Ask a Gender Therapist: “Dara, Can You Be My Gender Therapist?”
In this week’s edition of the Ask a Gender Therapist Video Q&A Series I address…
“Dara, Can You Be My Gender Therapist?”
Click video above to watch, or read the transcript below
Hello and welcome to “Ask a Gender Therapist.” This is a video series where I answer your transgender questions from the perspective of a gender therapist. My name is Dara Hoffman-Fox, I’m a licensed professional counselor in Colorado. Well, let’s get to today’s question!
The question I am going to answer today is one that a lot of people ask me. It is, “Dara, can you be my gender therapist?”
First of all, thank you for asking and I really wish I could. The only people I can be gender therapists for though are those that live in the state of Colorado in the United States. And that is because I am only licensed as a counselor in the state of Colorado. That’s a pretty strict rule, especially for gender therapy because that usually involves writing letters of recommendation for hormone therapy and surgery. It’s very important that you work with a therapist who lives where you live.
I know that’s bad news so I’m going to try to figure out a few ways to maybe help you out anyway. Let’s go ahead and look at some of those answers.
First, I have a couple of videos that I made that can hopefully help you find a gender therapist in your area. The first one is called How Do I Find a Gender Therapist? and the other is Nervous About Meeting a New Gender Therapist? Both of those videos should be able to give you a good start on being able to find a gender therapist in your area.
I know that can be really tough for some of you and it depends on where you live, especially if you are international. That might be especially challenging.
Another thing I wanted to mention is if you still have trouble finding a gender therapist in your area, go ahead and send me a message. The best way to do that is through my website at darahoffmanfox.com/contact. Let me know where you live and then I will turn to my Facebook community who I always get a lot of help from.
On Facebook I have a lot of Facebook friends who are transgender who live all across the world. They also know a lot of gender therapists through Facebook. So I can put your question out there and see if anyone knows a gender therapist in your area.
There are two other ways I can help you out. One would be that if you already have a therapist who is not specifically a gender therapist, maybe they need just a little bit of training and a little bit of help on figuring out how to help you. If you are already comfortable with them, and you are wondering if they can help you out, ask them if they wouldn’t mind contacting me and then I can provide them with consultation.
This is something that I do need to charge for so you can send them to my website to look at the page where I do talk about different ways that people work with me. It’s at darahoffmanfox.com/work-with-dara so you can give it to your therapist.
The other way that I can help is that, even though I wouldn’t be able to be your gender therapist, I can offer you coaching or consultation as well. So if there are certain things about your transition that you think I would be able to help you with when it comes to figuring out some of your path, I would be able to do that in a coaching way instead of a counseling way.
The best way for you to find out the differences between that is to, again, go to my website and go to the Work With Dara section and look at that and see if there is something we can work together on.
I do offer free 30 minute consultations so we can even talk either on the phone or through Skype, and be able to figure out if I would be able to provide you with a coaching or consultation service instead of being able to be your gender therapist.
So, that answers that question. If you have a question you would like to send to me, please go to my website darahoffmanfox.com/contact and put in your question there.
I am happy to be here to help and I’ll talk to you guys soon!
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