Meet the Speakers

This session challenges the reactive nature of mental health support for minoritized Gender, Sex, and Relationship Diverse (GSRD) individuals. Using the Sikh community as a primary case study, I will explore how "preventative interventions" must be rooted in Cultural Safety rather than mere competence. Traditional public health models often intervene at the point of crisis. However, for those navigating the intersection of faith and queer identity, the "Last-Mile" barrier is frequently a lack of culturally resonant language. This presentation introduces the "Learning a Vision" framework, a grassroots initiative that utilizes the Sikh principles of Seva (selfless service) and Sangat (community) to create "Third Spaces" for discourse. We will discuss how moving away from a "deficit-based" lens allows us to treat cultural heritage as a protective factor rather than a barrier. By integrating storytelling and AI-driven community insights, we can identify early signs of identity-based isolation and intervene through peer-led, affirmative education. Attendees will gain a systems-thinking toolkit for building interventions that are: Culturally Sovereign: Empowering the community to lead its own narrative. Preventative: Addressing spiritual and familial friction before it mandates clinical crisis intervention. Inclusive: Reconciling ancient ethics with modern GSRD realities. Target Demographic: This session is designed for clinicians, social prescribers, and community leaders working within South Asian and faith-based contexts, as well as those interested in the systemic intersection of religion and GSRD mental health.

This presentation invites therapists to think beyond “kink-friendly” practice and move toward a more reflexive, intersectional, and queerly attentive understanding of kink, trauma, and healing. Drawing on the largest qualitative study to date into kink, BDSM, and Leather in the UK, the session explores what queer kinksters wished therapists knew about their practices, identities, bodies, and relationships. Kink cannot be understood in isolation from queerness, race, transness, disability, and systemic fetishisation. What does it mean to offer safety to clients whose bodies and desires have already been shaped by stigma, pathologisation, and shame? What might the therapeutic gaze miss when we meet kink with neutrality, but not with cultural, historical, and embodied understanding? And what if hope is found in practices therapists have been trained to mistrust? Rather than offering kink as pathology, provocation, or simple reclamation, we will follow anonymised narrative invitations and explore kink as a complex site where survival, agency, intimacy, identity, pleasure, and trauma may be negotiated. Attending to the intersections of queerness, race, transness, disability, and other marginalised positions – often overlooked in research and clinical frameworks – allows a fuller, more nuanced picture to emerge, where what is usually unseen becomes central to how we make sense of kinky clients’ lived experience. For therapists, the hopeful invitation is not instant expertise, but a deepening of reflexivity, humility, and GSRD-affirmative practice: a willingness to let queer kinksters teach us how to queer kink-informed therapy.

The Two Spirals Model did not begin as a theory. It began as a pattern I recognised in myself (as a queer, autistic woman in recovery from chronic illness) and then kept recognising in the clients and therapists I work with. This session introduces the Two Spirals Model and its clinical application for practitioners supporting clients who hold multiple marginalised identities to hold onto hope, alongside their grief. Drawing on the framework of neuroqueering, this model recognises that queer and neurodivergent identities do not simply co-occur but create cumulative experiences of marginalisation that shape how clients experience their own needs. The Two Spirals Model maps how self-care, self-worth, regulation and capacity exist in dynamic relationships. It proposes that sustainable change rarely comes from productivity-focused approaches, but from cultivating curiosity, kindness and compassion toward ourselves, promoting regulation and increasing capacity from the inside out. Clients may initially be resistant to this shift in focus, viewing self-care as self-indulgent, however Audre Lorde’s assertion that self-care is an act of political warfare reframes rest as resistance and values our marginalised identities for what they are, not what they do. At the end of the session, attendees will be invited to explore what it means, clinically and politically, to help clients believe they deserve to curate a life that works for them. Because giving themselves that permission is not a destination. It is the work itself, and the place where hope can be found.

The fourteen-stage model for transsexual and transgender identity development created by Devor (2004) has provided a framework for understanding trans identity development for over two decades. However, people at the intersection of trans identity and fat embodiment are not easily able to progress along the stages as set out in the model. Social stigma about fatness makes disambiguating gender dysphoria from body dissatisfaction more difficult, and medical or surgical gender transition is often inaccessible to people above BMI limits set by healthcare providers. Huelsman (2012) created a Positive Fat Identity Development Model (PFIDM) based on earlier frameworks created for and by women and people of colour. Her five-stage model offers an alternative and an adjunct that integrates personal self understanding with social justice. The PFIDM centres immersion in identity-affirming culture that facilitates development of positive valence towards identity, as well as participation in social justice for other socially stigmatised people as a way to foster agency and encourage hope. This session will explore some of the shortcomings in the Devor model for fat trans people, including discussing why this is important, and offer a new perspective to help conceptualise identity development for fat trans people. It brings together a widely accepted framework with a less well-known model, offering a combination that fits within the GSRD framework of social justice and the possibility of joy for a doubly marginalised queer community, adding another model to the GSRD theoretical toolkit.

This presentation draws on a first-person heuristic inquiry to explore how sexual trauma can distort the meaning of sex, and how survivors can actively reclaim and redefine their sexual experience. Dominant clinical frameworks often focus on dysfunction, damage, or recovery, overlooking the ways trauma can warp a survivor’s concept of sex—its meaning, purpose, and potential for pleasure. This study highlights the importance of explicitly examining and redefining sexual concepts and reclaiming one’s narrative, which is vital to restoring agency and supporting authentic, self-directed sexual experience. The research explores embodied, emotional, and relational themes, including the coexistence of pleasure, dissociation, vulnerability, and agency. It examines the role of patriarchy in shaping survivors’ sexual experiences, showing that therapists and individuals may need to actively challenge patriarchal norms within relationships to create safety and space for joy, agency, and freedom in sexual expression. Rather than positioning hope as a return to “normal” sexuality, this work reframes hope as the capacity to engage with, make meaning of, and redefine sexual experience in ways that feel safe, authentic, and self-directed. The session will outline the research approach, key themes, and clinical implications, inviting therapists to move beyond pathology-based models toward approaches that centre lived experience, curiosity, and client-led meaning-making. It is particularly relevant for therapists working with individuals, couples, or groups who have experienced sexual trauma, and for those supporting survivors in exploring sexual identity, intimacy, and agency.

The session explores some of the lived experiences of individuals facing hate incidents and hate crime and identity-based discrimination. It draws on emerging themes from my personal experience as a therapist and as a clinical lead within psychological therapy which now form a basis of my PhD proposal. The session hopes to bring forward some of the voices of transgender and broader LGBTQ+ communities, and pays respect to the creative strategies they use to maintain wellbeing in the growing climate of prejudice. The session aims to share insights from LGBTQ+ individuals on navigating hostility, whilst maintaining and sustaining identity, hope, and ability to thrive within a growing uncertainty; offer a space for practitioners to reflect on their own practice; and broaden my own perspective and gain further clarity in the direction of my proposed PhD. It is relevant to counsellors and therapists (training or qualified), trans counsellors, people working in private practice or other settings.