Statement Regarding Gender Justice & Transphobia

Gender Expansive folx (including, trans, non-binary, gender nonconforming, queer, and fluid) and their families are experiencing powerful legislative attacks in the United States, challenging bodily autonomy and access to healthcare, education, jobs, housing, community spaces, financial resources, as well as relationship and family protections. Unsurprisingly, the legal attempts to culturally scapegoat and isolate those who are identified or perceived members of the queer community has correlated with an increase in targeted lethal violence and harassment of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, and a destruction of the safe spaces where we gather. These attacks are tied to a long history of gender-based violence, oppression, and transphobia. We acknowledge the greatest risks and consequences are often experienced by poor, trans-feminine, people of color, and acknowledge the leadership and influence of radical queers across every influential change movement throughout history. Tandem Columbus is proudly in service to the LGBTQIA2S+ communities, including those who are most vulnerable to harm. We are fervently committed to queer, trans, and women’s liberation viewed through a lens of Gender Justice.

The Gender Justice movement centers the experiences of trans and cis women, birthing bodies, and menstruating people. Anti-femininity is viewed as the origin of all gender-based violence and oppression. The movement demands more than trans visibility, pay equity, reproductive healthcare (including abortion), and woman-led organizations knowing these steps often result in individual exploitation or cultural “acceptance” at best. Gender Justice, as we understand it, is instead the complete quest for a society based on gender self-determination and the absence of state control. Gender self-determination validates all identities, choices, and experiences represented across the wide spectrum of gender, and acknowledges yet-to-be-named genders that are distinct from the current gender imagination. The Gender Justice framework removes ownership of masculinity and femininity from the physical body, and acknowledges a multiplicity of femininities and masculinities, as well as neither, both, sometimes, never, and fluid gender experiences.

Gender Justice is a call to revolution and the deconstruction of norms, systems, and institutions that uphold our current gender “truths”. It is the ongoing recognition of misogyny and oppressive, patriarchal systems that have historically brutalized, silenced, and punished women and LGBTQIA2S+ folx based on their physical expression, genital presentation, reproductive choices, erotic orientations, and their gender, sexual, and identity expression. It challenges compulsory heterosexuality and cis-heteronormativity. It recognizes multiple feminisms and centers those bodies, identities, and expressive forms that are most impacted by gender-based oppression.

At Tandem Columbus:

We understand Gender Justice to be intersectional work, intimately bound together and dependent on racial justice; queer, trans, femme, and women’s liberation; migrant rights; climate justice; economic justice; prison abolition; sexual freedom, pleasure and erotic wellness; health and reproductive justice; crip liberation and disability justice; fat justice, and justice for the youth, aging, and elderly.
We recognize that our clinical work is built on the research, community practices, and cultural experiences of Black, Indigenous, and POC queers. And yet, we know the mental health field has directly contributed to the culture of transphobia and gender-based violence through policy, ethics, procedure, protocol, training, supervision, and direct clinical service. By allying ourselves with medical/colonial/supremacist ideology, this profession has contributed to the violent diagnosis, treatment, and hospitalization of gender expansive bodies and identities that have traumatized generations, destroyed cultural knowledge, and isolated individuals from family and safety networks. At Tandem Columbus, we endeavor to take accountability in our complicity by divesting in colonial approaches to mental health.

Gender Justice demands accountability for harm and complicity, and challenges the systems of oppression that demand compulsory allegiance to a binary gender system. True accountability requires strategic analysis, planning, and action across systems, policy, and relationships.

We commit to the Gender Justice framework in the following ways:

We are committed to the integration of feminist principles and theory in our business practices; our clinical work; our professional endeavors; and in relationship with and among each other.
We endeavor to replace the need for resilience with rest and self-compassion within and outside of the organization. We commit ourselves to the work of building communities and therapy spaces that prioritize safety, resolution, justice, freedom, and healing for us all through community engagement and encouraging community advocacy in our values and financial support.
We are committed to gender equity (resources, access, and opportunity), and believe in varying levels of reparation for individuals dependent on the intersection of gender and other marginalized identities via reduced fee services, employee benefits, and equitable pay practices.
We contribute financially to organizations with explicit mission statements and demonstrated outcomes that reflect gender justice; racial justice; and disability justice frameworks.
We maintain a nuanced understanding of gender, recognizing the traumatic impact of patriarchal systems and harmful gender ideology on us all–including the lives of cisgender men and boys. We know men and boys have widely diverse experiences, and that men’s intersectional experiences are best understood through an analysis of access and power. The varying levels of access to gender power and masculine privilege that men experience is often dependent on context and environmental relationship. For example, the increased risk of violence, victimization, trauma, and dehumanization that some men experience in certain contexts (i.e. in relationship to police) is often based on gender itself (i.e. black and brown men, and men with experiences of disability and mental illness, often experience greater risk than those who identify or express their genders differently). Even for those men who maintain the greatest power and privileges in the United States, the results are often associated with isolation, dissociation, emotional numbing, physical violence, accidental death or suicide, as well as reduced self-compassion, physical health, and satisfying life outcomes. For this reason, we commit to facilitating men’s consciousness-raising as well as motivating men in the fight for Gender Justice.
We endeavor to increase sexual knowledge and develop self/relational/community practices that will expand opportunities for pleasure and regulation across the lifespan. We will do so by continuing to invest in our own sex-positive training and supervision. Similarly, we are committed to developing individual gender pleasure and creativity in all of its forms and expressions. We know that sexual freedom, bodily autonomy, and self-knowledge is uniquely tied to gender justice for us all.