Gender, Communication and Sexuality in the Workplace

Dr Russell Thackeray has extensive experience in the areas of Trans & Gender support and is a Trustee of Chrysalis (Gender Identity Matters), a Trans support charity. As such, we specialise in supporting transgender and questioning people, their families, close friends and employers.

Gender and sexuality play an integral role in the lives of us all, in all communities and cultures around the world The West, (as with so much in today’s society), influences and shapes these identities.  

Our dynamics, our sexual and non-sexual relationships and the roles assigned to us socially are often based around our gender perceptions of one another. In understanding how gender and sexuality can vary, we can understand miscommunications between communities and cultures based on a mistranslation or misalignment of norms and practices.  If we understand them, that exclusivity is a means to create productivity, symbiosis, and communication within communities. Understanding sexuality is about communication, something so crucial and that benefits all of us.

It is commonly understood that the younger generation, in particular Generation Z, (those born between 1997 and 2012/15) engages and focuses with the gender equality and communication message more than many of the older generation. By focusing on visibility and representation, community-based social change and practice can happen, which matters as it gives voices to individuals who were not afforded that opportunity in the first place.

We think that globalization and access to the internet virtual spaces and social media has given younger people the opportunity to congregate and find their community.

This younger generation has been raised in a time where conversation around gender and sexuality is more open than ever before.  People can discuss sensitive matters in confidence with others who have gone through it before. In time, social change can be enacted, and communities will become more visible in non-virtual spaces. Small communities and marginal groups have always existed and found ways to congregate but now this is more feasible and visible.

One of the benefits of engaging with diversity in the workplace in particular is that it focuses a brand-new lens on what an organisation is doing. This will help shed light on potential blind spots that existing team members may have missed because of their own standpoint or experience.

Engaging groups in gender diversity can be transformative to workplace culture and thus feed back into our societal norms, making our lives and relationships across the board more open, understanding and supportive.

From our positions of relative privilege, we have the platform to develop equal power relations between men, women, transpeople and all other denominations in order to effect change.

Let us:

• Listen to one another with empathy and seek to understand all perspectives.

• Enquire as to the experiences of others and in turn, share our own.

• Show up by being deliberately engaged, present and showing commitment.

• Advocate for others, speak up and evangelise.

More information can be read here: https://hypnotherapyetc.com/gender-support

Listen to the podcast “Resilience Unraveled” with guest Georgie Williams.

Georgie is a PhD researcher at University College Dublin, specialising in Transgender, Genderqueer, Nonbinary and Intersex experiences, whose recent papers have focused predominantly on marginality pertaining to queer and specifically non-cisgender identities, but has also written about aspects of sexuality, structural violence, borders and bodies as sites of resistance through interdisciplinary and intersectional lenses.

Further reading material and resources can be found on Georgie’s website is here: https://slashqueer.com/articles

Do you want to talk about it? Maybe we can help.

Email us on russell@hypnotherapyetc.com or WhatsApp / call on 07770 811 352