Snag Your Copy Theorizing Transgender Identity For Clinical Practice: A New Model For Understanding Gender Imagined By S.J. Langer Distributed As Digital Format

learned something new on every page of this book, I loved the multidisciplinary approach to understanding transgender identity, The author is openminded, empathetic, and very wellthought out in their process, Anyone would benefit from reading this, I am not a therapist, but I am a trans person, and I got so much out of this book, It is pretty dense for the lay reader, but it has some serious gold if you go into it with patience for the academic language.
Its an important book that Im certain will be very useful to the clinicians it was intended for however I think trans individuals can also get a lot out of its researched, scientific, and medical validation of the pain of growing up disassociated from ones body in a crucial way, and of the trans experience as a whole.
It advocates for medical professionals to direct their energy and research into helping trans people exist in alignment with their bodies, as opposed to searching for a cause or cure for transness.


Here is my understanding of the topics presented in each chapter and their major points, so you can get a feel for if it will be useful to you:

ChapterBeing and Knowing: The Interoception of Gender
Gender is not a merely a visual

experience: it can be felt in the body down to a chemical level.
A persons core gender is a “hyperprior” which cannot be changed, only aligned to match, The brain predicts that it has a body that is a certain way, and when it receives signals that it is not that way, “free energy” is created which is experienced as dysphoria.
Social and/or medical interventions are the solution to the internal noise of dysphoria trying to deny the transgender feelings will not work.


ChapterFoundations of Consciousness and Gender
Gender is like consciousness: it is a “dynamic process running throughout our being,” not something thats able to be defined easily or put in a concrete category, and it does not live in one part of the body or brain.
“After profound brain injury, core gender and gender identity remain stable whereas aspects of personality can be affected”, Much of gender is nonconscious, which is why it is so hard to verbalize, and trans people have the unfair burden of being expected to verbalize it perfectly.


ChapterMirroring Recognition
Children develop healthy senses of embodiment by identifying the person that is reflected back at them by caregivers and society as themselves.
“The TGNC child follows the others gaze, but their sense of themselves is not usually reflected back, . . If the childs bodyimage is developed from incongruently gendered mirroring, it scrapes against their bodyschema”, Trans children learn to dissociate from their body and self as a defense mechanism, and this becomes a deeply entrenched habit, This chapter also discusses the effect of shame on the health of trans people,

ChapterGender, Terminable and Interminable
This chapter presents a “formula” that can be used to dissect the elements of gendered embodiment and expression, to aid patients in understanding their needs in gender.
“In my practice, most people do not begin their exploration of gender as deciding between male or female man or woman, The process begins with a feeling about certain behaviors or gender expressions, such as clothes or hair or a feeling about a certain body part”.
Knowing how to describe the way you feel about your gender comes later in the process, and so again, it is wrong to force trans people to be able to clearly define their gender early in the process, especially as a prerequisite to medical treatments that will be the thing that furthers their understanding of their gender.
The idea that an external party could determine whether or not someone is trans and should transition comes from the view of transness as an illness that should be diagnosed by a professional this is an inaccurate view.


ChapterAccommodating for Bodies
This chapter borrows ideas from the disabled experience and applies them to similar trans experiences, especially those concerning sex.
“If trans people are to feel positive about their sexual lives, then they cannot be measured against people with different ie, cis bodies”“If the only goal of sex is to have it like cis people, then it is setting oneself up for disappointment”.
Helping patients with owning their bodies in their sexual relationships can be an important and complex part of therapy which intersects with other issues such as trauma and shame.


ChapterTrauma, Trans, and Temporality
The time it takes to align ones body with ones identity and all the effects of “trans time” can be categorized as little “t” traumas: they are small but accrue over the years into something bigger.
Trans people often experience other larger “T” traumas, and working them out in conjunction with gender issues can be complex in therapy.
The trauma of disconnecting to ones body is also a serious thing: “Gender trauma could be defined as the profound and consistent disruption of the self by the misattunement of the body and society.
. . This trauma defacilitates the trans individuals ability to connect with their own body and other people, due to alienation from the body and possibly from attempting to act in an incongruent gender role”.


Shout out to my therapist for recommending me this book: Providing new approaches for exploring gender identity and expression, this book is ideal for clinical practice with transgender and gender nonconforming/diverse clients.
Importantly, it moves beyond the medical model to advance an understanding of transgender subjectivity as a natural variation of gender in humans.



The book deepens understanding of the developmental trajectory of trans and gender nonconforming individuals over their lifespan, before and beyond transition, by offering new theories on gender.
Drawing on theories from a range of different fields including psychoanalysis, philosophy, neuroscience, consciousness studies, trauma therapy, sex therapy, gender theory, disability studies and trans studies, it illustrates how informed clinical practice can recognise the complexity of gender identity and expression.
With chapters on the understanding of core gender through the Free Energy Principle, the foundations of gender in consciousness, a gender algorithm, trauma, mirroring, and sexual functioning, this book works to provide a superior method of clinical practice that can better serve trans communities and our understanding of gender across the population.
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