*It was soul crushing to me to realise that the organisations set up
to help women would think that women in my circumstances, who were
being gaslit and subject to coercive control in their relationship
with a man, should have their needs and their own lived experience
considered secondary. Not only that, but their despair should be
regarded as a form of “bigotry”.
This is not helped by such things as the “memorandum of
understanding" adopted by professional bodies for therapists that
require practitioners to only ever affirm the declared gender of
clients without deeper investigation lest it be considered
“conversion therapy", and the training received by practitioners
from organisations that re-enforce a narrative that paints a
negative picture of the partners of people who declare a trans
identity and who are anything less than 100% “on board" regardless
of the impact on their own or their children’s lives or sense of
themselves as “phobic".
So in a nutshell, there is no specialist support.
There are no
specialist training programmes outwith those that are focused on how
to support the trans partner. It is unlikely that such specialist
support will be developed given the current “memorandum of
understanding" and the policy positions that have been developed by
women’s support projects in conjunction with trans support
organisations that (understandably) present an entirely one-sided
perspective.*
From parliamentary submission.