Instructors:

Heather Edwards, PT, AASECT Certified Sexuality Counselor, and Sexuality Educator; and Tuesday Feral, LPCA, NCC, Tranzmission Support Programs Director

Dates & Location: 

• SELF-PACED. Find this course online HERE. 

About the course:

This course will be unlike anything else happening in clinical education world. It can be taken as one entire course or broken into halves, depending on your needs. 

• Trans 101 for medical providers (first half)
• Inclusive Sexuality Counseling (second half)
• Trans-Inclusive, Trauma-Informed, Kink-Aware Care: Optimizing Sexual Health (both of these courses together)

We’re bringing mental health and medical providers into one learning situation because when we’re talking about these big, complex topics from multiple angles, everyone benefits from a richness in content and being able to understand what “the other lane” is. This course applies to every single patient who walks through your door and is inclusive of transgender and nonbinary folx.

The instructors for this course, Heather Edwards and Tuesday Feral, are examples of this type of collaboration. Heather has been a pelvic PT for 16 years, is certified as a sexuality counselor through the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, and was trained by the University of Michigan Sexual Health Certificate Program as both a sex educator and a sex counselor. In addition to this, she hosts adult-sex-ed-in-a-bar events (Vino & Vulvas) for the past 5 years that pull together mental health, medical health, advocacy, outreach, drag performance, burlesque, and professional domination. Tuesday Feral, is a mental health professional and is Tranzmission’s (local transgender support agency) Support Program Director as well as a national presenter on transgender and nonbinary topics. Tuesday is also a frequent contributor to Vino & Vulvas. These two LOVE to present together and always have a great time discussing this complicated (and often uncomfortable) content with the course participants.

These two taught Transgender and Nonbinary Pelvic Health: Creating Competent and Affirming Care in 2019 through Pelvic Guru Academy and have decided to take the content in a different direction for 2020.

This course will cover some fun and challenging content. There will be many opportunities for activities for your personal learning and ways to take some challenging sexual issues that your patients might come to you with and learn how to break them into pieces and help them through their process. Topics covered will be:

• Examining our own biases around gender, orientation, race, culture, religion, body size, and ability and how it might unknowingly affect how we care for our patients/clients
• Understanding the difference between sex counseling (which medical providers can do) and sex therapy (which mental health providers can do in addition to sex counseling) through the PLISSIT model
• Understanding the DOUPE (no, that’s not a joke, it’s actually the acronym) model for sexual history taking
• Kink and BDSM awareness and understanding
• Enthusiastic Consent and how we can model that in a medical setting
• LGBT considerations
• Asexuality
• Transgender and nonbinary genital talk and education
• Trauma awareness training for you to use with patients
• Skills to teach patients to use with their partners for communication during sex
• Counseling on helping patients with self-pleasure/education/desensitization activities
• Counseling on partner engagement
• Use of power dynamics to empower sexual activity (and how it applies to dysfunction)
• Moving away from cis-het normativity with our language and education
• Sexual anatomy and arousal
• Separating erotic needs from genital rehabilitation
• Pleasure-centered perspective
• Sexual dysfunction will be covered, but this course will NOT be focused on medical management with pathophysiology
• A healthy dose of self-reflection where you’ll get to loosen up and take off your clinical hat for a bit (but we won’t make anyone share anything that they are not enthusiastically willing to share)
• Learn why Heather and Tuesday will firmly stand by their (tongue-in-cheek) statement of “It doesn’t matter how vanilla, straight, or cisgender you are… you can (and should) still be having queer sex”.

PLEASE NOTE: This course will NOT be teaching manual skills, pre-op/post-op transgender treatments, or transgender surgeries (we will discuss for the purposes of understanding various concerns, but not focus on these) but will be heavily engaging on how to interact with your patients on these topics. If you are looking for answers to questions like “What is the protocol for transfeminine bottom surgery and what complications arise?”, this course is not the one you want. For that, check out Sandi Gallagher’s offerings through the (formerly known as) Section on Women’s Health. She’s an amazing wealth of knowledge for that!

ALSO NOTE: You will be expected to have gone through the Transgender 101 pre-course material and basic education about surgeries prior to coming to this course. This course will assume a basic level of understanding of terminology (al of which will be provided in the pre-course required material). 

What people have been saying about Heather & Tuesday’s classes:

“The emotional and psychological components of care and this population were addressed in depth. As this greatly affects the outcome of ANY patient’s care, I felt relief that instructors were taking this into consideration; acknowledgement of emotional factors are very rarely brought to light in our PT realm of education.”

“I highly, highly, highly recommend this course, taught by Heather and Tuesday. This has been one of the most informative courses I’ve ever taken, having been a PT for 10 years now. I appreciate so much Heather and Tuesday’s presentation style, their breadth and depth of knowledge and the course material.”

“I got so much more from this course than I ever anticipated. The small group setting allowed for interaction and for participants to help provide information if they are currently seeing trans patients. So much of the information regarding trauma is useful beyond just the trans population and I was grateful to spend the time to learn and be more prepared to help patients with traumatic pasts.”

“I was struck by how deftly they led the course, while making sure the student with hearing challenges was always included and filled in. It was so amazing and inspiring because they gave us a master class in how to be inclusive providers, while leading by stellar example.”