Counseling LGBTI Clients

Kevin Alderson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781412987189
• eBook ISBN: 9781452289014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Sexualidad humana en psicología

This Practical, Easy-to-Read Guide Prepares Students and Clinicians to Become Effective LGBTI Counselors

This comprehensive, practical, easy-to-read guide for emerging and current practitioners, as well as LGBTI individuals, combines theory, research and practice to help readers become effective counselors. Students and clinicians will gain relevant and up-to-date knowledge about LGBTI groups, and will develop the skills needed to work effectively with each subgroup in an empathetic and understanding manner. Additionally, to enhance practitioners? multicultural competency to counsel LGBTI clients and prepare them for practice in an increasingly global landscape, the author explores cultural differences around the world and discusses how LGBTI identities change from region to region. Counseling LGBTI Clients challenges and changes beliefs about and attitudes toward each LGBTI subgroup, while preparing practitioners to provide sensitive, informed, and effective affirmative counseling to this largely misunderstood population.

 

1

---

INTRODUCTION

REFLECTIONS

Have you ever watched a gay pride parade (more inclusively known as a “pride” parade) in a large city, especially one like San Francisco, New York, or Toronto? What a spectacle! The most amazing thing is that the majority of spectators are not lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex (LGBTI) individuals themselves. No, they are heterosexual people and their families who are supportive, accepting, inquisitive, and/or they are those who just like to attend a good party. One definition of gay is “keenly alive and exuberant” (Merriam Webster Dictionary, 2011) and the fact is, the LGBTI community knows how to have a good time. Generally speaking, LGBTI people think outside the box, so ordinary convention does not always apply. Furthermore, they are accommodating of diversity, so everyone is invited! Next time you have an opportunity, attend a pride parade in a large city and experience the plethora of LGBTI identities firsthand.

1. What reservations, if any, would you have about attending a pride parade?
2. Do you believe that people you know would think differently about you if they saw you attend a pride parade? In what way(s)?
3. What does a pride parade teach spectators about diversity? What are the pros and cons of what they would learn?
4. How would you distinguish a transperson from a drag queen or drag king?
5. What percentage of the LGBTI individuals present have always had the sexual identity they espouse right now?

BOOK OVERVIEW

A portion of most modern societies is composed of individuals who differ with respect to some aspect of their sexuality or felt gender. This does not mean, however, that every society allows its members to express these differences—individualism and its expression are not valued in every culture. For example, there is little question that gay and lesbian individuals can be much more open about their lifestyles in individualistic societies (e.g., United States Canada, Western Europe, Australia) compared with collectivistic societies (e.g., Mexico, Southeast Asia, South America).

Furthermore, the form that such expression takes is also dependent on sociocultural and historical factors. Gay identities in the 1950s, for example, look different than today’s gay identities. Their expression also depends on a person’s culture, religion, and age.

The main focus of this book will be on contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) identities primarily in the United States, but also in Canada and in various collectivist societies. Salient research will be included aimed at increasing your understanding of LGBTI individuals and looking at what we know from the published literature about counseling them.

The Problem With Terminology

Collectively, LGBTI are people with nonheterosexual identities (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual) and/or those with transgender identities (e.g., fetishistic crossdresser, transsexual, intersex). More specifically, transgender individuals include those who present unconventional gender expressions (e.g., fetishistic crossdresser, transgenderist, gender bender) and/or those who present unconventional gender identities (e.g., transsexual, transwoman, transman). Terminology is often challenging when writing or talking about groups who have been historically oppressed and disenfranchised. Postmodern writers have become very sensitive to the labels used to describe individuals. Within queer theory, for example, labels are avoided altogether. Although some writers use the term queer to refer to LGBTI people, the older generation often associates this label with a derogatory term used mainly to describe masculine gay men in the early part of the 20th century (Minton & Mattson, 1998).

The term sexual minorities also has disadvantages, as some writers suggest that the word minority may imply a lesser-than status compared to those who are “mainstream.” One favorable expression could be persons with nondominant sexualities; however, it is cumbersome and pedantic. The term LGBTI has been chosen for this text instead of the many acronyms that are in usage today, including some that include one Q for queer and another Q for questioning. Not only does adding further initials make the acronym needlessly cumbersome, terminology remains in flux for some identities, and some individuals chose not to identify with any of the identity labels within the acronym anyway.

Identity labels are used herein as adjectives, not nouns. For example, lesbian women, not lesbians; gay men, not gays; and so forth. While the term lesbian is considered appropriate usage by the American Psychological Association (APA; 2010, p. 74), lesbian women is arguably a preferred term to equalize it with the suggested term gay men by APA (2010, p. 74). It is imbalanced and prejudicial to use gay as an adjective for gay men while using lesbian as a noun for lesbians. This book is primarily about identities, and these social constructions do not describe a person’s entirety. To imply that a gay male’s identity is socially constructed (through adjective usage) while implying that a lesbian female’s identity is essentialized (through noun usage) is incorrect and, if anything, is completely backward. Research provides stronger arguments to suggest that most gay men have affectional orientations that are inherently based much more than is the case for most lesbian women.

Identities describe one aspect of a person. A lesbian woman, for example, is more than just her nonheterosexual identity—she is also someone’s daughter, someone’s neighbor, and someone’s friend. She is a lover, a worker, and an inhabitor of earth. Similarly, referring to a transsexual individual as a “transsexual” diminishes this person’s existence to this one aspect of self.

Even the term LGBTI is limited in that its focus is only on identities. People also differ on the continuum called “affectional orientation,” for example, and these do not in and of themselves constitute an identity label. Affectional orientation is used preferentially over the older term sexual orientation throughout this text as it better reflects “the fact that a person’s orientation goes beyond sexuality” (Pedersen, Crethar, & Carlson, 2008, p. 136). Affectional orientation refers to the attraction, erotic desire, and philia for members of the opposite gender, the same gender, or both (Alderson, 2010).

A recent scale that measures affectional orientation includes six components: sexual attraction, sexual fantasies, sexual preference, propensity to fall in love romantically, being in love romantically, and the extent to which one has sexual partners of each gender (Alderson, Orzeck, Davis, & Boyes, 2011; Brown & Alderson, 2010). This scale, called the Sexuality Questionnaire, incorporates suggestions made by several researchers to measure affectional orientation on two separate scales: one that measures magnitude of interest in males and another that measures interest in females. Factor analytic work has shown that affectional orientation can operationally be defined and measured as a combination of the above six components (Alderson et al., 2011; Brown & Alderson, 2010). A copy of the scale can be found in Appendix C.

Philia is the propensity to fall in love romantically with members of a particular sex or gender (or both, as in the case of biphilia). Consequently, individuals can have a heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual orientation—regardless of the extent to which they acknowledge or accept it. Most gay men and lesbian women, for example, went through a “coming out” process before they accepted their homosexual orientation (Alderson, 2002).

Identities and affectional orientation do not always match. A gay male, for example, often identifies as having a bisexual or heterosexual orientation before he accepts his homosexual orientation (Stokes, Damon, & McKirnan, 1997). Some marry a woman before later coming out. Likewise, lesbian women often have a similar experience, despite the finding that their affectional orientation is usually much more fluid than men’s (Diamond, 2007, 2008). More on that in Chapter 4.

Identity labels—when chosen at all—are picked by individuals themselves to describe some aspect that defines their sense of self. Consequently, they can be transient labels, inaccurate labels, or oversimplified labels. Such is also the case with some LGBTI individuals—our sexuality and gender is so much more than the label we give it.

DEFINING LGBTI INDIVIDUALS

Sexual Identity

Sexual identity refers to the label individuals use to define their sexuality (Alderson, 2010). Most people choose a label that coincides with their affectional orientation (i.e., heterosexual or “straight,” gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer), but most transgender or transsexual individuals will also use a sexual identity label that describes their gender expression or gender identity (i.e., transgender or transsexual). Some intersex individuals—that is, people with “congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical” (Vilain, 2008, p. 330)—will define themselves as intersex and/or as transgender.

Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Individuals

Gay men are males who self-identify as having primarily homosexual cognition, affect, and/or behavior and who have adopted the construct of “gay” as having personal significance to them. Lesbian women are females who self-identify as having homosexual cognition, affect, and/or behavior and who have adopted the construct of “lesbian” as having personal significance to them (Alderson, 2010).

Bisexual individuals are defined as those who self-identify as having primarily bisexual cognition, affect, and/or behavior. People might define as bisexual if they have sexual attraction, sexual fantasies, a sexual preference, a propensity to fall in love romantically, the actual experience of being in love romantically, and/or the experience of having sex with both genders. In effect, they acknowledge some degree of affectional interest in both sexes. Bisexual individuals have not established a substantive bisexual community (McKirnan, Stokes, Doll, & Burzette, 1995), so many define themselves as gay, lesbian, or heterosexual (McKirnan et al., 1995).

Transgender and Transsexual Individuals

Transgender persons refer to “individuals who do not comply with the either/or, female/male construction in society” (Ormiston, cited in Herring, 1998, p. 162), while transsexual individuals are those who believe their gender is dissonant with their morphology (adapted from Vanderburgh, 2009). Generally, transsexualism is viewed as a subset of transgenderism, the overarching category that also includes intersex people, fetishistic crossdressing individuals, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Counselor Reference Guide to the Common Concerns of LGBTI Clients Included in This Text
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives Regarding LGBTI Individuals
• Chapter 3: Gay Boys and Men
• Chapter 4: Lesbian Girls and Women
• Chapter 5: Bisexual Boys and Men
• Chapter 6: Bisexual Girls and Women
• Chapter 7: Fetishistic Crossdressing Children and Adults
• Chapter 8: Transsexual Boys and Transwomen
• Chapter 9: Transsexual Girls and Transmen
• Chapter 10: Intersex Children and Adults
• Chapter 11: Conclusions
• Appendix A: Glossary
• Appendix B: Handling the Roleplay Situations
• Appendix C: Sexuality Questionnaire
• Appendix D: The Sexual Orientation Counselor Competency Scale
• References
• Index
• About the Author