GSRD Community of Practice Announcement: The launch of The Empathy Archive
by Megan Wright
In recent weeks, The Person Centred Association’s Community of Practice Group for Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity (GSRD) launched a new project: The Empathy Archive.
Over two years ago, we decided to create a platform for people to share their earliest experiences of their GSRD identity.
The idea emerged from conversations in which we spoke about our younger selves, sharing memories of our budding non-conformity.
From there, we reflected on the seeds of our self-understanding and actualisation as GSRD people. We noticed threads of consistency: ‘Looking back, it was so obvious,’ ‘This is what I have always been, I just didn’t have the words.’
We saw potential for a kind of encounter, one which could deepen awareness of - and thereby, empathy for - the experiences of GSRD young people. This felt interesting and exciting, but most of all important.
Discourse around GSRD issues has become increasingly regressive in recent years.
A common trope is that the increased visibility of GSRD people is due to a ‘trend’, or because young people are vulnerable to being ‘brainwashed’ by the political agendas of GSRD and allied therapists.
We wanted to demonstrate the consistency in GSRD people’s experience of themselves, even before they have role models, community, or the language to name their identities. The implication being that GSRD people are nothing new, and will always exist.
With this in mind, we set out to give a voice to our younger selves. And in doing so, we hope to stand in solidarity with today’s GSRD youth.
We are now accepting submissions to the archive.
We welcome any GSRD person to share how they remember feeling different as a child or young person, in ways that they can now identify as being related to their GSRD identity.
We also welcome anyone, GSRD or not, therapist or not, to read through the submissions.
We hope you can experience tenderness for the young people represented there. We hope that you can meet them in the spirit of ‘I-Thou’.
And we hope that this inspires you to stand with and for the GSRD community.