Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 7

Alternative Academia

If you’re interested in my occasional thoughts on academic life – having left – there’s a new discussion piece where David Robertson and I share our thoughts on what alternative academia might look like in the free journal Rogue.

This is based on thoughts that we shared, along with other participants, at The Conference at the End of the World last summer, which was indeed as awesome as it sounds. Thanks so much to editor, Vivian Asimos, for including me in this. There’s also a couple of great papers in this edition of the journal, based on presentations from the conference.

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Words Matter: Non-Binary Gender

Thanks so much to Reina Shimizu who interviewed me for Vogue Japan this month in their ‘words matter’ section on non-binary gender. Here’s the English language version of the interview:

What is the definition of non-binary (gender)?

Non-binary gender means identifying as a gender other than man or woman. It includes people who experience their gender as somewhere between male and female, people who don’t feel that they have a gender, people who are both masculine and feminine, and people who have a gender beyond the binary of man or woman.

Why do we need this term?

We need a concept for non-binary gender because so many people experience their gender in ways outside the man/woman binary. One recent study found that over a third of people experience themselves as – to some extent – ‘the other gender, neither gender, or both genders’. 

Around the world there are many cultures who don’t have the binary man/woman gender system, including places where there are three or five genders, and where gender is tied to other aspects of a person such as sexuality or spirituality, so it doesn’t make sense to ask somebody’s gender separate to that. To be culturally inclusive we need to include non-binary genders, which is why many countries now include a third gender option on passports. 

Why are we getting more and more interested in the term now?

In countries that do have a binary man/woman gender system, more and more people are identifying as non-binary. The internet has helped people to form communities around non-binary gender and to begin to fight for rights and recognition.

At the same time, people have recognised that the binary gender system isn’t working well for anybody. Many men and women suffer because of rigid ideas of what it means to be a ‘real man’ or ‘real woman’. For example, high suicide rates in men have been linked to cultural norms that men shouldn’t display emotion or seek support. High rates of depression in women have been linked to norms that women’s lives should be based around pleasing others. The binary gender system isn’t working well for anybody.

What are the difficulties of lives of non-binary people in today’s society? Is the situation improving?

In cultures that still have binary gender systems there is a big problem with invisibility. Non-binary people are misgendered many times a day, by people calling them ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’, for example, or referring to them with ‘he’ or ‘she’ pronouns. They may also struggle to find a bathroom to use which isn’t gendered, and to be treated as a non-binary person in their workplace or educational institution, or by health professionals.

We know that being treated by the world in ways that conflict with your way of experiencing yourself takes a big toll on mental health. Many non-binary people also experience transphobic discrimination, bullying, and even violence. 

What do we need to change? How can we achieve the change?

We need a cultural shift, in binary gender countries, to recognise non-binary genders as legitimate. That means changing policies to include non-binary gender legally, ensuring the availability of gender-neutral bathrooms and changing areas, and giving the option of ‘they’ pronouns and the title ‘Mx’ or their equivalent.

An important step in achieving this change is cultural awareness, which is slowly happening through non-binary actors playing non-binary characters on TV shows like Billions and Grey’s Anatomy, and non-binary creators like CN Lester, Jeffrey Marsh, Sam Smith, and Travis Alabanza producing awesome media content. 

What are the challenges in order that non-binary should be widely accepted?

It is challenging to get many people – in binary gender cultures – to acknowledge the existence of non-binary gender. This is despite the fact that, even in such cultures, the idea of two ‘opposite’ genders is actually a relative recent thing. Previously women were seen as an inferior version of men. Also, historically there have always been people who didn’t fit into the binary gender system. 

According to the GIDS website, “There are many ways in which people identify or present in a non-binary manner, and perhaps we all do in some respects.” Could you elaborate on this, using some examples?

Most people experience and express themselves in some ways that don’t conform to the gender they’re generally seen as being. Most men have some stereotypically feminine characteristics (such as sensitivity, nurturing behaviours, or caring about appearance), and most women have some stereotypically masculine characteristics (such as competitiveness, toughness, or being focused on their career). Many women wear ‘masculine’ clothes, and perform ‘masculine’ roles, although there is generally more stigma about men doing the ‘feminine’ equivalent.

While only a few percent of people – so far – identify as non-binary in binary cultures, far more experience and express themselves in somewhat non-binary ways. Of course it is fine for them to do so and identify as a man, as a woman, and/or as a non-binary person.

Will there be any benefits for society and all people if non-binary is widely accepted? What are they?

Huge benefits because it will open up the possibility for everyone to loosen their grip on rigid gender binaries. Boys in binary cultures grow up finding it hard to express or name emotions other than anger. This means they are far more likely to act out their distress in aggressive ways when they’re older, potentially hurting others and themselves, and being convicted of crimes. Girls in binary cultures grow up very focused on appearance and relationships, and believing boys are ‘better’ than them. This means they can find it hard to tune into their own needs and boundaries, and express these, which takes a major toll on their mental and physical health. 

There may be people who cannot easily understand or accept the concept of non-binary as they are socially conditioned to see all people either men or women. Is there any effective way to make non-binary more accessible for those people?

Luckily we have many wonderful non-binary creators who write about being non-binary, put out non-binary theatre and art, and portray non-binary people on TV and in movies. Follow some of them on social media, and check out their content.

Also it is a great idea to reflect on your own experience of gender, to recognise how it isn’t completely binary. Check out my books to help with this: How to Understand Your Gender, and Gender: A Graphic Guide.

It’s helpful to remind those who struggle with the concept of non-binary that the way we understand gender is always changing. Even the cultural roles of men and women will have changed a great deal in their lifetime, and certainly in the last century or two, and that is a great thing.

However, there will sadly be some people who are impossible to convince. If you’re non-binary yourself, you may want to get support from trans and non-binary organisations, or groups online, as it can be very hard if friends and family dismiss your identity.

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Queer Activism and Mental Health Activism: The Need For Dialogue

Recently I was asked to speak on a panel for NSUN – the National Survivor User Network – about what mental health activism and LGBTQIA+ activism could learn from each other. NSUN is the UK’s only mental health charity to center survivor and lived experience voices, everyone involved having lived experience of mental ill-health, trauma, and/or distress. This panel was partof their 2020 AGM. You can view the full panel discussion, with the awesome Sabah Choudrey, Suriya Aisha, Kes Otter Lieffe, and Aimz Ruthron here.

In this post I want to share some thoughts about the learnings that I believe are important, in both directions, between mental health activism and sexuality/gender activism. I also want to explore the separation that we make between these two areas and whether that might be part of the problem.

Separating out mental health and gender/sexuality

The first thing we were asked to do on the panel was to introduce ourselves, including our own gender and sexuality – given the focus of the panel – and our lived experience of mental health struggles.

The answer I would usually give to this question nowadays – for example in the interview that I did for mental health podcast So Many Wings – would be something like this: 

‘My gender is trans, my sexuality is queer, and my mental health situation is that I’m a survivor of developmental and relational trauma who experiences themselves as plural.’

So I could be diagnosed with post traumatic stress and dissociative identity disorders if using those psychiatric categories. If you wanted to add a question in there about my spiritual/therapeutic stance then something like somatic- and social justice-informed Buddhist mindfulness might get close to that.

As I considered this answer though, I realised that a deeper truth is that it really doesn’t make much sense to me, any more, to distinguish my gender, my sexuality, my mental health status, and my spirituality in this way. The answer to all of these questions – gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality – could be trans, they could all be queer, they could all be plural, traumatised, and mindful. They are all of them.

So the main point I want to make in this piece is that I think we should question the very separation between mental health activism and LGBTQIA+ activism. The reasons for this is not just because – as Black feminists have rightly pointed out – we have to fight all forms of injustice – whether or not they impact us directly – in order to be truly free. It’s also not just because so many queers are also survivors due to the traumatising nature of marginalisation and stigmatisation. It’s because the very separation of these aspects of our experience may well be part of the problem which leads to both the oppression of queer people and to the distress of survivors. 

I’ll return to this theme in more depth shortly. First, let’s consider what each form of activism might learn from the other, if we did regard them as separable. For each I’ll make a couple of key suggestions although there are many more we could consider.

What can mental health activism learn from LGBTQIA+ activism?

My answers to this question are both things which more radical mental health activism has already learnt from queer activism, but which could definitely do with filtering through more fully to mainstream mental health activism.

First, LGBTQIA+ activism – whether the more mainstream or radical version – has generally located the problem of queer experience out there in the heteronormative, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, acephobic, etc. culture, rather than in queer people themselves. This is a shift that began a long time ago, in the moves towards decriminalisation and depathologisation of homosexuality. It has continued as each new addition to the LGBTQIA+ acronym has eventually argued that their experience should not be understood as a problem within the individual, but an issue with wider normative society. 

Within more mainstream mental health activism there is still often a sense of mental health struggles as something which are located within the individual, which require fixing, rather than as signs of a toxic culture, unjust social structures, or systemic problems within a family or workplace, for example. 

Some mental health struggles simply wouldn’t be struggles within a culture which accepted diverse experience rather than insisting that people follow certain rigid norms of behaviour and experience, and pathologised and stigmatised those who don’t. Many other struggles are the result of forms of traumatic experiences such as marginalisation and non-consensual treatment, which are individualised in the person who is struggling, rather than recognised as being structural and systemic problems. 

Survivor-led and mad pride movements have moved towards a more similar understanding to queer activism: that the problem is out there rather than in here, and that one important form of resistance is that of visibly taking pride in our difference, rather than accepting the shame and stigma of the wider world. For example we might question those who can can manage to fit into the category of ‘sane’ in such an ‘insane’ world. We might celebrate the ‘creatively maladjusted misfits and changemakers’ that we are, as So Many Wings does.

What can LGBTQIA+ activism learn from mental health activism?

My answers to this question are about what LGBTQIA+ activism could learn from the more radical and critical versions of mental health activism. I wrote more about this in this paper on why bi communities, in particular, could do with a more critical understanding of mental health.

One thing that’s always surprised me in queer communities is the way people who are very critical about normative ways of understanding gender and sexuality, often seem to accept mainstream medical models of mental health. Folks who think carefully and queerly about the labels and categories that are imposed on our genders and sexualities, where those come from and who benefits from them, often seem comfortable labelling their mental health struggles with psychiatric categories, and accepting that those make them a certain kind of – disordered – person. 

Also, many in the queer world challenge the binaries and hierarchies that are imposed on gender and sexuality, without applying this to mental health. So the main thing I’d like to see from a dialogue between queer and mental health activism, would be a more critical perspective on mental health among queers which questions binary divisions between normal and abnormal, mad and sane, functional and dysfunctional, healthy and unhealthy, rational and emotional, and so on. Just as with the binaries of man/woman, gay/straight, cis/trans, etc. we can ask who is served by such divisions, and whether they stand up to scrutiny. Alex Iantaffi and I explore these questions more in our book Life Isn’t Binary.

Secondly, mental health activism is – it seems to me – increasingly informed by somatic understandings of trauma and the way it operates in the body. Queer activism could certainly do with learning from such trauma-informed perspectives. My experience of LGBTQIA+ and sex positive spaces is that they are often unaware of this. For example, there’s often little awareness in party and con spaces of the potential triggers of trauma, how these show up in the body, how to know that you – or somebody else – is in a trauma response, and the implications of this in for our sexual practices and relationships. 

In more conscious sexuality and kink spaces, there can often be a sense that people should be pushed to their edges, or confronted with challenging activities as a form of catharsis, without an awareness of the potentially retraumatising impact of putting somebody through a similar situation to one which was traumatising in early life. Online call-out and cancel culture, which is prevalent in some queer communities, similarly lacks an awarenes of the potentially retraumatising impact of public shaming, and the traumatised places in ourselves that such impulses can come from.

Mental health activism is LGBTQIA+ activism and vice versa

When I worked as a therapist, one thing that struck me was that gender and sexuality were almost always deeply relevant to clients’ mental health struggles. This was true whether they were somebody whose gender and/or sexuality was marginalised, or somebody who was more normative in their presentation of their gender and/or sexuality. 

LGBTQIA+ people’s mental health struggles are clearly related to their experiences of marginalisation, stigma, invisibility, discrimination, bullying, and so on. For more normative folks, it is often the attempt to adhere to rigid ideals of masculinity, femininity, and heteronormativity that is the problem. 

For example, in relation to gender, we know that high rates of suicide and addiction in men is highly linked to toxic masculinity and rules against expressing vulnerability or emotion, and seeking help or support from others. We also know that high rates of depression, anxiety, and body shame in women is highly linked to the way femininity is defined in relation to others, and women’s worth is wrapped up in their relationships and desirability. 

In relation to sexuality, many people experience distress because the very limited ideas about the kind of sex that they should have, and the relationship contexts they should be having it in, bear little relation to their internal erotic landscapes. This mismatch plays out regularly in a vulnerable and embodied way during sex, which takes a great toll on mental health. It could be seen as a form of everyday non-consent enacted against the bodies of ourselves and/or of others.

So, whether we are marginalised in relation to our gender and sexuality or not, normative understandings of gender and sexuality traumatise us. For this reason, our mental health struggles, genders, and sexualities cannot easily be disentangled, in fact should be explored together.

Bringing mental health and gender/sexuality back together

It strikes me that many cultures around the world do not separate out gender, sexuality, spirituality, and mental health at all. In many places the most spiritual people have also been those who were gender creative and erotically expansive. Language has developed in such contexts which captures that whole state rather than separating out gender, sexuality, and spirituality. In many faiths and communities, experiences which we might label mental health struggles are seen as sacred experiences, or paths to enlightenment, and people going through them are honoured and supported.

The separation of gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality could be seen as a toxic aspect of racial capitalism, required to ensure docile subjects who are too busy policing themselves, and each other, around their ‘normality’ or otherwise to critically consider what is being done to them, or its impact. 

Certainly we can see the roots of the current form of the binary gender model and heteronormativity in forms of capitalism which required women to work unpaid in the home supporting and reproducing the workforce. In many ways this has ramped up under neoliberal capitalism with its pressure to present a successful, productive singular self who is performing gender, sex, and mental well-being perfectly, while paying little attention to spirituality beyond the individualised kind of care required to keep them functional and productive.

Perhaps one of the reasons we see such high rates of distress in neoliberal capitalist cultures is this very severing of gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality, within such an unjust race and class system. This could, itself, be seen as a form of historical and intergenerational trauma, as authors such as Alex Iantaffi have suggested. 

The work of Audre Lorde – and many Black feminists who’ve followed her – calls into question such separation. They suggest instead that we could understand ‘the erotic’ as a powerful resource relating to how we feel when we’re most alive and mentally well which incorporates and transcends the sexual and the spiritual. If liberated such a resource would reveal and challenge all of the destructive forces we’re operating under, and require something very different.

My trans, queer, plural, traumatised, mindful self

You might find it useful – like me – to play with whether the labels you use to describe one aspect of your experience or identity are actually helpful to apply to other aspects. Perhaps this can be helpful in breaking down the divisions between gender, sexuality, mental health status, and spirituality.

I find trans a useful word to apply to all of these areas because my experience of all of them is different to what they were assumed to be when I was born, not just my gender. Also we can understand trans as signalling transition, or change over time, and I consider all these aspects of me as in a state of becoming, rather than being fixed.

The word queer can signal being outside of normativity of all kinds, and that certainly applies to gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality for me. Queer also involves questioning binaries, and the power structures they serve, which is something I’m keen to do, whether those binaries be man/woman or cis/trans, gay/straight or sexual/non-sexual, mad/sane or normal/abnormal, spiritual/non-spiritual or Buddhist/secular.

In addition to transition, plurality is a word which captures my experience of selfhood better than most. Again this applies across all these aspects of being. My plural parts have different genders, they have different sexualities and erotic desires, they express trauma in different ways and fall into different survival strategies, and they certainly come down in different places on a spectrum from secular to spiritual, or ‘rational’ to ‘woo’.

Finally trauma and mindful are both words which are useful across all aspects of myself. I have certainly been traumatised by normative understandings of gender, sexuality, mental health, and spirituality which have been passed down through the generations to me. These are also all sites of trauma for me as I’ve experienced gender-related bullying and discrimination; sexual assault and harrassment; gaslighting and stigma around my mental health struggles; and traumatic experiences in spiritual and conscious sexuality communities – both personally and in relation to the wider #MeToo moments that such communities have gone through.

Somatic and social justice forms of Buddhist mindfulness have been important for me, in addressing all these forms of trauma, and in coming to understand my self (or selves, or no self) better in relation to gender, sexuality, mental health, spirituality, and the ways these are all woven together.

Further resources



You can read a dialogue between me and Helen Spandler on what queer studies and mad studies can learn from each other here.This resource that I wrote for the BACP explains in more detail why gender and sexuality are themes that need to be explored with all clients in relation to their mental health struggles, along with race, class, disability and other key intersections.This article I wrote about mental health as depression and oppression in relation to bi communities also deals with these themes.



BarkerJoB2015Download

You can find more of my resources about trauma on my trauma work page.Patreon link: If you found this useful, please feel free to support my Patreon.

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Sex/gender episode of NatureBang

Today I was featured on a sex/gender episode of the Radio 4 show NatureBang along with Professor Jenny Graves. We spoke about sex/gender diversity across the animal and human worlds. The small child in me who loves David Attenborough is very happy to have achieved being on a nature programme, albeit it wasn’t me who spoke about dragon lizards!

You can listen to the show here.

And here’s the full blurb:

[image error]Dragon lizard

Sex is simple. Or so we’re taught; animals can be male or female. But even the briefest glance at the animal kingdom tells us that this simply isn’t true. Some creatures have only one sex; some have three; some have none at all. Some animals are two sexes at the same time; some flip flop between them when the time is right. When evolution came to solve the problem of procreation, she did it in a myriad of mind-blowing ways.

When it comes to humans, it’s even more complicated – we have this thing called Gender, too. It’s often defined as the social and cultural side of sex, distinct from the biological. But that’s not the full story. Becky Ripley and Emily Knight travel back to the dawn of human culture, and into the tangled depths of our genetic code, to try and unravel why we are the way we are, and why it matters so much that we understand it all properly.

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On queer writing

Congratulations to Queerlings magazine: a magazine for queer writing which started up today. Many thanks to the editors – Chris, Tom, Scott & Ezra – for asking me to write something for the first issue. The request took me on an important journey in exploring what I’ve learnt from my years of increasingly queer writing, and from mentoring other queers with their creative work – particularly during this year of pandemic.

In my piece I explore how we might write in ways that resist attempts to marginalise and silence queer people, how we can capture queer identity and experiences in our writing, how we might challenge normativity and raise up voices from the margins, and how we can tell stories queerly, and apply queerness to our writing process as well as content.

You can read my full piece here. This is a taster…

On queer writing

To celebrate the launch of this awesome new queer writing magazine I thought I’d reflect on queerness and writing. I’ve been writing, myself, for my whole life in one way or another, but I would say that queerness has only gradually infused my writing – as it has my self – over time. Perhaps it has followed something like the journey through queerness which I’ll follow here.

In addition to writing myself, I currently mentor a number of other queer writers including Simon Forsyth, Daniel Morrison, Jeanne Devlin, David Darvasi, Stacy Bias, Katie Green, and Russ Wolf, whose work is referred to here. It’s through my dialogues with them that I’ve come to approach both the content and process of writing ever more queerly. I’m deeply grateful to them for the wisdom and learning they’ve shared, which very much inform this piece.

Jules Scheele and I started our book Queer: A Graphic History by exploring the different meanings of the word queer, and I thought that’d be a neat way to structure this piece. So let’s consider queer writing in relation to otherness, to being LGBTQIA+, to being non-normative, and to the overall project of queering everything.

Queer as in other

The original meaning of queer from the 16th century was of something strange or illegitimate. You might think of phrases like ‘nowt as queer as folks’ or ‘queer as a three dollar bill.’

From the late 19th century, this meaning became attached to same-sex attraction specifically, and queer began to be used as a term of homophobic abuse, for example in the letter from the Marquess of Queensberry which become famous through the trial of Oscar Wilde. It’s due to this meaning of queer that a magazine like Queerlings is necessary at all.

We still live with the legacy of queer people being regarded as something different, something other, something abnormal or illegitimate. It remains rare for queer experience to be the focus of mainstream fiction or non-fiction. For years queer characters have been depicted as the bad guys, as tragic, or in tokenistic ways like the ‘gay best friend’. We still see this today, particularly in the representation of trans people, as highlighted in the recent documentary Disclosure.

Novels and memoirs centring queer experience are generally targetted specifically at queers, seen as only of relevance to us. This is unless they sensationalise queer experience in ways deemed interesting to a cishet audience, for example by depicting a promiscuous bi person or by telling a conventional narrative of a trans person ‘changing sex’ through medical procedures, with before and after photos.

While things are gradually shifting, there remains a sense – sometimes even explicitly taught in creative writing classes – that the white, cishet male protagonist is the only one that audiences can really relate to, or want to read about.

For these reasons we need magazines, bookshops, writing classes, and more which centre queer experience, and outlets which publish specifically queer stories that may well not be accepted or celebrated by mainstream publishers. Bravo Queerlings!

Read more…

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Consensual events

In the weeks leading up to #IDOConsent on 30th November I’m sharing a few posts dealing with consent and non-consent at all levels: in wider culture, in our communities, in our relationships, and with ourselves. In this post I explore how we might make online and offline events more consensual.

You can check out more of this year’s #IDOConsent content and events here.

Many thanks to Justin Hancock for the podcast conversations which were the starting points for these posts. You can find those over on megjohnandjustin.com and on our Patreon. If you want to learn more about consent, there’s no better place to start than Justin’s new book Can We Talk About Consent? Available for pre-order now.

Consent

The definition of consent is ‘agreement to do something’. Being able to agree to something requires everyone involved feeling free-enough and safe-enough to tune into ourselves, and to communicate openly with others, about who we are, what our capacities are, and what we want and don’t want. So how can we run professional or social events – online and offline – in ways that maximise everyone’s capacity to consent?

Consent is the aim

First of all when planning an event, can we ensure that the aim is that everybody involved is consenting, instead of the aim being that it happens in a particular way, or that particular people attend, or even that it happens at all?

If people feel under pressure to attend a social or professional event then it’s hard – if not impossible – for them to be in consent. So can we attend to ways in which this might be the case and do what we can to mitigate those?

In the case of a social event, is there space for every potential attendee to be open about whether or not they fancy it, with recognition that it’s probably not everyone’s thing? For example, if you were planning a birthday party, wedding, or similar, you might think of providing friends and family with other ways they might celebrate you if that wasn’t their thing, or if they couldn’t afford to take part, or if they didn’t get on with other people who were going. That could be getting together with you personally at another time around the event to celebrate, or contributing a video message, for example.

In the case of a professional event, might people feel they have to attend even if it’s not a space they feel comfortable in, due to being asked by a manager, or their being financial penalties if they don’t? How might we reduce any sense of duty or obligation as much as possible?

Informed consent

When planning the event, it’s also important to consider informed consent, ensuring that people know what they’re getting into: what they will be doing and why, and what exactly will be involved. It’s important that they know these things before they decide whether to sign up.

This is particularly vital because, if you don’t tell people what to expect in advance, they may well find themselves in a ‘foot in the door’ scenario. Because they’ve shown up, paid, participated in the first part of the event, etc. they may well feel that they have to keep going, and can’t opt out if they begin to feel uncomfortable.

Important things to let people know about before they sign up include:

Any content or activities that could be potentially triggering for anybodyWho else will be involved if there are potential clashesWhether they will be expected to talk with strangers – particularly whether that might involve difficult decisions about whether to out themselves or remain closeted about aspects of their experienceWhether activities will happen which are designed to elicit big memories or feelingsPresence of drugs/alcohol

It’s rarely possible to meet all potential access needs and some may be in tension. For example, physically accessible spaces can often be more financially expensive. Going slowly enough for some people may mean an event which is too long for others. Creating an event which is safe-enough for people new to a topic to ask basic questions and potentially mess-up may not be safe-enough for those who that topic is personally relevant to. This is why it’s good to be mindful of access needs, and to be clear what is and isn’t catered for at this event, and who it’s aimed at. 

Your role

It’s also worth thinking about your role in the event. Is this a co-created event where everyone is responsible for what happens, or is it one where you’re explicitly the organiser or facilitator? 

If it’s the latter then it’s important to recognise that that is a big role, and it takes a lot of energy and attention, so it might be wise to have somebody else available to assist. For example, that might be someone to sort out the technology at an online event so you’re not worrying about that, or someone who will check up on anybody who needs to leave, or more of a co-organiser or team to spread the load.

Probably the most important thing you can do in preparing for the event is whatever self-care helps you to be as present as possible to yourself and others, counting this preparation time as part of the work, and seeing this as more important than learning the content of what you’re planning perfectly. 

It’s worth being mindful, for example, of the risks of scheduling too many events back-to-back, of organising both a whole event and a workshop within that event, or of having people attend a professional event who you have other relationships with (e.g. clients, partners, family) without a clear plans with them about how that will work, and them understanding that you are ‘on’ and can’t be for them in the way that you usually are one-to-one.

It’s also important that you, as facilitator, are treated consensually as much as it is participants. You might work through a yes, no, maybe list to think about what kinds of events you are – and aren’t – up for being part of, and what your own consent agreements need to be, as well as considering what you’re offering to participants as a facilitator.

For example, with the shift to online events I’ve found that I generally want somebody else to monitor and filter questions coming in on chat, as it’s very hard to remain present to the conversation if I’m also watching chat comments come in. I’ve also had to be open with participants in online workshops about what kinds of situations I do and don’t have the capacity to hold.

Consent agreements

Early on it’s useful to form a group agreement, ideally through a process of asking the group what they need in order to feel free-enough and safe-enough to participate fully in the event (i.e. to be in consent). With shorter events it can be harder to do this, but you could ask people to write things down (e.g. in chat on an online platform) and then write a list of key ones. 

Important points for the group agreement would be: the kind of conversations we are aiming for here, treating anything people share confidentially, not putting people on the spot, listening, use of respectful language, looking on people with kind eyes if they make mistakes, checking in with yourself before sharing, and being being free to opt-out of anything or leave at any time. Some more suggestions are here.

At the end of the group agreement it’s great to model adding any access needs. For example I might explain that I’m hard of hearing and request that people don’t talk over each other. This, followed by asking if anyone else has anything to add, can enable people with other access needs to mention them.

Before or after the group agreement it’s useful to have some form of activity to help people to ‘land’ in the room and get a sense of who is there. For example this could involve inviting everyone who wants to take three breaths to orientate themselves in their body and the space; or inviting everyone who wants to write their name and location in the chat online.

Including pronouns in introductions is appropriate with groups who are already familiar with that practice, and where it’s likely that more than one person has pronouns that aren’t ‘he’ or ‘she’, otherwise one person can feel very exposed so it’s worth being cautious. If there’s an option like pronouns on badges or online handles that can be easier, especially if you model having yours there. You definitely need to flag up not assuming people’s pronouns if they’re not stated, perhaps by encouraging use of names and second person pronouns (e.g. ‘when you said…’ – looking at the person concerned – rather than ‘when he/she/they said…’).

Ongoing consent

Ongoing consent is important during the event. Just because people agree to something at the beginning, they may not as the event unfolds, so it’s important to give people opportunities to check in how they are feeling, particularly before a shift in activity.

To be consensual it must be possible for people to leave at any time, and it’s good to make this clear up front and provide easy ways to do so. For example, online, you might give multiple options ‘It’s fine to go mute, to blank your screen, or to turn down your volume and step away for a while if you need a pause. If you want to leave entirely, you can either let us know in the chat or just end the call – no need for an explanation.’

If people are breaking out into smaller groups, consider whether they get any choice in who to work with, and how to enable them to make choices if that is possible. For example in one online therapy course it was possible that some people might be clients of others, so people were encouraged to let moderators know if there was anybody they couldn’t be in a group with before break-out groups happened. Remember to be mindful of cultural power imbalances with dyad / group work, and how they may restrict who feels able to take openly.

Active consent

Group pressure and social scripts makes it very hard for people to opt out of activities which everyone else is participating in, and easy to passively go along with something that doesn’t feel right. 

It’s great if there can be two or three options to actively choose from, for example; or a group process to decide on what fits everyone’s needs; or an option to be an observer – where that is an important role; or a norm of a craft table or chill-out space people are encouraged to go to whenever they don’t fancy something; or – online – an option of writing responses in the chat rather than taking part in discussion on camera/audio, or an option for self reflection rather than group work. It also helps people if you always let them know why you’re inviting them to do a particular thing rather than just doing it.

Try to be mindful of the different access needs that are likely to be present. It’s important to have breaks and endings at the time stated as people may have very different energy capacities, concentration spans, requirements for nourishment, caring responsibilities, etc. Ideally people with such needs shouldn’t have to say something, but rather the space would be designed to be inclusive and/or opportunities given to state any specific needs in advance anonymously. Again modelling is great, e.g. ‘I’m going to stand up/lie down for this activity because my back needs it. Anybody else feel free to do whatever makes you comfortable too.’

Building in self-consent check-ins as part of the event is great, so people have a specific chance to tune into how they are feeling, whether they want to engage with something, and how. 

Endings and aftercare

It’s important to allow a decent amount of time to close the event to help people through the transition back into their everyday life. For example you might have a closing round of ‘one thing that people are taking away’, or an opportunity to write something in chat online. As facilitator you might offer to be around for a certain amount of time to deal with any individual debriefs that need to happen. It’s good to be super clear with yourself in advance what you can and can’t offer with this, in relation to your own needs and what you’re being paid for.

Make sure that you build in self-care time to recover from the event. Holding space takes a lot of energy, so this needs to be budgeted for as much as the time planning and facilitating the event itself.

It’s also worth thinking in your own self-consent reflections before, and in the group agreement, about how any feedback after can be given consensually and constructively, and how you’ll be kind with yourself around receiving it and considering what to take on board.

Consent checklist

You might find it useful, when planning events, to go through this consent checklist and to consider how the event meets the various criteria for consensual engagement:

Consent as the aim: Have we made everyone being in consent the most important thing here rather than specific things going the way we planned? Consent of all: Is the event planned so that the most vulnerable people in the room are likely to feel able to consent (e.g. survivors of trauma, people with various access needs, members of marginalised groups), rather than defaulting to the assumed needs and capacities of the most privileged people?Informed consent: Is everyone fully informed beforehand about what will happen during the event, what they’ll be expected to do, who else will be involved, how long it will last, etc. so that they can make an informed choice about whether or not to engage with the event?Active consent: Are we aiming at active consent of all involved, rather than their passive agreement to ground rules, activities, etc. (i.e. are we going beyond assuming consent if people don’t actually say ‘no’)?Ongoing consent: Is consent ongoing before, during, and after the event with enough pauses for people to check in with themselves? Is ensuring consent seen as a process rather than a one off event at the start? Awareness of scripts and power dynamics: Are we aware of the default script for ‘successful’ engagement in an event, and have we shifted this to giving multiple options so nobody feels pressured to participate in anything, or to stay beyond their capacity? Are we aware of the power dynamics which may make it hard for people to be in consent, particularly around our position as leader/facilitator?



Further resources

You can find more of my resources about consent on my consent work page.

You can check out more of this year’s #IDOConsent content and events here.

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

The post Consensual events appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Gaslighting and consent

In the weeks leading up to #IDOConsent on 30th November I’m sharing a few posts dealing with consent and non-consent at all levels: in wider culture, in our communities, in our relationships, and with ourselves. In this post I look at how gaslighting operates at all of these levels.

You can check out more of this year’s #IDOConsent content and events here.

Many thanks to Justin Hancock for the podcast conversations which were the starting points for these posts. You can find those over on megjohnandjustin.com and on our Patreon. If you want to learn more about consent, there’s no better place to start than Justin’s new book Can We Talk About Consent? Available for pre-order now. He’s also written a great post on gaslighting in relationships.

What is gaslighting?

Gaslighting is when somebody manipulates another person so that they doubt their own reality or sanity. The word comes from the play and movies called ‘Gaslight’ where one character tries to make another crazy by constantly questioning her experience. One thing he does is to dim the gaslights in her home. He then tells her that they haven’t got dimmer and that she’s imagining things.

In her forthcoming book, Lori Beth Bisbey says that gaslighting does two damaging things simultaneously. It convinces you both that:

Your perception is distorted, and thatAnother person – or group’s – perception is reality 

Lori Beth points out that, as well as being a sign of a non-consensual relationship, gaslighting makes us more at risk of non-consensual situations. For example, gaslighting about our experiences when we’re younger makes us more likely to mistrust our own feelings, and to overly trust other people’s sense of how things are. In later life this may mean that we override our sense of danger that something isn’t right about a situation or relationship. It may mean that we believe a partner or friends’ sense of what is normal or acceptable in a relationship even when it doesn’t feel good to us. It may mean that we doubt our sense that something non-consensual or abusive has happened to us when it has.

What’s involved in gaslighting?

Common features of gaslighting include:

Minimisation (e.g. it wasn’t that bad, it didn’t have such a bad impact, no-one intended any harm, you’re making too much of this)Denial (e.g. it didn’t really happen, your memory is inaccurate, what you’re describing isn’t real, you’re acting crazy, everybody else agrees with me so you must be wrong)Victim blame (e.g. it was your fault, you brought it on yourself, surely you could just have done X and it wouldn’t have happened, bad things only happen to bad people)Defensiveness (e.g. it’s nothing to do with me, I’m blameless, you’ve hurt me by raising this), andOffering a superficial fix that doesn’t get at the extent of the problem (e.g. couldn’t you just try…? Let it go. You’re overthinking this/making a big deal. Look on the bright side).



Who gaslights?

Rather than being something that only a small minority of abusive/narcissistic people ‘over there’ do in deliberately manipulative ways, gaslighting is something we’re all socialised into within our non-consensual culture. It’s also on a spectrum, with most of us automatically going to a gaslighting response sometimes. 

For example, we might gaslight unintentionally, and/or for understandable reasons when:

We don’t want to acknowledge that a close person is struggling so much and that we might be powerless to help them,Their experience shows us just how unjust and painful the world can be, Their vulnerability frightens us because we’d hate to be that vulnerable ourselves, Their experience highlights a privilege/oppression dynamic that we benefit from ourselves, or We’re scared that our own behaviour might have been harmful in some way either to them directly or to other people in similar ways in the past.

Lori Beth writes that gaslighting can be deliberate, but it can also be unconscious on the gaslighter’s part, for example when it involves protecting them from a negative view of themselves, or when it involves them asserting their need to be ‘right’ in order to shore up their sense of themself.

Levels of gaslighting

Gaslighting happens at all levels. One of the reasons that we struggle to spot it, easily fall into it in our own relationships, and internalise it and gaslight ourselves is because it is so common in wider culture, and in the communities and organisations that we’re part of.

You might find it useful to identify forms of gaslighting that were familiar to you at the following levels growing up, or which you see in the world and relationships around you in the present.

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Cultural gaslighting

Gaslighting has been evident in political responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, such as denial of the extent of the problem, its impact, or the fact it is impacting some – marginalised groups – far worse than others. #BlackLivesMatter has also highlighted how those common features of gaslighting are generally present in everyday responses to police brutality against black people, and in racism more broadly.

The common features also map onto the rape myths which surivors generally hear when they speak about their sexual assaults. These are present in jury decision making, and are often internalised by survivors themselves, making it hard for them to acknowledge what happened to them, or to speak out about it.

It’s important to be aware of how marginalised and oppressed people in particular tend to be gaslit in wider culture, for example in the portrayal of trans people as not really existing and as perpetrators of violence when they are statistically vastly over-represented as victims of violence.

We can be mindful of when our go-to response when hearing about a situation is minimising, denial, victim blame, defensiveness, and coming up with quick fixes, that we’re at risk of perpetuating cultural gaslighting in that area.

Systemic gaslighting

Gaslighting also happens in systems such as organisations, communities, and families. A common form of gaslighting involves individualising something which is really a systemic/structural issue. Examples of this include: 

‘Explaining away’ why all the people high up in an organisation are white men, rather than acknowledging and addressing the role of structural sexism and racism, Scapegoating one individual in a community as abusive rather than recognising an underlying issue with normalising of non-consensual behaviour in that community, Blaming an individual for being over-sensitive rather than dealing with structural racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. in an organisation,Giving a brief training or workshop on some form of injustice rather than tackling it throughout the system.

Lori Beth Bisey highlights gaslighting as a common feature of many of our early family lives. Many children are taught to distrust their needs, feelings, and boundaries because they don’t have these heard, reflected back, and respected by caregivers. Gaslighting children risks them learning to mistrust their own experiences, becoming unable to tune into vital needs and boundaries, and being overly trusting of potentially unsafe others rather than checking them out of building trust over time. 

Common examples of gaslighting in childhood include adults: 

Telling kids they shouldn’t – or don’t – feel the way they feel about something, Pretending that tough things aren’t going on in their family or community when they are,Making light of their struggles, Assuming they must have done something to cause any bullying or hurtful behaviour they experience, Suggesting their experiences or identities are ‘just a phase’ or not real,Blaming them for finding something hard when this may well be due to a form of disability, neurodiversity, or mental health struggle, Telling them they have to accept adult behaviours after they have expressed discomfort with them (e.g. forms of touch or invasions of privacy).



Relational gaslighting

One reason why gaslighting in families or educational settings is so damaging is that it can set us up for emotionally and otherwise abusive later relationship dynamics. If we’ve been taught that our feelings are not valid, that we don’t have a right to privacy, and that our body is other people’s to touch even when we don’t want it, we can easily fail to recognise when people later on in life are undermining us, trying to control us, or even assaulting us.

Signs that you might be gaslit in relationship include: feeling foggy, lost, or murky rather than clear about what’s going on, and finding yourself protecting that person – and their view of themselves – in conversations with other people. 

It’s useful to ask yourself whether your experiences and views are affirmed or undermined in the relationship, whether another person’s views are put across as always ‘right’, and/or whether any difficulties are blamed on you rather than being seen as relational issues and/or there probably being responsibility on all sides. 

It can be the case, of course, that both or all people in a relationship engage in gaslighting behaviour. In conflictual and non-consensual dynamics people can often end up attempting to undermine each other’s versions of events in gaslighting ways. Important things to hang on to hear is that there are generally multiple stories through any situation, and that it’s important to affirm the truth of each person’s lived experience of it, without undermining anybody else’s. More on this in the break-up chapter of my book Rewriting the Rules.

There are links to more posts on consensual and non-consensual relationships at the end of this post.

Self-gaslighting

Sadly, because of cultural, systemic, and relational gaslighting, it is easy to gaslight ourselves, which often contributes to our suffering. 

For example, if we have mental health problems, common stigma around mental health can often lead to us questioning whether what happened to us was really ‘bad enough’ (minimising), wondering whether our mental health problem is even real (denial), blaming ourselves for it (victim blame), mentally defending the people/situations that traumatised us (defensiveness), and telling ourselves that we should be able to easily fix this as individuals, rather than recognising the extent of the trauma and/or the wider systems which are involved in our suffering (superficial fix).

Working with a trauma-informed therapist can help us learn how to reality-test, how to regulate our feelings and come to a more trusting relationship with them, and how to find and articulate our needs and boundaries.

Responding to gaslighting

At all these levels it can be helpful to respond to the common features of gaslighting in the following ways – when drawn to gaslighting behaviour ourselves, or when experiencing gaslighting from others. 

Minimising: Instead acknowledge the ongoing impact of what happened, and that it may always be there.Denial: Instead recognise that what happened was real and painful, and allow any feelings to be present, assuming that they are sensible.Victim blame: Locate the responsibility for what happened in the person/group who behaved in the harmful way and/or in wider systems and structures, not individualising it in the one who is suffering or was victimised.Defensiveness: Be accountable for your role in what happened if relevant, acknowledge the systems and structures involved.Superficial fixes: Ask the person concerned what helps, and practice these things. Do your homework to learn what is generally supportive in such situations. Seek consent before giving any advice. Try to empower the person in finding their way through rather than assuming you know what’s best for them.

Importantly please be kind and gentle with yourself around this. Because gaslighting is such a common go-to response at all levels, and because most of us grew up with it, it is really hard not to engage in this behaviour with ourselves and with others. We all need to do the work of learning how to treat ourselves kindly and honestly, knowing our trauma responses and stuck patterns, staying with our feelings, and articulating our needs and boundaries where it’s safe-enough to do so.

Further resources

You can find more of my resources about consent on my consent work page.

You can check out more of this year’s #IDOConsent content and events here.

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

The post Gaslighting and consent appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Consensual relationships

In the weeks leading up to #IDOConsent on 30th November I’m sharing a few posts dealing with consent and non-consent at all levels: in wider culture, in our communities, in our relationships, and with ourselves. In this post I focus on consensual relationships.

Many thanks to Justin Hancock for the podcast conversations which were the starting points for these posts. You can find those over on megjohnandjustin.com and on our Patreon. If you want to learn more about consent, there’s no better place to start than Justin’s new book Can We Talk About Consent? Available for pre-order now. 

You can listen to me and Justin discussing consent in romantic relationships, specifically here. In this post I want to open this out to consider all relationships. You can also see me talking about these topics on this consent culture video.

Non-consent in relationships

The current moment highlights the importance of turning our attention to consensual relationships in several ways. 

First, domestic abuse has gone up globally by 20% during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK calls for domestic abuse helplines jumped by a half in the first month or so and a further spike is predicted post lockdown. Boots pharmacies began offering safe spaces for people to go if they were in abusive situations, and legislation was put in place to help survivors to escape abusive homes during lockdown. All of this led to domestic abuse being called the ‘shadow pandemic’. So we see clearly the scale of non-consensual relationships, and just how important this is to address. Being stuck in together during lockdown has highlighted to many people the areas in their relationships which are not as consensual as they would like them to be.

Then the #BlackLivesMatter uprising highlighted massive flaws in the policing and criminal justice systems. Some people responded to calls to dismantle and abolish these systems by asking ‘what about’ survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault? However, others pointed out that the criminal justice system has never served survivors. Survivors often experience legal processes as retraumatising and gaslighting, given the minimising, denial, victim blame, and perpetrator defense which often happens in court cases – mirroring how survivors are treated in wider culture. Number of cases passed for charges is low, as rates continue to rise. 

Many have suggested that policing is ill-equipped to deal with sexual and relationship abuse, and that involving the police is actively dangerous when those involved are people of colour. For these reasons, people have turned to alternative models like funding other forms of support for survivors, building accountable communities, and transformative justice. 

Alex Iantaffi and I had a conversation with Deana Ayers on the Gender Stories podcast about how police feel necessary in communities where people keep themselves and their families separate and private – a particularly white western middle class heteronormative model. Alternative models include building relationships and support systems in community, and learning how to open the windows on our relationships and support each other when our dynamics have fallen into non-consensual or traumatic patterns.

Sexual non-consent and relationship non-consent

The #MeToo movement highlighted the commonality of sexual forms of abuse and assault. At least 1 in 5 women and 1 in 20 men have had someone try to have sex with them against their will. In most cases when sex happens against someone’s will, it is with a known person, mostly a current or former intimate partner. 

This highlights the fact that we need far more focus on how to avoid and address sexual – and other forms of – abuse in the home and within known relationships. Instead, media focus tends to be on stranger sexual assault of women. This potentially puts women at more risk because fear of stranger danger constrains them to private home spaces. It also makes it harder to speak out about assault with known people when it occurs, and about assault in other gendered dynamics. 

Non-consensual sex often happens in contexts where other forms of non-consent are normalised, so we need to explore how to cultivate cultures of consent around all aspects of our relationships, not just sex. This is also important because emotional forms of non-consent can be just as damaging as more sexual and physical forms, but often harder to recognise and to open up about. 

With all forms of non-consent it’s rarely obviously present from the outset of a relationship but rather it gradually creeps into a relationship (like the foot in the door technique, or the boiling a frog fable). This makes it hard to recognise because it seems normal due to past experience, and because beginning to question it would mean recognising all the previous moments of non-consent when we didn’t say something about it.

It’s also important to consider these questions in all kinds of relationships, not just partner relationships, because non-consent in friendships, family relationships, colleague relationships, and so on are also very common, and often go unrecognised because of the focus on romantic/family relationships, and because terms like ‘bullying’ are used which downplay and normalise peer-to-peer or colleague-to-colleague non-consensual and abusive behaviour.

Cultural normalising of non-consent

The wider culture of relationships normalises non-consent, with common tropes like it being legitimate to pressurise or manipulate somebody into a particular kind of relationship with you, and to do particular things (e.g. go for a drink with you, eat the kind of food you enjoy, take the kind of holiday you prefer). 

It’s also presented as valid to attempt to shape a person into who you want them to be, to focus on that relationship to the exclusion of others, and to try to convince them to stay with you even if they don’t want to. 

Close relationships are often presented as private so we shouldn’t share what’s going on in them with anybody else, we should present them as perfect on social media and never talk about the difficult parts. 

These tropes are particularly prevalent for romantic relationships, but also often apply to best friendships, family relationships, and close collegiate relationships, for example.

Relationship researchers find that it is very common for people to engage in behaviours like shaming forms of criticism, mocking contempt, defensive blame, and stonewalling or shutting down in relationships which are struggling, all of which are examples of non-consensual behaviours, but are rarely framed in this way because it is so normalised in our culture to treat people in these ways within relationships.

Why a binary model of consent/non-consent is unhelpful

The common idea with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse is that the majority of relationships are ‘normal’ and non-abusive, and a minority are abusive which is a very specific issue and requires a completely different approach to ‘normal’ relationships. This division is unhelpful because it encourages us – as survivors and as a wider culture – to keep asking the binary question of whether a situation is ‘bad enough’ to count as abuse, and only counting it, and feeling able to address it, if it meets those criteria: often the legal criteria. 

Also, this binary perpetuates the idea that there are bad ‘abusers’ and then there is everyone else who is perfectly good and safe. This makes talking about consent in relationships really hard because we feel like we have to present ourselves as perfectly good and safe – and deny or defend any non-consensual behaviours – lest we be seen as an abuser and rejected, called out, or reported. 

We need to acknowledge that we’re all likely to behave non-consensually at times in such a non-consensual culture, when most of us were brought up with these relationship norms, rather than denying our capacity for non-consent, and focusing on policing and punishing others for it.

Spectrums of consent

The criteria for ‘abuse’ is a low bar for a relationship: the sense that if it doesn’t meet the legal criteria for abuse/assault then it is fine. Instead we should focus on how all relationships can be as consensual and beneficial for all involved as possible, recognising that the level of consent present is probably on a spectrum which goes up and down over time. 

We can define consent as the degree to which people feel safe-enough and free-enough in a relationship to be open about their needs and boundaries. This is inevitably going to change over time, impacted by outer circumstances, trauma, how well-supported we are, and more.

So we might ask ‘how can we maximise how consensual this relationship is for all involved?’ – as the people in that relationship, and as the supportive people around that relationship. Then, if we feel like the level of consent is not good enough – if someone starts feeling unsafe or their freedom constrained for example – we can know that that is enough reason to ask for that to be dealt with, or to step away if others aren’t up for that.

Thinking about all the following features of non/consent on spectrums rather than as legalistic abuse/non-abuse binaries can be helpful:

How consensual is physical touch in this relationship – how free and safe do we each feel to say what we want and don’t want in this area with no sense of pressure – (rather than does it count as physical abuse or not)?How consensual is sex in this relationship – how free and safe do we each feel to say what we want and don’t want in this area with no sense of pressure – (rather than does it count as sexual abuse or not)?How consensual is money in this relationship – how free and safe do we each feel to say what we want and don’t want in this area with no sense of pressure – (rather than whether someone is entirely controlling of the other’s personal finances)?How kind are people in this relationship, and are they able to regulate their emotions and behaviours when not feeling kind (rather than do people actively put each other down or diminish each other)?How safe do people in this relationship feel (rather than are active threats made)?How free do people in this relationship feel to have other close relationships (not just whether they are explicitly isolated from friends or family)?Is everyone in this relationship able to meet their basic needs and get support when they need it?Does everyone in this relationship get the privacy and solitude they need, online and offline, without monitoring from the other person/people?Is everyone free to decide where they go, who they see, what they wear, when they sleep, etc.?



Recognising non-consent in relationships

In addition to working our way through the previous questions, tuning into our body and feelings is an important way of identifying how consensual a relationship dynamic is. It can be difficult though, particularly for those with a history of trauma, and/or when gaslighting is present, to tune into – and trust – our feelings. Also it can be confusing when non-consensual dynamics coexist, for example, with strong love feelings, exciting sex, a close connection between you during the good times, and/or deep mutual understanding. 

Remember that non-consent is not always conscious on the part of the people involved. They may well not know they’re behaving in non-consensual ways, and/or these dynamics may be so familiar from their past that they don’t recognise that they are a problem. If everyone involved doesn’t feel free enough or safe enough to be themselves and to express their needs and boundaries, then it’s not a consensual dynamic.

Signs that a dynamic has become non-consensual to a concerning level include the following: 

Feeling frightened of another person or their reactionsFelling small or powerlessYour mind being foggy and confusedInability to express yourself openly around the other person Sense that you’re losing things like your other close people, your passions, or your sparkSense that you and/or the other person are treating each other very differently to the ways you treat other people in your lives (e.g. much more criticism, comparison, aggression, or taking for granted)Uneasiness or queasiness about things you’ve done or said in the relationship and whether they’re okayNoticing that the other person seems frightened, placating, or unable to be honest around youFeeling out of control around the other person Struggling to allow the other person space, privacy, or time away from youFeeling threatened by the other person’s relationships and interests outside of your relationshipSpending a lot of your time thinking about this relationship, particularly trying to tell if something might be wrong, or to figure out how to keep the other person happyEditing what you tell your close people about the other person or things that happen in the relationship



Addressing non-consent in relationships

Unless there are clear sexual or physical violations going on, it can be hard in relationships to know whether you are overriding your own consent (perhaps because this was the way of relating you learnt in the past), or whether the other person is overriding your consent, or whether it’s more of a mutual non-consensual dynamic between you. 

It can be helpful to remember that it doesn’t matter whether this dynamic is 95% down to them and 5% you, or vice versa, or 50/50. The thing to do when it feels non-consensual remains the same: 

Pull back from the relationship as much as you need to to find a sense of clarity and ‘having yourself’ againPress pause or slow down in order to do soGet all the support you need from others around the relationship and your role in it. This might be friend, community support, trauma-informed therapy, and/or support groups, for example

Once you are feeling clearer, calmer, and stronger you can get a sense of whether a more consensual dynamic is possible in this relationship, and what kind of relationship container would be necessary for that. For example, it may require rethinking whether you cohabit, or whether you see each other as often, whether you share finances, or how you name the relationship.

It’s also useful to think about what systems and structures of support you’d need in order to keep an eye on the dynamic and to keep moving towards greater consent. Some form of individual work for each person around their patterns is helpful, as well as ensuring that everyone has a network of support around them so you aren’t each other’s main support while you’re going through this together. Forms of mediation, transformative justice, or therapy together can also help address the dynamics between you.

The other person should be up for you doing what you need if you articulate it this way and if they are committed to having a consensual relationship with you. If they’re not hearing you, or meeting you there, then it may be necessary to pull back further or to step away.

If you struggle to do this, it’s worth remembering that remaining in a situation where someone is getting hurt – whether that is somebody else or whether it is you – doesn’t help anybody, including those who are behaving non-consensually. It often keeps them stuck behaving in habitual ways which are often very painful and shameful for them, whether or not they’re able to acknowledge that. Remaining in such situations also tends to take so much of our energy that we’re not much good for ourselves, for the things we find meaningful, or for anybody else in our lives. Taking yourself out of the dynamic enables everyone – if they’re up for it – to look at their part in it, and hopefully to address that. 

There’s more from Justin about signs of non-consensual relationships and how to address them here, including how to access support if it is difficult or dangerous to leave.

A culture of consensual relationships

Ideally we would change the whole culture to depict relationships far more consensually – so that we have models for this – and to support everyone to relate more consensually. In the meantime hopefully we can try to shift the consent cultures in our communities and networks. If it takes a village to raise a child, perhaps it also takes a village to support a consensual relationship.

Moving towards a culture of more consensual relationships could involve things like:

At a micro level learning how to notice what non-consent feels like in our body: both when we are at risk of doing it to another person, and when it is done to us. This requires getting enough solitude and privacy to be with our feelings and to check in with ourselves regularly about our needs and boundaries.Addressing our stuck patterns which make us more likely to behave reactively or non-consensually, and being up for getting support with this when needed. Again some time alone is necessary for doing this work, as is the capacity to take ourselves away to a safe-enough place when we become reactive.Practising addressing micro moments of non-consent in relationship so it becomes everyday and normalised to do so.Cultivating systems of support, and consensual relating within those systems, so that it becomes normalised and so that we have people to support us in this. Committing to keeping the windows on our relationship open with our close people and community so we can be alerted if people have concerns, and supported to maximise consent. Check out Mia Mingus‘s work on pod mapping to think more about the support structures around your relationships.



Key relationship consent criteria

Taking the key ideas about sexual consent and applying them to relationships, we might consider the following:

Make consent the aim. With sex making consent the aim, rather than getting sex, enables consensual sex to happen. With relationships we could make mutual consent the aim of the whole relationship, and each encounter: not getting what you want from the other person, or being what they want. This might look like wanting the maximum freedom and safety for you and the other person, regardless of what the relationship needs to look like in order for this to be possible.Everyone knows that they don’t have to do it (now or ever). Sex can’t be consensual unless we know that we absolutely don’t have to do it, and that no kind of punishment will occur if we don’t do it. With relationships the same is true for the whole relationship. We need to know that we are free to not be in this relationship, or in this particular way, without fearing that we will be punished or suffer significant loss. Here it can be useful to keep affirming with each other that our whole relationship (and our home, community, security, etc.) isn’t contingent on, for example: having sex regularly, continuing to cohabit, feeling romantic towards this person, our body staying the same, doing certain things together, earning a certain amount, etc. Consent is informed. In sex this means knowing what’s on the cards before the encounter rather than being surprised with activities we weren’t expecting. In relationships this means having enough information to be able to make a decision about whether this kind of relationship with this person is a good idea for you. It’s important not to hide vital information that you know might make a person think twice or want to go slower. With each step in a relationship people need enough information in advance in order to make a consensual choice. For example it’s good to be clear about your feelings about having kids and childrearing long before you’ve committed to a relationship that would preclude people doing that elsewhere, or not doing it if it’s not what you want. It’s good to be clear about your financial situation and relationship with money long before sharing/borrowing/lending finances in any way. Considering speed of relationships can be helpful for having long enough to ensure informed consent before each step. It’s also important to explore shame and how we cover over shame in presenting ourselves to others.Consent is ongoing. In sex this means checking in verbally and/or non-verbally during the encounter that everyone is enjoying it, and pausing or stopping if not. In relationships this means also continuing to check in whether it is working well for everyone, and taking whatever kinds of pauses, breaks, or step-backs are necessary on aspects of the relationship – or the whole relationship – if it isn’t working (if it’s not working for everyone, it’s not working for anyone). The cultural idea of specific vows, promises, duties or commitments – particularly in romantic and family relationships – can make ongoing consent difficult because they suggest that it’s possible to agree to share your money, body or home in a certain way for the rest of your life, whatever happens in relation to money, health or feelings.There is no default script, but multiple options. In sex there is the default script of first to fourth base (or similar). In relationships there is a similar cultural ‘escalator’ model where it is seen as good to get closer, more entwined, and happier in a relationship over time, checking the points on the relationship checklist (e.g. for romantic relationships dating, having sex, becoming exclusive, moving in together, getting married, having a family, etc.) For consent it’s vital to know that all erotic, sensual or sexual activities – and none – are equally valid, so you can choose what works best for everyone. In a relationship all ways of doing relationships – and all aspects of relationships – need to be affirmed as equally valid. Then you can find what works – and doesn’t work – for this particular relationship. It’s important that the person or people whose ways of doing things are the closest to the normative script maximise the agency of those whose ways of doing things are further away to articulate their preferences and have them respected.We’re all mindful of power imbalances and how they constrain consent. Sexual consent is way harder when one person has a lot of power over the other. For example it is hard to say ‘no’ if you feel at risk in some way if you don’t respond to another person’s sexual advances (career, money, care, safety, etc.) Similarly those with more power in a relationship in various ways need to recognise those with less may feel far less able to say what they need and where their boundaries are. It’s good to be open about the power imbalances, and to do what you can to enable those with less power in each area to identify and articulate their needs and boundaries and have them respected.We try to be accountable. It’s important to recognise that we won’t always be perfectly consensual and to recognise – as soon as possible – when this hasn’t happened, and to be accountable for that. Micro moments of non-consent can be fairly easy to repair, and the more we make a habit of doing that the more easy it can become. Bigger moments can be much harder, and this is where it’s really good to have a network of support around you to help each person to process what has happened, to enable them to take as much space as they need in order to be ready to address it, and to support them coming together to hear and be heard, and repair if possible.



Further resources

You can find more of my resources about consent on my consent work page.
Patreon link: If you found this useful, please feel free to support my Patreon.

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Self-care, trauma, and embodiment podcast

Recently Alex Iantaffi and I spoke at an embodiment conference about our upcoming book, Hell Yeah Self Care. Alex released the dialogue over on their podcast, Gender Stories.

We’re discussed some of the key themes in the book, applying them to the current moment, including embodiment, intersectionality, trauma, plurality, and the non-binary approach.

You can check out the podcast here, and order the book here via QueerLit online bookstore, or from your local independent bookstore.

Alex and I just finished our annual writing retreat – online this time sadly for us. How to Understand Your Sexuality should be out later next year, including many similar themes applied specifically to sexuality.

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So Many Wings mental health podcast

I was stoked recently to be interviewed for the So Many Wings podcast, which is one of my favourite podcasts – about transformatice mental health and social justice, hosted by mental health activists and creators Sascha DuBrul and Jacks McNamara.

In the podcast we covered topics like:

What it means to write an “anti self-help book”Plurality and traumaThe intersections of psychology, gender non-conformity, and relationship structures outside the mainstreamThe crucial and complicated nature of consentNavigating the contradictions of academia and DIY media production

You can listen to the podcast here, and I’ve included the questions and answers I prepared in advance here as it contains a pretty good update on where I’m at and what I’m working on these days…

How would you like to introduce yourself, your ancestors, and your connection to place?

So many possible answers to this, and I note an initial grief response. It’s not easy for a white British person to feel great about their ancestry or connection to place with Brexit looming and attention on the ongoing horrific impact of colonisation and white supremacy. More personally I’m very connected to the legacy of intergenerational trauma at the moment in relation to mental health, so biological ancestors feel complex.

After sitting with it though I realise I do connect with ancestors in other ways, maybe like Armstead Maupin distinguishes between logical vs. biological family. Logical ancestors could be the queers, freaks and weirdos in the past who trod similar ground to me: the ‘creatively maladjusted misfits and changemakers’ as you so nicely put it on the website.

Also I’ve practised a version of Buddhism for the last 20 years, particularly following the teachings of Pema Chodron, and I’m aware she calls her lineage something like the messed up lineage because so many of the great teachers had terrible pasts and struggled immensely. There’s also a lot of what’s called ‘crazy wisdom’ in that lineage, and I like that connection to celebrating madness.

I do feel very connected to place as in nature – as followers of my Instagram will be aware. Moving recently to a place where the land meets the sea, and there are hills to walk in and nearby forests, means a lot to me.

How would I like to introduce myself – it’s an interesting one given I’m plural – something I know you covered on a recent podcast with Dick Schwartz. I’m a system of seven people and we collaborate to write books, podcast, serve our communities, and train others around mental health and collective care, as well as on gender, sex, and relationship diversity.

While we feel like the language of “mental health” is totally inadequate and misses so much of how people experience emotional distress in the world, we are using the term on this podcast so people can find us and have a sense of what movements we may be coming from. Can you speak a little to your own journeys with “mental health” and moving beyond that construct?

Absolutely, in a way it’s perhaps a reverse journey to the one many take. I trained in psychology and was lucky enough to be exposed to critical psychology understandings very early on. I then trained as an existential therapist which has big overlaps with the anti-psychiatry movement. My Buddhist approach would also be highly critical of dividing people into binaries of mad/sane, normal/abnormal, etc. I have colleagues who are very involved with mad pride and mad studies.

So from the start my own writing was always very informed by these perspectives: questioning of conventional diagnosis and treatment of mental health struggles, and locating struggles in oppressive systems and structures – and wider cultural messages – rather than in individuals.

However, in some ways I think I did focus ‘out there’ to some extent to avoid looking closer to home – particularly at the ways early child development shapes our suffering – because this felt like risky territory, and because so many of the approaches which take this view have such a poor history of individualising struggles and pathologising queer people.

I’m now finding the work of people like David Treleaven (who you also had on the show), Staci Haines, my co-author Alex Iantaffi, and others super helpful for bringing together social justice perspectives with the neurobiology of intergenerational, historical, and developmental trauma. Alex would definitely be another great person for the show as they do the Gender Stories podcast and are just publishing a book on gender as a form of trauma.

Personally there were severe mental health struggles present for grandparents on both sides of my family. Both were highly impacted by the second world war I suspect. The stigma around such difficulties, and attempts to eradicate ‘negative emotions’ in an attempt to avoid them, play a big role in my own mental health struggles. The labels I could apply – with caution of course – to myself would be developmental trauma, DID, and something like CFS (recognising the lack of clear separation between physical and mental health).

I’m also thinking a lot right now about moving towards what is often seen as ‘mad’ as being vital for transformation. For me the most helpful things have been moving towards experiencing all my feelings – especially the ones we’re most taught to hide or eradicate in our culture like shame; to embrace the experience myself as multiple people and hear all their voices; to talk to myself (the classic ‘first sign of madness’); and to go towards the most tormented and traumatised parts of myself with deep kindness.

What does it mean to you to write an “anti self-help book?”

I’ve said a bit about locating people’s struggles in wider systems and structures, and cultural messages, already. The first anti-self-help book I wrote was Rewriting the Rules which focuses on relationships. So it locates the struggles we experience in relationships largely in the cultural myths around love: that the best basis of a relationship is the experience falling in love, that romantic love is the most important kind of relationship, that we can expect to live happily ever after and have great sex till the end of time with our partner, that kind of thing!

Again drawing together trauma-informed and social justice perspectives – on the podcast I do with Justin Hancock – the Meg-John and Justin podcast – we now consider the ways in which neoliberal capitalism shapes our understandings and experiences of relationships, and how families pass such understandings and experiences on – as a kind of intergenerational trauma. So we learn ways of relating which hurt us and others. For example, yearning to get all our needs met in a romantic love relationship, struggling to have boundaries and to express our needs, being out of touch with our emotions and feelings, feeling that we have to hide parts of ourselves if we are to be loved, etc.

With Justin and Alex we’ve taken a similar approach to sex and to gender as well. Alex and I do a series How to Understand Your… (gender/sexuality/relationships) And I also do this graphic guide series with Jules Scheele – comic introductions to queer, gender, sexuality, and hopefully mental health and love in future – which take a similar approach.

How did you get into working at the intersection of psychology, gender non-conformity, and relationship structures outside the mainstream?

Again perhaps an unusual origin story for a mad queer person, but it started with trying very hard to conform to the norm. At university all I wanted was to find The One and settle down with him, be the woman behind the great man, be good for the other people in my life, become a therapist to help others, basically conform to heteronormativity and femininity. I only did a PhD because my partner was doing one and I didn’t know what else to do!

Over the course of my 20s I began to question what the norms of relationships, sex, and gender did to me. I increasingly felt how they impacted my mental health and definitely did not lead me to having good relationships, good sex, or a happy relationship with myself.

In my late 20s, after discovering feminism and social constructionism, I discovered the overlapping bi, polyamorous, and kink communities. Through those I explored different ways of doing sex and relationships, and later on gender. In also questioning some aspects of those ways of doing things I’ve got to where I am now – a plural, queer, trans, largely-solosexual relationship anarchist! And very much still a work in progress.

Can you tell us about how how you navigate the relationship between your work in academia and your production of DIY media like zines and your participation in queer and other subcultures?

I’m a recovering academic! I left academia last year because I was finally able to earn enough money from writing and related work and wanted to focus on creating more DIY type content for a general audience, and serving my communities in other ways.

There was certainly always a tension within academia between the way things were done there and who I was and the work I wanted to do, so it is a relief to now be self-employed. It is perhaps impossible not to internalise the toxic aspects of what is a neoliberal capitalist institution where you have to produce a great deal, hide vulnerability, and compete.

That said, academia gave me access to many of the ideas that influence my work – which I am passionate about making more accessible to all – and supported me to train as a therapist, and to focus on public engagement. I have huge gratitude for the feminist and queer psychologists who supported me on that journey in particular.

Can you tell us more about your work around biphobia, bisexual invisibility, and mental health?

Sure. Part of my work with the bi community was co-founding an organisation focused on bi research, and together we wrote The Bisexuality Report. One of the key findings of that was that bi people have worse mental health than both straight and gay people. This seems to be the result of biphobia and bi invisibility. Because of binary cultural understandings of sexuality, bi people are often assumed to be lying, going though a phase, confused, greedy, manipulative, etc. That stigma, and the fact their bi-ness is not believed so they often have to come out repeatedly or remain closeted, takes a toll. Also they are often rejected by both straight and queer communities, which can be extremely isolating.

Of course similar things are true for non-binary people who question the binary of man/woman, and sometimes also of cis/trans. This is what led Alex and I to write the book Life Isn’t Binary: exploring how our culture tends to binarise everything, and what we can learn from non-binary people of all kinds. We also tackle the mad/sane, rational/emotional, and positive/negative emotions binaries in there, for example.

The consent checklist: What conditions are necessary to have consent? In what kinds of situations is consent crucial and complicated? How did you get into doing work around consent?

The consent work I do is certainly motivated by being a survivor, and one who – like many – suffered both from the sexual assaults themselves, and from the cultural gaslighting around them which made it so hard – for years – to recognise them as such, and to get out from under the fog of minimising, denial, shame, and victim blame.

It also feels vital to me to link consent to all the other work I do. Most of the trauma people experience takes the form of non-consent, from physical, sexual, or emotional abuse at home and/or school, to forms of oppression where you learn that your body, life and labour is not valued as much as others.

Consent often focuses on sex, but many of our relationships, workplaces, and other institutions are deeply steeped in non-consent. So I’m all about trying to make everything more consensual, and recognising how incredibly hard that is.

I think of consent as ensuring that everyone involved in a relationship or interaction is free-enough and safe-enough to express their needs and desires, their limits and boundaries, knowing that they will be respected. This needs to be an ongoing, relational process, with awareness of the power imbalances and social scripts which make consent very hard – if not impossible.

It’s also about learning about how to be accountable, and to employ models of transformative justice, when consent violations occur, something I’m still learning a lot about.

We’re both IFS geeks and recently interviewed Dick Schwartz, the founder of IFS – based on your recent writings, it seems like you have a relationship to parts work. Can you tell us more about that?

You could say that! In the last 5 years I experienced myself increasingly vividly as 6 – then 7 – parts or selves. What began as an exploration into my gender and erotic fantasies, ended up as a much more clear sense of plurality, and now most of my work is informed by this, including writing many of my blog posts as dialogues between different parts. My lived experience during lockdown has not been of living alone, but of living in a family of 7 who have been getting to know each other much better!

I only came across IFS recently. Initially I was informed more by my dear friend Trevor Butt’s work in personal construct psychology, and then John Rowan and Mick Cooper in the UK, and Hal and Sidra Stone in the US, all of whom present versions of parts work as a useful therapeutic approach for everyone.

I’m fascinated that while one branch of psychology and psychiatry was dismissing ‘MPD’ as made-up between clients and therapists, and invested in making people singular again, another bunch of therapeutic approaches were suggesting that everyone could benefit from getting in touch with their inner children, inner critics, etc. as separate parts of themselves.

Lately plural communities have challenged the pathologisation involved in DID and embraced being plural systems, with many diverse experiences and understandings under that umbrella.

Can you tell us more about your investigations into plurality and trauma?

I’m aware there are plural folks and systems who find the link with trauma very helpful, and those who view it as another way of pathologising plurality and regarding it as ‘lesser’ than being singlet.

I find it helpful, but just as I’d say it is equally important for trans and cis people to examine their relationship to gender, I would suggest that it is helpful for systems and singlets to explore their relationship to trauma. In such a non-consensual culture do any of us escape trauma? Might it be that trauma is part of what leads some of us to fragment into plurality and some of us to cling on to a sense of being a singular self, when actually we are all complex and containing multitudes?

The book that brought it all together best for us is Janina Fisher’s Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, which we have recently written over 15,000 words of blog post about! Fisher locates our various parts in trauma survival strategies, which certainly maps onto our inner experience. We have parts connected to fight, flight, freeze, fawn, attach.

Like many authors on developmental trauma and shame Fisher suggests cultivating parts who can take a more parental role, holding and hearing the traumatised parts, and bringing our systems to a point of earned secure attachments, and expanding our window of tolerance for difficult feelings, which has been a huge part of our work.

What current projects are you excited about?

A friend recently said that their vision of me during lockdown was that – as a prolific writer – I’d be holed away working on my masterpiece. After a moment of shame I realised they were quite right. For the first time in my life I’m not working on a writing project, but the project of inner work, deep trauma healing, spiritual practice, transformation, or whatever you want to call it.

It feels both personal and political to me though, because it is also intrinsically about how I can relate with others in more ethical, consensual ways, and about how I can engage with my work – and the wider world – the same. There’s a lot in plurality, I think, that echoes calls from intersectional feminists to look deeply at our own potentials to be both victims/survivors and oppressors/abusers, before we engage with others.

In terms of creative projects, Alex and I have our workbook on self/collective care coming out soon, and Jules and I our graphic guide to sexuality – both very exciting.

Alex and I are writing again together in October. Justin and I continue to create together. And Jules and I are collaborating with some others for a graphic guide on trans voice, and hopefully a further graphic guide on mental health in 2021/22. I think you’ll enjoy the fact that the creative theme we have for this one is superheroes and superpowers.

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