Hello and welcome.
You can read here about the one to one work I do with transgendered individuals, and the training I offer for professionals, counsellors, therapists and organisations about transgender, transsexual and gender variant people. I hope that you find it useful and informative.
“Transgendered and transsexual people have probably always been present in any given society and are often invisible.”
It’s estimated that 1 per cent of the population experiences questioning of their being a man or a woman, and of these a small number feel so extremely that their internal feeling of being a man or a woman is at odds with their physical sex that they seek medical treatment to change their sex (estimated to be 0.02 per cent of people in the UK. GIRES 2007). To date some 12,500 people have asked for treatment, and the numbers coming forward annually are estimated to be doubling every several years.
There are in addition people who, while not asking for treatment, wonder how they feel about their gender and how to make sense of this. Recently new labels have been created and words like gender variant, gender queer, non-binary or gender non-conforming are amongst dozens of terms currently emerging on the internet.
Since the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, in which the British government passed legislation allowing transsexuals to change their birth certificates and to protect their rights and privacy, there has been a requirement in law for organisations and employers to protect transsexuals from discrimination in the workplace, yet a subsequent report found that many such employees were subject to abuse, harassment and were forced to leave their jobs.
“Lack of knowledge and training about this population leads to fear and ignorance and ultimately to discrimination.”
Many trans people have sought counselling and have reported feeling unable to reveal their feelings and experience about their gender to their counsellor, for fear of being misunderstood.
This population experiences discrimination and misunderstanding on a wide scale, and while attitudes are gradually changing there is a need for much education in this area.