2015 Association for Women in Psychology Conference

Women’s Therapy Center (WTC) is a feminist psychodynamic social justice oriented training clinic. Our faculty wants to talk with people from other training agencies about creating more racial/ethnic diversity among faculty, supervisors and trainees. We have created a diverse training cohort, and hope to learn more about attracting faculty and supervisors. WTC was founded in 1978 as a place for experienced women therapists to train beginning therapists in work with female clients. Although WTC has always had small numbers of women of color affiliated with our training programs, our organization has historically been predominantly White. Our agency has served a diverse client population for many years. We have successfully turned a corner over the past six years, so that people of European descent are no longer the majority of people training with us. This was not an easy thing to achieve. There were many conversations and many mistakes. We made changes to our admissions criteria that expanded access to us, and we changed our curriculum to be more inclusive. We had many diversity trainings aimed at both students and faculty. We have stopped seeing people of color as the only carriers of culture, and begun to recognize the culture of Whiteness that our organization embodied. Having an all-volunteer faculty and supervisory staff added to our challenges for diversifying. In our early years, we were most interested in the way that sexism, within the gender binary, shaped women’s lives. We now include an understanding of the ways that all social location shapes our internal and external lives. Although we continue to be predominantly a women’s organization, our understanding of gender has expanded and we now serve and train transgender/genderqueer people as well as women. We hope our conversation can also include the complexity of this shift.

Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, and Jordan Davis are all Black men who were murdered unjustly either by the police or by a racially motivated white male. There names have made national headlines, and many Black communities and individuals have mobilized to call for justice in their honor, and in the honor and protection of all Black boys and men. The many protest and communal actions that have ensued are evidence of great acts of resistance and social justice mobilizing that proudly state “Black lives matter!”, however, when Black women—especially Black trans women—are slaughtered daily and by the dozens, these same acts of communal mobilizing and vigils of honor are non-existent. President Obama and many other political officials and scholars have righteously given support and condolences in the murders of the aforementioned slain men, yet, little to no consolation, acknowledgement, nor support have been given to Tarika Wilson, Aiyana Jones, Shantel Davis, Rekia Boyd, Islan Nettles, Chanelle Pickett, Nireah Johnson, Erica Keels, Dana A. Larkin, Duana Johnson, Brandy Martell, and Yazmin Sanchez, all Black females—both cis and transgender—who have been unjustly murdered and forgotten. This structured discussion is guided by a Black feminist framework (Collins, 1991) and also by W.E.B. DuBois’ double consciousness (1903). As Black feminist thought seeks to move the stories and experiences of Black women from margin to center, and Black women are simultaneously doubly conscious of the plights of Black men. Thus, our goal is not to create a hierarchy of oppression, but instead, to restore justice and equality to Black women. Moreover, the aim of this talk is to begin to think about how we as feminist psychologist can assist in restoration of justice and voice to Black women.

The Bisexuality and Sexual Diversity Caucus will host a discussion on gender and sexuality diversity at AWP, paying particular attention to the visibility of trans* and gender nonconforming people and reviewing our history of welcoming people of all sexualities. Trans* and gender nonconforming people have been a part of feminism and AWP throughout its history, whether or not this has been discussed openly. We will open a dialogue about the needs of trans* and gendernonconforming feminists at AWP, and the continued needs for programming and visibility for people of all sexual orientations, particular bisexual, queer, and gay and lesbian people.

The New Yorker (August, 2014) recently published a scathing article in which many second wave and radical feminist were virulently attacking trans women and stating they were not women. While the article made some erroneous assertions, and misquoted a few of the radical feminist such as Michelle Wallace, many radical feminist and non-feminist transphobic women do feel that trans women are not women. However, many transsexual women, particularly African American transsexual women, indicate that their experiences are more closely related to their cis-gender counterparts than to their gender queer and gender variant transgender cohorts (Brown, 2015), which begs the questions what defines being a woman and are radical feminists really attempting to protect womanhood or are they creating more oppression and hatred by suggesting that only those women who were assigned female at birth are women? This structured discussion is guided by an intersectionality framework (Combahee River Collective, 1982; Crenshaw, 1993) and loosely investigates gender schema theory (Bem, 1981). Bem’s pioneering work on gender schema and sex typing helped to pave the way for how we investigate gender in psychology today, and how we have come to understand how individuals make meaning of their gender identity; however, Bem admits herself that her work was limited in it scope, thus, in combining an intersectionality framework with a Bem's social psychological theorizing on gender, we are hoping to expand on the notions of gender identity and what defines a woman.

Restoring Justice for LGBT Communities through Professional Education and Training As mental health professionals we recognize the importance of restorative justice as documented by Campbell (2008). When applied to LGBT individuals, restorative justice may require a community rebuilding process (Gumz, 2004) and the development of competencies to treat LGBT individuals who have been victimized by criminal behavior or incompetence of mental health professionals. Rectifying the latter requires us to begin more thorough training in LGBT professional competence. This clearly begins with our education and training programs. One research study found psychologists received little training in areas of sexual orientation and gender identity and limited opportunities to work with these populations during training (Johnson & Federman, 2014). Our presentation will focus on the qualitative data collected from the first graduates of a LGBT Human Services and Mental Health certificate program. The certificate program provides 15 different courses designed to aid clinicians in developing competencies to work with LGBT individuals, couples, and families. Graduates will be interviewed about their satisfaction with the certificate, sense of preparedness in working with the LGBT clients, and experiences restoring clients who have been victims of microaggressions, criminal behavior, and incompetence on the part of untrained mental health professionals. We will present these findings in a conversational style, followed by group discussion of these planned questions: 1. What is essential for mental health professionals to become more competently trained with LGBT clients? 2. How do you guard against microaggressions in your own work? 3. How can mental health professionals become more involved in the restorative justice movement through education and advocacy? 4. How do you provide support to LGBT students in hetero-normative environments within educational institutions? We plan to discuss how the experiential-based component of the student feedback and conference participants’ discussion will lead to changes that need to be made to the certificate program.