition and a touch of the erotic’ everything that I now know about how sex and sexuality work, drawing on the activists, scholars, therapists and others who’ve taught me the most useful things I know about this topic. It’s part of our graphic guide trilogy.How to Understand Your Sexuality with Alex Iantaffi (out next year, we just finished writing it!): This book takes the reader through how they can understand their own relationship to sex and sexuality, within the wider understandings they grew up with, and those which surround them today. It also covers how they can communicate their sexual or asexual identities, attractions, desires, and practices to themselves and others, if they want to. It’s part of our ‘how to understand your…’ trilogy.

To celebrate the launch of the second of these books, I thought I’d reflect here on the sex education that I received myself, as well as the messages that I’m passionate about getting across in the ‘real’ sex education that I now put out there.

Content note: There’s brief mention of the traumatic impact of bullying and non-consensual sex and relationships in this post, no detailed descriptions.

My sex education

I didn’t receive much explicit sex education at all myself. In middle school (9-13) it came in the form of a couple of anatomy lessons from an obviously highly embarrassed science teacher. It now seems striking to me that this lesson came from the same teacher who – when vexed – would make her class raise our arms above our heads and ‘clench and unclench your hands’ until we were in pain. It was said that she did this because she was no longer allowed to hit the kids to punish them, something that had only just been made illegal in state schools in the UK. I wonder now how it impacts you when you receive education about sex in the same context as you receive both emotional awkwardness and non-consensual/abusive behaviour. My high school was Catholic which – back then – meant that the only sex education came in the form of a disturbing anti-abortion video.

At home sex, education took the form of the three aforementioned three books which several of my friends received around the same age. These were the Usborne books Growing Up and Babies, and a book about periods Have You Started Yet? It looks like there are more recent versions of the Usborne books, which were also combined into a book called Understanding The Facts of Life. Recently a friend found some images of the 1980s version of the book including this one about sex:

In some ways this book was impressive for its time. The pages before and after this one include boxes explaining that it’s perfectly fine to fantasise and to masturbate ‘during puberty’ (although by implication less okay afterwards?), and that around 1 in 10 people is ‘homosexual’ and even more are ‘bi-sexual’. 

The ways this book covers sex is not dissimilar to any number of popular sex advice books today. It assumes that sex equals penis-in-vagina intercourse, and that we do it to achieve orgasm. It includes some mention that ‘foreplay’, masturbation, and same-gender sex as legitimate activities – although these are given nowhere near the amount of room as hetero ‘sexual intercourse’.

The messages in explicit/implicit sex education

The messages that I internalised from these books – and from the more implicit forms of sex education that circulated in pop songs, teen mags, peer conversations, and romance fiction – were the following:

There are two kinds of people – boys and girls (there were also boy and girl specific Usborne books called What’s Happening to Me?)Boys have penises, girls have vaginas.Boys want sex with girls and vice versa (‘Homosexuality’ is this other strange thing that requires an explanation).Sex is penis in vagina intercourse.People generally orgasm from penis in vagina intercourse, which is the goal of sex.If you want to fall in love and have ‘a relationship’, you need to have sex.

These messages were unfortunate for me given that:

I had a pretty strong sense that I wasn’t the gender everyone seemed to think I was.My genitals didn’t seem to work in the ways these books described.It didn’t make a lot of sense to me to be interested in girls and boys in different ways.The things I thought about when I was excited were not penis in vagina intercourse.When I eventually tried it, it was impossible for me to orgasm from penis in vagina intercourse.I desperately wanted to be loved and became convinced I wouldn’t be because I wasn’t physically able to either have penis in vagina sex, or to be attractive to the ‘opposite sex’ in the ways described.

Nowadays I’m thankfully aware that the things on the second list all apply to large numbers of people. In fact, if you put together all the people that at least one of those things apply to you would have the vast majority – rather than the minority – of people.

The impact of sex education

When I think about the legacy of any one of these disconnects – between the messages in implicit/explicit sex education and my own experiences – they are very painful. So many teenagers share the experiences of being convinced that they’re unattractive and/or abnormal because of their physical appearance, the ways their genitals work, their experience of gender, or their erotic desires and attractions – or lack of them. 

It’s worth repeating that those who have at least one of these disconnects are actually in the majority rather than the minority. Also there are far too many – like me – for whom that sense of unattractiveness and abnormality was reinforced on a daily basis for several years in the form of bullying. From what I now understand of trauma, it’s hard to compute the damage done from being repeatedly told that you – and your body – are abnormal, unattractive, unacceptable and even disgusting, with nobody to counter these messages or to help you to bear the excruciating pain, fear, and shame that comes with them.

In my case I eventually learnt that I must conform – or pretend to conform – to that former list of messages, if I ever wanted the bullying to end, or to find love and belonging. This is the second layer of damage done by explicit and implicit sex education: all of the people forcing themselves to have unwanted sex, trying to conform to gender norms that don’t fit, allowing things to happen to their bodies which are not pleasurable or may even be painful or non-consensual, and entering relationships which aren’t good for them because that’s the kind of relationship they’ve been told is normal or romantic.

And, of course, it’s very painful indeed to realise – later in life – that none of this was necessary, that there were other ways you could have lived your life. It’s little wonder that many people double down and try to ensure that they – and others – conform to the sex, gender and relationship norms they grew up with. As Alex suggests, we could see that as a form of intergenerational trauma.

Real sex education

This all perhaps explains why I’m so committed and passionate about getting different messages about sex and sexuality out there: why I’ve co-created my own trilogy of books to provide a very different kind of sex education than the trilogy I received as a kid.

For me, the following list of alternative messages would be the absolute baseline required for decent sex education or advice.

Gender is diverse and we all have a unique and complex relationship to gender.People have a diverse range of bodies – including sexual anatomy – which work in diverse ways. So it’s always about finding out how your body, and anyone else’s body, works at this particular time, without making assumptions.We can be attracted to all kinds of people, in many different ways, on the basis of all kinds of physical, psychological, and other features. Anything can ‘count’ as sex so long as it feels erotic to you, and it’s all fine to think about or act upon so long as that’s consensual for you and everyone else involved.There are all sorts of reasons to have sexual, sensual or erotic contact with yourself and/or others, and it tends to work best if you’re being present rather than trying to reach any kind of destination or goal, such as orgasm.All different kinds of relationships are equally valid – again so long as they’re consensual. None of them should require that those involved have any kind of sex – or do anything else – because that’s inherently non-consensual.

We really can’t get these messages across if we centre any one kind of body as the default kind of body, any one kind of gender or sexuality as the default kind of gender or sexuality, or any one kind of sex as the default kind of sex – even if we acknowledge that other kinds of bodies, genders, sexualities and kinds of sex exist.

Returning to the 1970s and 80s

Thinking about the book that Jules and I have just published, in the light of this trip down memory lane, I realised that we managed to return to the media of the 1970s and 1980s in another way in what we created. That is in addition to trying to come up with something that was better than the sex ed books that I received at that time.

Our background theme for this book is a mashup between two 1970s creations which remain popular and are constantly reimagined: The Rocky Horror Show Picture Show and Scooby Doo.

As a kid I was obsessed with Scooby Doo and with anything relating to ghosts. In fact Usborne – who published the Facts of Life books – also published some of the best true ghost story books which I devoured. 

I also vividly remember the first time I saw The Rocky Horror Show Picture Show at a friend’s house and all the confusing feelings it left me with: this depiction of another world in which all the rules of sex, gender, and relationships which I thought were set in stone were completely different. I remember the massive sense of loss that came – for me – at the end of the movie, when the human characters are left on earth with just the sense of how everything they thought they knew has been upturned. At the time I hard-related to the character of Janet, although nowadays that has certainly shifted!

Jules and I mashed Scooby Doo and The Rocky Horror Show Picture Show together because we wanted a sense – like in The Rocky Horror Show Picture Show of unknowing characters entering the potentially confusing, frightening, exciting, wonderful world of sex and sexuality and returning changed by the experience. But, of course, in Rocky Horror, the main characters who do this are the young, white, heternormative couple Brad and Janet. Scooby Doo gave us the potential to imagine a more diverse group of characters to navigate this fun house / house of horrors. In the process we took the opportunity to (re)imagine a Scooby gang who included more intersecting experiences and identities, and a more consensual version of Frank-n-Furter and his friends for them to engage with, which made us both very happy.

Of course no book is perfect, and there’s so much more that I wish we could have covered in Sexuality: A Graphic Guide, some of which Alex and I have been working to incorporate into How to Understand Your Sexuality. For example, Alex and I include much more on how trauma of all kinds – as well as pleasure – shapes our sexualities. We also touch on more indigenous scholarship, which is a vital perspective when considering the problems with western understandings of sex and sexuality, and how these have been imposed on people around the world in forms of historical trauma which link to claiming/owning of land. Despite having studied sex and sexuality for well over two decades now, I’m still learning about it – personally and politically – and still have much to learn.

I hope that Sexuality: A Graphic Guide is a helpful starting point to get folks questioning the messages that they’ve received in their own explicit and implicit sex education. I also hope that some people may receive it – and other resources like it – young enough that a more open understandings of sex and sexuality may become a foundation for their burgeoning erotic experiences, instead of them having to begin by undoing the damage of previous messages.

More information…

You can listen to me on The Real Sex Education podcast here.

There are details of the online launch events for Sexuality: A Graphic Guide here.

If you liked this post, please feel free to support my Patreon.

The post New sexuality book out! The real sex education! appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Book Out Today: Hell Yeah Self Care!

My new book with the fabulous Alex Iantaffi – Hell Yeah Self Care! – comes out today. It’s a workbook full of information and activities about self-care and collective-care, from a trauma-informed perspective.

Here’s a video of Alex and me talking about the book, what it means to us, how we struggle around self-care ourselves, and what we do about that.

The post Book Out Today: Hell Yeah Self Care! appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.