A community discussion of the intersections between queer and trans lives and experiences of emotional distress, “mental illness,” and healing.

In this workshop we will open space for creative investigations of queer/trans experiences with mental health that inspire us to break isolation, find our stories reflected, share strategies towards healing, and build community resilience in the face of a shaming, crazy-making world. Topics may include

• living with the traumatic legacies of harassment, violence, and invisibility
• surviving rejection and exclusion by families of origin
• working through shame, anxiety, grief and internalized homophobia/transphobia
• the intersections of class and race in forming our experiences of queer and gender-variant traumas and healing
• the importance of self-care, mutual aid, community support, and creative resistance
• reclaiming our contested bodies as sites of power, desire, and strength
• transformation: physical, psychological, spiritual, interpersonal, and hormonal
• queerness and gender variance as liberatory practices in a colonized world
• the sanity in creating chosen family, loving who we want to love, embracing genders that fit, and learning how to have the sex we want
• finding and accessing helpful healers/practitioners when we want guidance, and interfacing with the medical/industrial complex when we have to