Exploring Trans Liberatory Therapy
In my experience as a trans therapist and as a trans client, I feel that magic can happen when two trans or non-binary people come together to engage in healing practices. Having experienced this first hand, I am always curious about ways to move beyond gender-affirmation and into truly liberatory approaches to healing for trans people.
What can trans liberatory therapy look like?
This work in my practice draws heavily from Critical Liberation Psychotherapy (Morrill & Comas-Díaz, 2025), who propose that psychotherapy as a field may mirror and uphold harmful Western cultural ideologies like white supremacy and cis-heteropatriarcy. Liberatory therapy, then, needs to hold a critical lens about the field itself and conventional approaches to practice. The implication here is that we must move away from individualism and toward collective healing, suffering and surviving alongside one another. This is a very different orientation toward psychotherapy than the model many of us are used to, in which space is held for our healing by someone who often holds multiple intersecting kinds of power in the room.
As trans therapists, I believe we have an opportunity to engage in uniquely liberatory therapy with trans clients by showing up to our clients as more than space-holders. When we show up as fellow survivors, as community members, and as those with personal ties to the empowerment of our clients, we begin to relate more holistically to one another. Perhaps we inspire each other in our healing journeys, so that we are each more able to show up to community and to participate in collective healing for trans people. This idea complicates the role of therapist and client, however, and important questions arise: how do we occupy space in the therapy room as suffering and surviving therapists without making the therapy about us? And, how do we share space in our small communities of trans people, without jeopardizing the safety that can come from having a therapist with whom we have no other overlapping social connections?
I believe that these questions begin to reveal more nuanced considerations of risk, safety, power, and dual relationships. Here, our ethical codes of conduct are important guides, as issues of privacy and confidentiality are paramount to safety. What’s more, the last thing we want to normalize are dual relationships which are ignorant of the power held by those in practitioner roles. However, liberation psychotherapy takes for granted that we are connected in more ways than simply through the therapy room. It assumes that we are joined in our struggle to survive in the world, and to bring in greater possibilities of ways to live. What a powerful point of connection to hold within healing work.
Coming together in ways which honour our collective liberation allows us to create ever expanding possibilities of what healing work, therapeutic practice, and liberatory ritual looks like. This collaboration is possible in this work, because we each know something intimately, through our own survival, about the survival of the person across from us in the therapy room. While we should be careful, always, not to assume that our story, with all our unique intersections of social location, is identical to any other trans person, there is something potent about what we can recognize in one another. Especially in a world that is often hostile to our ways of knowing and living.
Some Considerations For Trans Clients in choosing a trans therapist
Do you have an experience of being trans that is important to your life and what you’re hoping to explore in therapy?
This question gets at what can be very different for each of us as trans people. For some of us, we might experience our gender journeys as simply including a medical transition, and we might not particularly identify with our trans medical histories beyond the event of our transitions. Being trans, then, might simply never come up, and our experience of self and relationships may not feel overly impacted. As such, many other factors in who we want to work with as our therapist may be more important than shared trans identity.
However, for many more of us, being trans has impacted who we are and how we experience the world in very core ways. Even beyond the journey of self discovery, coming out, transition, or any other gender-related topics, we might find the fact of our trans-ness to emerge often as we explore many fundamental parts of ourselves, our histories, and our lives. In this instance, we might long for recognition by someone who understands how various parts of our complex and nuanced lives reflect trans experience, without having to make those parts of our lives all about our trans-ness, or erasing the layer of gender from our explorations.
2. How comfortable are you being an educator, or explaining your experience of your gender to a cisgender clinician?
You may or may not be someone who is fazed by putting on the educator hat and letting someone from outside the community in on your experience. Conversely, having someone who is already deeply familiar with terminology, transition, gender dysphoria, and gender euphoria may feel critical to your therapeutic process. An important consideration for therapy might be, how much are you pulled from your emotional experience by needing to explain? Often in therapy, we are looking for access to deep parts of ourselves, to uncover our emotional experiences, memories, and beliefs, and to build greater connection to our core selves. This involves deep immersion in a moment with a therapist. For all of these reasons, this is one of the most common reasons we see for folks who seek out therapy with shared-identity therapists.
3. Are you comfortable navigating a shared community outside of therapy?
This is one of the trickiest obstacles to working with therapists who share our communities. For some trans people, confidentiality, privacy, and a feeling of separateness from their therapist may be insurmountable obstacles to seeking out services with a trans therapist. Or, we may work around this by seeking virtual therapy outside of our city. These are absolutely reasonable preferences. For those who feel the navigation is worth the experience of being in-person with a member of their trans community, Critical Liberation Psychotherapy offers us an avenue to embrace some of what can feel murky about this navigation. Engaging in direct, nuanced, and ongoing conversations with your therapist about your experience of sharing community can yield deeply therapeutic explorations of what it is like for you navigating complexity in any relationship. Spotting your therapist at the rally can build senses of trust and working alliance. Ultimately, the feeling of working together for the betterment of ourselves and the community as a whole can transform what is tricky about this into a unique strength.
Some considerations for Therapists: Trans People are Not a ‘Niche’
While I believe that certain values and intentionality must anchor therapeutic practice in order for therapy to be safer and more accessible to trans people, I don’t believe that we are a ‘nice’ because I don’t believe our community comes to therapy with a singular presentation, need or goal. We come to therapy at all points in life. We come to therapy wanting to talk about gender and not talk about gender. We come to therapy pre-, during, and post-transition and we come to therapy non-transitioning. We come to therapy with a diversity of hopes, dreams, traumas, and challenges. When we treat a population as a niche, we risk making flattening assumptions about clients and their support or treatment. We also risk assuming that, due to our specialization in this area, we are great therapists for all trans people because we ‘understand trans issues’. This is tricky because understanding at a high level what trans people may encounter in our lives is helpful to the therapeutic process. Indeed, having personal experience in the world as a trans person may uniquely benefit our work with other trans people. I believe it does. However, any assumptions we make which homogenize the trans community or presume their reasons for being in therapy undoes the benefits that our research or personal experience gives us.
Ultimately, I believe that there is a unique depth that can be reached when we share intimate understanding of what it is like to be trans, right here, right now. We can move into the places that cis-centric language would fail to articulate. A knowing nod, a gesture to keep going because the context is understood, can be safety signals that we can move to the very edges of our own experiences, where even we might not yet have words. This is the place where empowered possibilities take root.
References
Morrill, Z., & Comas-Díaz, L. (2025). Critical-liberation psychotherapy: Unsettling hegemonic power toward liberatory practice. American Psychologist, 80(4), 576–588.https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001444
