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IDENTITY-AFFIRMING SUPPORT IN CAPE TOWN AND ONLINE

Trans and Gender-Diverse Support

I work with trans, nonbinary and gender-diverse people and their partners, through conversation, the body, relationships and spirit. You don’t need to be certain about your gender to start, and pleasure is part of the work from the first session.

I'm Amy. I'm coloured, nonbinary, pansexual and nonmonogamous, and I work with trans, nonbinary and gender-diverse people and their partners, at Fruition House in Woodstock and online.

Why I do this work

When I was two, a neighbour reported a mixed-race family living next door. The police came after us, and my parents fled with me to Swaziland. It's absurd to think that who we are and how we love could be made so political.

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Today, our constitution protects people from discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, sex and sexual orientation, and on paper it's one of the strongest in the world. However, in daily life, gender-diverse and relationally diverse people in South Africa still meet an enormous amount of injustice, in clinics, at work, in their families and on the street.

 

I'm not trans, but my own intersecting identities, my history, years of working with trans clients and my academic background in queer feminism are what bring me to this work. My degree in Psychology and Counselling specialised in Gender, Sex and HIV. I also stay aware of where my experience ends, and yours begins, always asking instead of assuming.

I've chosen not to register with the Health Professions Council of South Africa, because registration doesn't cover the shamanic, touch-based and psychedelic integration work I do. That means I don't diagnose, I'm not a medical aid provider, and I can't write the assessment letters some doctors ask for before hormones or surgery. If you need one, I can help you find a registered practitioner who works affirmingly, and we can keep working together alongside them.

What we can work on

People come to me at very different points. Some have questions and want to talk them through without shame, awkwardness, judgement or fear, and without being steered towards an answer. Some know exactly who they are and want support trying a new name, pronouns or a look they're experimenting with. Others are years past transition and want to work on something else entirely, like stress, relationships, sex, work or parenting.

 

Things people bring to sessions include:

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  • confusion or questions about gender, and talking them through out loud for the first time

  • stepping into expression: name, pronouns, clothes, voice, how you move through the world

  • telling partners, family, children, friends or colleagues, and what happens afterwards

  • finding community and building chosen family

  • decisions about social, legal and medical transition, and living with the changes

  • relationships, including partners who are adjusting too

  • sex, sexuality and the sexual changes that come with hormones and surgery

  • shame, stigma, internalised prejudice and transphobia

  • trauma and gender-based violence

  • the spiritual side: sensitivity to energy, and feeling called to spiritually meaningful work

 

A lot of the work is about shame and liberation. Most of us take in ideas about gender long before we're old enough to question them, and trans people often end up carrying those ideas against themselves. In sessions we unpack the specific messages you grew up with, notice when they come out in how you talk about yourself, and practise answering them.

 

The way I work is practical and solution-focused. Sometimes it's direct coaching, and we're making an action plan. Sometimes we're in the body, exploring what you feel somatically. And sometimes we're in the energetic and the sacred, working with ancestral healing, energy blocks and shamanic journeying.

A queer feminist lens

My academic background is in queer feminism, and it shapes how I work. Queer feminism looks at gender as something shaped by history and power: by colonialism, religion, law, medicine and the families we grow up in. In South Africa that history is close. The same state that policed who could marry whom also decided whose bodies and relationships counted.

 

In sessions, that lens helps us separate what's yours from what you were taught, and see where the pressure on you comes from systems and not from you. It also means I pay attention to power between us. You're the expert on your gender and your body. I bring knowledge and tools, and we decide together what to do with them.

Trauma and GBV

This section discusses sexual and gender-based violence.

 

Gender-based violence runs through daily life in South Africa, and trans and gender-diverse people are often targeted for who they are: by partners, by family, on the street, and in clinics and hospitals. I work with sexual violence, intimate partner violence, hate-motivated attacks and harassment, family rejection and medical trauma.

 

The work is trauma-informed and paced by your nervous system. You don't have to tell me everything that happened for us to work with it. We can start with what's affecting you now, like sleep, panic, a body that's always on guard or sex that's become difficult, and use talk, somatic work and, if you want it, SomatoSensual work to help your body feel safer. Practical support is part of it too: safety planning, and help connecting with legal, medical and community services.

 

If you're in danger now, call the Gender-Based Violence Command Centre on 0800 428 428

Working with your neurotype

Neurodivergence and gender diversity overlap a lot. In a 2020 study of more than 600,000 adults published in Nature Communications, Varun Warrier and colleagues found that transgender and gender-diverse adults were three to six times more likely than cisgender adults to report an autism diagnosis.

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When leave this out of the work, it causes harm. Autistic communication gets read as avoidance, sensory needs get missed in body-based work, and gender exploration gets dismissed as "just" autism or ADHD, or the other way round. I work with your neurotype as part of the picture, whether you have a diagnosis, are wondering about one, or don't want one.

 

In practice that can mean direct language, speaking about situations with the inclusion of a neurodivergent lens, time to process before you answer, lighting, sound and seating you choose, and stimming and movement welcome. In SomatoSensual work we map your sensory preferences carefully, including pressure, texture and what's too much, we can also work with masking and unmasking during interactions. 

Somato-Sensual Therapy for trans bodies

SomatoSensual Therapy is the framework I developed for working with sexuality through the body and nervous system as well as through conversation. It's gender-affirming and trauma-informed. It belongs to the same family as somatic sex education approaches such as sexological bodywork, which use breath, touch, movement and body mapping to help people learn about their own bodies and pleasure. SomatoSensual work combines that kind of body-based learning with counselling, relationship work and shamanic practice.

 

For many trans people, dysphoria shows up as disdain for parts of their body, often their genitals, or as a habit of not feeling them at all. Talking about that only gets so far. In SomatoSensual sessions we work with what your body actually feels: where there's sensation, where you go numb, and what happens in your nervous system when attention moves towards a part of you that's hard to live in. We go slowly and stay within what you can tolerate.

 

The same approach helps with the changes that come with hormones and surgery, which can shift desire, arousal, orgasm and how touch feels. It helps with pain, whether from surgery, binding, tucking or sex, and with trauma, including harassment, violence and medical experiences where your body was handled without care.

 

Touch is optional, agreed in advance while you're sober, and you set the limit. You can lower it or stop at any time, and there is no sex between me and clients. [How working with me works] has the detail.

Pleasure activism

I work from pleasure activism, a term from adrienne maree brown's book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019). Her starting point is that feeling good belongs inside the work of justice, alongside the struggle.

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I hold this especially close in my work with trans people. So much of what gets said about trans bodies is about pathology, waiting lists, risk and pain, and people often start describing their own bodies in the same terms. With me, pleasure is part of the conversation from the first session. We talk about what you enjoy about your body now, what touch you like, how you want to be desired and what you'd like to explore, whether or not your body is where you want it to be yet

Relationship support

I work with many kinds of relationship structures, so I don't arrive with a fixed idea of what a relationship should look like or what's normal. That helps when a relationship changes shape. When a partner transitions, the relationship often goes through a death and rebirth: the old version ends, and the people in it decide whether and how to build a new one. I support both parts of that, for couples who want to stay together in a new form, for partners who need their own space to grieve and adjust, and for people who decide to uncouple with care.

 

I also work with dating and disclosure, opening a relationship, and sex as bodies and roles change. Relationship sessions are talk-based, with tools we practise together in the session, and couples can add SomatoSensual sessions if they want them.

Shamanic support

Many of the trans and gender-diverse people I work with are sensitive to energy, and some feel called to healing, ceremony or other spiritually meaningful work. I trained as a shamanic practitioner through my mother's lineage, and I support that side of people too. In practice that can mean learning to ground and protect yourself when you pick up a lot from other people, drumming and journey work, ancestral work, and finding your way into the work you feel called to. I also mentor people who are awakening into medicine work, separately from my therapy practice.

Community

Ancois (my wife) and I run communities and a venue in Cape Town that are built to be trans-inclusive. 

  • Queer Spirit Cape Town: a community for queer people exploring sexuality, spirituality, kink and embodiment. Every member goes through an intake form and a short video call with us before joining the WhatsApp group.

  • Shamanic Temple: temple nights for exploring sensuality and spirit in ceremony. All temples are open to trans bodies.

  • Beyond Monogamy SA: social events and peer support for people in consensual nonmonogamy.

  • Fruition House: our venue at 388 Albert Road, Woodstock. Our venue has trans-inclusive toilets, ticketing, facilitation, and agreements.

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I'm also a partner of Trans Siblings Connect, which supports trans and gender-diverse communities.

Financial Assistance

I understand that financial situations can vary greatly, and I am committed to making my services accessible to those in need. If you are experiencing financial hardship, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. Together, we can discuss your situation and explore potential payment plans or sliding scale options, if I am able to at the time, to ensure you receive the support and care you deserve.

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