Join us for an experiential workshop series specifically created for trans masculine folks who have completed top surgery; holding space in community to explore grief, consent and pleasure from an embodied understanding.
Throughout the process of pursuing top surgery you can become so focused on the final outcome that you have to compartmentalize the myriad of emotions that are felt along the way. The medical team can prepare you for the healing process from surgery, but doesn’t have the knowledge or the capacity to teach you how to explore pleasure in your body as it is in this moment. Quite often you overlook certain losses and the grief that come with them to focus on the fact that you finally have had your surgery. This is a space to express the fullness of your experience and learn skills to support your body and your pleasure.
This Workshop is For You:
If you have had any type of masculinizing top surgery
If you have noticed complicated feelings during or after the surgical process
If feeling into boundaries and embodying consent are skills you want to learn or practice
If you want more access to, and practices that support, your pleasure
If you want to feel more at home in your body
This offering is our love letter to post-op trans masculine spectrum people.
Session One: Establishing the Group Container
Session Two: Dipping Our Toes into Grief
Session Three: Learn and Practice Embodied Consent
Session Four: Individual Pleasure Practices to Expand Erotic Possibility
Other Important Details:
Location: Private Zoom Room with Captions
Dates: Saturdays in September 9th, 16th, 23rd, & 30th
Time: 10am-12pm PST
Cost: Sliding Scale $125-$250 (If you have the means to pay more so others can pay less please do.)
Please check out our fundraising efforts to support future students access to scholarships and bursaries for hands on scar support bodywork. FUND WEBSITE
Space for 10-15 participants.
Testimonials:
I appreciate the small group. Originally, I wanted a larger group so I could hide and not necessarily contribute but the smallness allowed for a really intimate connection and for me to actually share my experience in ways I do not normally. This workshop helped me hold grief for something that also brought me the deepest sense of joy and presence in my body. Both can exist together and must be honored. Thank you for that. I am deeply appreciative of this experience.
- anon -
What did you take away from this workshop?
I have the choice to give consent or to withhold it. I can embody that power of choice. My scars are a part of me and I can live in this body and experience pleasure. I can know with 100% certainty that top surgery was the right decision for me, and still experience grief about losing a part of my body.
- Ellis -
Meet the Facilitators:
Jess DeVries (she/her) is a queer cisgender somatic sex and intimacy coach trained in the Somatica method and trained in somatic sex education and sexological bodywork. She primarily serves the queer/trans community to support folks in reclaiming body autonomy and to inspire curiosity about pleasure and sexual expression including expanding possibilities of what sex can be and guiding folks to define and pursue pleasure on their own terms. In addition to her pleasure work, she is a grief advocate who regularly facilitates spaces for people to grieve, inviting the wisdom of the body to guide the grief process. She understands that there is a deep kinship between pleasure and grief and believes that they both deserve to be tended as full experiences of our humanity.
Kori is a queerly gendered parent, caregiver and freelance community educator based in Lekwungan territories. They have worked in the field of community organizing, sexual health, harm reduction and supporting groups and individuals in visioning liberatory futures for many years, on and off, while also tending to the human needs of recovering from injuries and surgeries, gestating and parenting a small human, tending home and family in the face of cancer and chronic illnesses, fleeing violence and the other unexpected turns that punctuate this life. They are a student of the Institute for Somatic Sex Education and are passionate about bodies, pleasure, and imagining our ways past colonial mythologies of scarcity and disconnection. They descend from European settlers and walk through the world with access usually granted to white men; utilizing these privileges with integrity is a project that they try to approach with humility and nuance.