Living in this Queer Body

Mugabi Byenkya is an award- winning writer who was born to Ugandan parents in Nigeria and is currently based in Kampala. Mugabi lives outside the gender binary and has a seizure disorder, chronic fatigue and experiences the world in a way that some would describe as “neurodivergent.”  In 2018, Mugabi was named one of 56 writers who has contributed to his native Uganda’s literary heritage in the 56 years since independence by Writivism (East Africa’s largest literary festival). Mugabi wants to be Jaden Smith when he grows up.

In this interview we cover so many topics including the distraction of reading comics while bed-bound, falling in love with writing, identifying access needs as someone with a seizure disorder, chronic fatigue and other health conditions, living in a volatile body, toxic masculinity, why Cambodia has infrastructure that makes it a good place to have a physical disability, why haircuts can be painful for folks with sensory sensitivities, keeping a secret blog, racism in the American healthcare system and learning how to mask disability.

https://www.mugabibyenkya.com/ 

@mugabs on IG and

@mugabsb on twitter

Kintsugi Therapist Collective

Kintsugi Therapist Collective’s Embodied Private Practice Cohort (EPPC), a year-long mentorship for clinicians who are beginning or revisioning private practice with a focus on embodiment and sustainability is now enrolling our September Cohort. We will continue reading applications on a rolling basis until all available spots are filled. Due to the waiting list generated last time around, we encourage anyone interested to apply as soon as possible, as openings are limited. Our hope is that by providing a space to support therapists that welcomes, rather than disregards, the parts of self that therapists too often feel afraid or ashamed to invite ‘into the room,’ we will assist in activating liberatory possibilities for space holders and their clients. To apply, go to kintsugitherapistcollective.com

KTC MERCH:  https://www.bonfire.com/store/kintsugi-therapist-collective/

Buy something, tag your cute self in our merch (@kintsugitherapistcollective) and we will be so pleased!

Always Coming Home: A disordered eating support group 

registration:  https://forms.gle/j5x9uhfHQUPrietB8

Today I am thrilled to celebrate the 3 year anniversary of the podcast! We’ve had over 250,000 downloads and released 51 full length episodes along with some really powerful pandemic dispatches. Living in this Queer Body has become a platform that has connected queers through instagram, workshops and group intensives. This community has allowed me to get to know so many beautiful, inspiring and generative people and I am humbled at all that has come into being over these past 3 years. I look forward to many more. Our guest on today's episode showed up with such openness and willingness to ask and answer complex questions, someone who is inhabiting the X and offering us all some hard won tips about how to radically accept and honor our care needs.

What began as a series of conversations about Olivia Laing’s fascinating book “Everybody” during the second year of the pandemic became a full length interview in which Joey Soloway and I talk about their trans family, the 6 genders in the Torah, the feeling of cross dressing as a cis woman, the importance of having a coven or care team as a trans human, moving away from "admin as a love language," naming what often goes unnamed, epigenetics and much more.

Joey Soloway is an artist, activist and filmmaker. They created the Emmy– and Golden Globe–winning series Transparent, cult feminist series I Love Dick, as well as Afternoon Delight, which received the Sundance Directing Award.  They are currently working on The South Commons Experiment, a documentary about race, architecture and memory.  They are the co-founder of 5050 by 2020, launched East Side Jews, and are on the board of Nefesh Temple.  They are amidst development on podcast, television and film projects that fulfill the Topple Production’s mission of elevating marginalized artists and their stories.

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Register here for Always Coming Home: A support group open to all people who are actively working on disordered eating recovery or navigating trauma experienced in institutional eating disorder settings.  @livinginthisqueerbody

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Kintsugi Therapist Collective’s Embodied Private Practice Cohort (EPPC) is a year-long mentorship offering for clinicians who are beginning or revisioning private practice with a focus on embodiment and sustainability. Combining reality-based, capacity-conscious clinical and business consultation, mentorship will focus on the ways that therapists can be nurtured by clinical practice, avoid burnout, and commit to sustainability, self care and healing. Application link here.  @kintsugitherapistcollective

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Living in this Queer Body Podcasts are edited by the lovely Barry Orvin

Music by Ethan Philbrick and Helen M-P

Hosted by Asher Pandjiris

I approached Alli for this interview as a fan and really loved meditating with her during the pandemic.  During this interview we talked about what it is like for Alli to be a queer, larger bodied, POC in the wellness industry, endometriosis, her relationship with a queer femme identity as someone who grew up as a tomboy and how a meditation practice helped her navigate significant traumatic loss and much more.

Alli Simon (she/her) is a certified yoga and meditation facilitator from Los Angeles. She commits her energy to working with nonprofits dedicated to systems change and community wellness. What began as a personal journey to heal from loss and trauma, led to sharing her practice with loved ones and eventually throughout her community. She believes in increasing access to self-care practices and community-based initiatives by using tools like meditation and yoga, to help foster a more connected and loving world.

Alli is the Wellbeing and Healing Justice Manager for Social Justice Partners LA. She currently facilitates meditation on Ope_n, a mindfulness platform and with local LA community spaces like The Underground Museum and Compound. Her story was featured for Athleta ‘Home Again’, and shared a 4-part wellness module for the recently launched adidas Community Platform.

Find out more at AlliSimon.com or @omgirlallison

Abundant Living Conference for Therapists with Chronic Illness and Health Challenges (use KINTSUGI25 for a discount)

Kintsugi Therapist Collective Embodied Private Practice Cohort  /  @kintsugitherapistcollective

Living in this Queer Body Podcasts are edited by the lovely Barry Orvin

Music by Ethan Philbrick and Helen M-P

Hosted by Asher Pandjiris

laura mae northrup is an author, educator, somatic & psychedelic psychotherapist, and podcaster. Her book Radical Healership: How to Build a Values-Driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World is an anti-capitalist, spiritually-led guide book for healing practitioners. She is the host and creator of the podcast Inside Eyes, an audio series about people using entheogens & psychedelics to heal from sexual trauma. Her work focuses on defining sexual violence through a spiritual and politicized lens and mentoring healing practitioners in creating a meaningful path.

In this interview we talk about the impact that growing up poor has had on laura’s embodied experience, utilizing psychedelics as a practice in being with suffering more skillfully, polyamory, the capitalist american dream machine, the importance of uncovering the unmet needs that healing practitioners bring to their work and so much more. Laura’s book is wonderful and you can purchase it anywhere. Here is a link to get a big discount and free shipping on Laura’s recently released book. Just use the code, all caps, LITQB

Kintsugi Therapist Collective: https://www.kintsugitherapistcollective.com/offerings

Purchase Radical Healership:  https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/radical-healership/

(Use promo code LITQB)

Inside Eyes

https://www.lauramaenorthrup.com/

@lauramaenorthrup

Anastasia (Onyx) Fujii is a queer, non-binary, chronically ill, mixed-race clinical social worker; living and practicing trauma-informed psychotherapy in Philadelphia, PA (on Lenni-Lenape land). They are a cultural humility consultant and group facilitator, as well as a lifelong East Coaster, a Cancer, a writer, and a parent. Onyx's professional practices and writing center the intersections of identity, trauma, (in)visibility, and connection.

Kintsugi Therapist Collective (KTC) is a virtual community offering embodied care, support, wisdom, and resources to trans and non-binary, BIPOC, chronically ill, and disabled mental health providers.

We aim to help other similarly situated clinicians build gainful income streams that do not rely on the same level of constantly reliable physical, mental, and emotional presence that is embedded in extractive business models and clinical training programs. We believe our private practices, in collaboration with the support of the Collective, can provide stability for our complicated bodies, not only existing for everyone else at the detriment of our wellbeing.

For more info find us here:  www.kintsugitherapistcollective.com and @kintsugitherapistcollective

LITQB Podcast: This is a podcast about the barriers to embodiment and how our collective body stories can bring us back to ourselves. This is a podcast for people who identify as queer or for people who might think of their relationship between their body and confining social narratives as queer. This can feel like an isolating experience.  Our wounded bodies need spaces to talk about struggles with nourishment/disordered eating, body image issues, dysphoria, racism, heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, substance use/abuse, chronic pain/disability, body changes in parenthood, intergenerational trauma, the medical/wellness/therapy industrial complex and its lack of inclusion of queer bodies and much more. Hopefully this podcast can illustrate the connections, and resonant pain points, that we have with one another.

Livinginthisqueerbody.com @livinginthisqueerbody

Sound Editing: Barry Orvin www.talkbox.studio

Music: Ethan Philbrick and Helen Messineo-Pandjiris

Susana Victoria Parras (@heal2gether) is the founder of Heal Together, a Guatemalan daughter, Anti-Racist, LCSW, Intersectional, Mother and Partner.  Susana is committed to justice and dignity for all peoples.  In this dispatch, we hear a testimony of the intergenerational impact of multi-systemic oppression (separation, neglect, abuse, poverty, disordered eating, alcoholism), the way this trauma lives in the body of a parentified child, and the efforts Susana is making to reflect, transform, honor grief and proclaim:  FUCK THE CONDITIONS THAT HURT CAREGIVERS THAT HURT US.

"My practice is to be a whole ass human with my child, with my partner, to keep the distance that I thought I couldn't keep because I thought I always had to be there for my parents." 

Nicole J. Georges is a graphic novelist and podcaster from Portland, Oregon. Nicole's podcast, Relative Fiction, adapted from her award-winning graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura. She is also the author of the book Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home, and the queer arts & vegan food review podcast, Sagittarian Matters. In this episode, Nicole and I cover topics ranging from punk righteousness, drawing comics, family secrets, podcasting, twelve step programs, chosen queer family, encopresis and making space for gentleness. Nicole makes the astute observation that “to be an adult, maybe, is to be less fragmented.” I urge you to check out all of Nicole’s work. She is prolific and funny and powerfully insightful. Since recording this episode I listened to every episode of the Relative Fiction podcast and I must say, if you are interested in complicated families, queerness, attachment styles, intergenerational trauma transmission, this podcast has that and more, so definitely check it out. 

Email Asher at [email protected] to join the waitlist for Embodied Testimony, a 3 month program intensive, starting DECEMBER 5th The theme for this Embodied Testimony will be, quite broadly, SURVIVING ADULT LIFE AS A PARENTIFIED CHILD.

LITQB Podcast: This is a podcast about the barriers to embodiment and how our collective body stories can bring us back to ourselves. This is a podcast for people who identify as queer or for people who might think of their relationship between their body and confining social narratives as queer. This can feel like an isolating experience.  Our wounded bodies need spaces to talk about struggles with nourishment/disordered eating, body image issues, dysphoria, racism, heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, substance use/abuse, chronic pain/disability, body changes in parenthood, intergenerational trauma, the medical/wellness/therapy industrial complex and its lack of inclusion of queer bodies and much more. Hopefully this podcast can illustrate the connections, and resonant pain points, that we have with one another.  

Livinginthisqueerbody.com @livinginthisqueerbody 

Sound Editing: Barry Orvin www.talkbox.studio  

Music: Ethan Philbrick and Helen Messineo-Pandjiris

 “Uninvisible Pod is an award-winning podcast about invisible conditions and chronic invisible illness, featuring interviews with survivors, their loved ones, advocates, and experts in varied healing modalities. Hosted by Lauren Freedman, an activist and patient advocate, who lives with Hashimoto’s disease, multiple sleep disorders, depression, and anxiety, Uninvisible uncovers real stories of survival and humanity – complete with laughter. In truth and with candor, Lauren and her guests offer solutions – and challenge the world to change. Lauren’s latest episode is an interview with Hyperacusis Awareness founder Jemma-Tiffany, a remarkable teenager who has devoted her life not only to having her rare and disabling condition — one that causes physical pain in reaction to everyday sounds — recognized as such, but also to raising awareness and encouraging inclusion. Catch this episode and over 130 more at uninvisiblepod.com or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. You can find Lauren and the podcast @uninvisiblepod on instagram.

In this episode, we talked about the long term impacts of childhood illness and confrontation with the fragility of the body, anti-fatness as a barrier for receiving medical care, how liberal folk’s disdain for the south constitutes anti-blackness, their discovery of fat studies and the impact of survival sex work on their sense of self, the significance of mutual aid work in Da’Shaun’s life, the limitations of academia as an institution and of course, their new brilliant book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness.

Da’Shaun Harrison is a Black trans writer and community organizer in Atlanta, GA. Harrison currently serves as the Managing Editor of Wear Your Voice Magazine, and is the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. A public speaker who often leads workshops on Blackness, queerness, gender, fatness, disabilities—and their intersections—Harrison’s portfolio/works can be found at dashaunharrison.com.

LITQB Podcast: This is a podcast about the barriers to embodiment and how our collective body stories can bring us back to ourselves. This is a podcast for people who identify as queer or for people who might think of their relationship between their body and confining social narratives as queer. This can feel like an isolating experience.  Our wounded bodies need spaces to talk about struggles with nourishment/disordered eating, body image issues, dysphoria, racism, heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, substance use/abuse, chronic pain/disability, body changes in parenthood, intergenerational trauma, the medical/wellness/therapy industrial complex and its lack of inclusion of queer bodies and much more. Hopefully this podcast can illustrate the connections, and resonant pain points, that we have with one another.  Livinginthisqueerbody.com @livinginthisqueerbody

Sound Editing: Barry Orvin www.talkbox.studio 

Music: Ethan Philbrick and Helen Messineo-Pandjiris

Sini Anderson is an award winning film director, producer, video art maker, and feminist art activist who lives in New York City. Her first feature length film, The Punk Singer -a documentary about Kathleen Hanna, premiered at SXSW in 2013 and was acquired by IFC Films. The Punk Singer received a theatrical release in 121 American cities and in 25 countries around the world.

In 1994 Sini Anderson and friend Michelle Tea founded Sister Spit and Sister Spits’ Ramblin’ Road Show. From 1994-2001 Anderson and Tea held weekly shows at Blondies Bar and the CoCo Lounge in San Francisco. In 1997 Anderson and Tea produced their first, of four, Cross Country Tours. Packing two vans with 12 queer artists they zig zagged across the United States and Canada for six weeks performing 40 shows! It was such a hit, they did it again for another 3 years, gaining national recognition they were signed to Mercury Records and released 3 tour albums with them. In 2000 Sister Spit released their final album, I Spit On Your Country, on radical queer & feminist label,  Mr. Lady Records & Videos.

Eventually Sister Spit would tour with over 50 queer artists and were credited with creating a queer literary scene that still thrives 20 years later as Radar Productions.

Anderson was the Chief Curator and the Co-Artistic Director for The National Queer Arts Festival and has served as the president of the board of directors for The Harvey Milk Institute and the co-chair of the board of directors for The Queer Cultural Center.

Sini is in the final phase of her second feature length film, So Sick (2014-2022) . The documentary is an exhaustive look at women/gender non-conforming people who are suffering so called “mystery illnesses” like Late-stage Lyme disease, Fibromyalgia, ME/Chronic Fatigue. 50 Million Americans been diagnosed with Autoimmune Illnesses, 85-90% of them are Women. So Sick uncovers infuriating truths behind women’s health care and the health care of PEOPLE OF COLOR and calls bullshit on American Medicine, Medical Education, and Bio-Medical Research, whose non-compliance with federal laws demanding Equality within government funded research, has only stoked the myth of “hysterical women” who are making themselves sick.

Contact Sini:  [email protected]

So Sick Facebook

The Punk Singer

Sister Spit

LITQB Podcast: This is a podcast about the barriers to embodiment and how our collective body stories can bring us back to ourselves. This is a podcast for people who identify as queer or for people who might think of their relationship between their body and confining social narratives as queer. This can feel like an isolating experience.  Our wounded bodies need spaces to talk about struggles with nourishment/disordered eating, body image issues, dysphoria, racism, heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, substance use/abuse, chronic pain/disability, body changes in parenthood, intergenerational trauma, the medical/wellness/therapy industrial complex and its lack of inclusion of queer bodies and much more. Hopefully this podcast can illustrate the connections, and resonant pain points, that we have with one another.  Livinginthisqueerbody.com @livinginthisqueerbody

Sound Editing: Barry Orvin www.talkbox.studio 

Music: Ethan Philbrick and Helen Messineo-Pandjiris