Resistance is Being Who We Are

By Djinn Thompson 5/11/25

The most challenging part of my job right now is that most of my clientele are queer and trans, and as everybody in the queer community knows it fucking sucks right now. We're all facing this collective effort of state violence against us, and when you're training to be a therapist, one of the things that they tell you to be conscious of and look out for is transference and countertransference.  Maybe I have experiences where I can, because we have shared identities, say, "Oh, I've had that experience and here's how to work on that." But right now what's happening is something different. It is that we are all collectively experiencing the exact same trauma at the same time from the same source. So, when I am going to hold space for people they're saying, "I'm scared that I'm going to lose healthcare. I'm scared I'm going to end up in a fucking concentration camp.  I'm scared that my children will be taken away from me. I'm scared that my queer children are going to lose access to their healthcare. Will I have to run away to Canada?" There's all of these things that are coming up for my clients, and they’re things that are going on inside of me too, like actively right now. So I have to be able to hold space for my clients and also hold space for the fact that I don't really have a lot of answers. There is no Welbutrin to fix being persecuted by the government. There's no amount of EMDR that is going to fix you if you're in an El Salvadoran concentration camp. It's like the normal ways that you provide therapy, don't really apply right now because it's active trauma. It's not trying to heal from past wounds, it's the wounds occurring now. Mostly what I do is say to people, "Yes, I understand what you're experiencing, and I'm willing to sit here and give you a space to have emotions about that, and I can very much relate to the emotions you're having, and how can we manage the things we have control over, what are the things that we don't, and let's focus on those things we do have control over right now.

I think a lot of cis people, even gay cis people to be honest, don't necessarily understand why trans people are so afraid right now. It took months even for my supportive parents to really realize why I was so afraid and that my fears were founded. I really wish that when cis folks would see these headlines from our perspective- that our rights are being taken away and they're not gonna stop with us. They want to take away gay marriage. They want to bring back conversion therapy. We're just the canaries in the coal mine. And our fears are founded. And they've been like this for a number of years. I have been witness to friends here in Michigan in the last few years inviting young people into their home because their parents lived in Florida and they lost access to their gender-affirming care. We already have trans refugees in this country.

Resistance to me is us living our lives authentically even in the face of all the persecution and the hatred that we are up against. I know that a lot of people are nervous about going to Pride this year and I have always lived my life as a giant middle finger. I've always just been myself, no matter what form that took. Resistance is being who we are and building community with one another. I think what's going on right now is pretty obvious proof that as marginalized people, we can never really rely on the state to provide us protection or support, and that we are always going to need to lean on community and personal relationships, connecting in real life with other queer people to build networks of reliance, interrelationship and interdependence outside of capitalism.

When things feel really chaotic, it feels really good to walk on the river trail and see the animals and the water moving and remind myself that the world moves on, everything is temporary and all these things are going to pass no matter what. I'm not gonna fix you. My job is to help you find the parts inside of yourself that already have the answers that you're looking for, to reassure you and to help you find the healing that you already have inside. Therapy is work. You have to want to get better in order to get better.

Being a therapist has allowed me to sort of harness my codependent tendencies into a superpower. The Lansing queer community has like a lot of interrelationships. As a therapist, that can sometimes be challenging because we have to avoid what we call dual relationships. Our goal is to have the relationship that we have with a client be mostly in the therapy space, and we don't like to complicate that by having social relationships with our clients. It can sometimes be harder for us as therapists to feel like there's space for us because we're trying to avoid complications in our therapeutic relationships. It can feel really isolating. I think we need to work on having more spaces for us as therapists where we can support each other and provide the care that we need as healers, that is free of having to worry about dual relationships.

I am actively taking new clients. I am located at Red Cedar Okemos, 4084 Okemos Rd. Ste A and can be contacted at (517) 507-5892. My practice focuses on providing gender-affirming mental healthcare to queer adults and queer teens. I also do couples counseling. Part of my training at Michigan State was I received a certificate in counseling combat veterans, so I have pretty extensive training in that space which is really helpful for working with complex traumas of all sorts. Because of the Supreme Court upholding the ban on trans people working in the military, I'm actively looking to provide care to transgender service people who are facing discharge. 

When you look at the US transgender study that went around in 2015, it actually found that 25% of trans-identified people have served in the military. We are over-represented in our military service versus the general population. I think there's a lot of different reasons for that, but ultimately,  we are putting ourselves on the line to defend the freedom of the other people in our country and I think that's something that we (especially in the queer community who tend towards not being pro military) should recognize that these folks are a part of our community as well and that we need to find ways to make them feel safer and more accepted in our queer leftist spaces.