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Also, advocate for and practice affirmative action hiring policies at your business or workplace. If you work at a high-end spa and don’t have control over the rates, consider doing offering mobile massage or volunteering to do chair massage at a local community center for a few hours each month. One way to do this is to build sliding scale and low-income options into your business plan and budget.
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We must make sure massage therapy is financially accessible and not just promoted as a luxury spa treatment for the wealthy few. Addressing financial barriersĪ 2015 report points out that “trans people are nearly four times more likely to have a yearly household income below $10,000” and “the numbers go up if a trans individual is a person of color.” Attuned, caring human touch is vital to our health and has been documented as a healing method dating back to 2700 BCE.
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Here are five initial ideas to create a more affirming practice before clients even arrive at your door: 1. We can learn from examples like those to incorporate similar values into our own work. The list of such practices could go on.including Wild Seed Wellness, Third Root, and Holding Space Massage. was founded with the goal to create a practice that "embraces the many ways that people's bodies are non-conforming" and has a diverse staff that understands the importance of radical inclusion.
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Numerous bodywork practitioners across the country have been paving the way in terms of gender-inclusive healing environments. So how can we as massage therapists become intentionally welcoming to individuals of all genders and gender expressions? Our work has the potential to facilitate healing in every system in the body and can decrease anxiety, improve sleep, and reduce pain. We are not here to diagnose, pathologize, or prescribe. Massage therapists are in a unique position to offer affirming client-centered care. Bodywork can be a powerful healing modality that can counteract the physical effects of living in a climate that often keeps us in “fight or flight” mode. Transgender people (especially trans women of color) are in the cross-hairs of a variety of threats from discrimination in healthcare, housing, and employment to horrific acts of physical violence. Many trans people’s experience with the medical community has been negative- from the complicated diagnoses of Gender Dysphoria to the extreme medicalization of gender to humiliating and horrifying exams, it is easy to see why many trans folks choose not to engage with health care system at all. Our own bodies can be such a huge source of trauma so it's nice to have people who are committed to being intentionally welcoming and inclusive.įurther, in “Holistic Health for Transgender & Gender Variant Folks,” herbalist and community-based healer Dori Midnight points out why offering “holistic care and education to individuals in a manner that honors the whole person” is so important, Structural oppression makes us ill both mentally and physically, and many of us go ages without care for our bodies, and end up doing more damage. Often, queer and trans folk don't think we deserve to care for ourselves and heal, mainly because there hasn't always been spaces for us to do that. Mercedez, a massage therapist in Chicago, points out that:īodywork can be very clinical, and as many of us know, even skilled medical professionals lack the training to work with bodies that don't fit social norms. Broadly recently featured an article entitled "For Trans and Queer People, Massage Therapy Can Be a World of Pain." The article covered some of the unfortunate barriers and negative incidents LGBTQ individuals have experienced with massage therapy.