Queer Counselling

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What is Queer Counselling?

When you're part of a group that has faced and continues to face discrimination it can be really scary coming to therapy and not knowing if your therapist is going to argue about who you are or make you feel unsafe. So just as much as I'm here to talk about sexuality and gender identity, I'm just as much here to talk about everything in your life while making sure you know that you're welcome to share it.

How did this become a specialty?

When I was studying counselling we did an exercise about being empathic and listening to different viewpoints instead of trying to change someone’s mind. Wholesome exercise, right? Well the topic we were given was “Should gay marriage be legalised?” And so I, baby queer that I was, got to see which of my classmates didn't think I should have the same rights as them*, and sit across from a classmate and hear about why they didn’t think “they should get a whole parade” amongst other things.

But the real take-away was that my teacher didn’t even consider queer people in her class, and what the impact of this conversation could be on them. Queer people were the “other”, a type of client we needed to learn about. That was the moment I wanted to counsel my community.

*Note: these days I know the debate was more nuanced than that and that some of our anarchist brethren were opposed for broader “marriage shouldn’t be a thing” reasons, but that was how it felt at the time.

“I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community. I hope that my being real with you will help empower you to step into who you are and encourage you to share yourself with those around you.”

- Janet Mock, writer, TV host, activist

How can therapy help?

There are ways that queer counselling is unique to our community, and ways that it absolutely isn’t.

It’s unique because:

Same-sex attraction still varies from supported, to dismissed or made fun of, to still actively vilified and a risk for people’s safety, and our relationships to our love and attraction is informed by this
Trans and gender-diverse relationships to our gender and our bodies is often more complex than cis folks, and involves joy and euphoria as well as discomfort and dysphoria
Being LGBTQIA+ and how we identify within that is tied to community and political identities whether we like it or not, and this can be a unique source of stress and confusion
Like other minority groups, we have to factor in our therapist’s identity, belief, and knowledge level for our own safety

It’s like any other therapy because:

We’re still Human, and we face all the complexities of being human alongside the unique complexities of our gender and sexual identities
Our identity isn’t always the source of our stress or conflict - there’s plenty of ways the world is hard and confusing
We deserve respect, kindness, and empathy, and that’s what a therapist should be able to provide

So Queer Counselling is about recognising and acknowledging the ways our experience can be different to the mainstream views of personhood, but it’s also about seeing queerness side by side with the rest of our identity, and not assuming that queerness is always the problem. It takes in the political and historical realities of sexuality and gender, and how people might treat us, but never reduces us to a one-note stereotype.