S3E1: Beyond ‘The Talk’—Supporting Young People As They Explore Sexuality and Gender

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[00:00:05] Jasper Nighthawk: Welcome to The Seed Field Podcast, the show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories, and come together to win victories for humanity.

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[00:00:19] Jasper: I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk. With today’s episode, we’re kicking off season three of our podcast. We have something really special for you. We’re putting together a series of episodes that explore sex around Antioch. By that, I mean sex therapy in our psychology programs, sex ed in education, and the many other ways that human sexuality intersects with the work that Antioch does as a university.

To kick things off, I could not be more excited to talk with today’s guest, Dr. Markie L.C. Twist. Markie is an award-winning sexuality educator, sexologist, relationship therapist, author, and international speaker. She’s also a licensed marriage and family therapist and mental health counselor and a certified sexuality educator and certified sexuality educator supervisor.

She’s also a prolific scholar with over 70 journal publications, 13 book chapters, and she’s co-written numerous books. She’s the Editor in Chief of the journal, Sexual and Relationship Therapy: International Perspectives on Theory, Research, and Practice. She serves on the editorial board of one of the most prominent journals in her profession, The Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. This year Antioch, New England was lucky to hire her as teaching faculty in the Applied Psychology Department. We couldn’t wait to welcome her on The Seed Field Podcast. Markie, welcome. We’re so glad to have you here.

[00:01:42] Dr. Markie L.C. Twist: I’m very excited to be here, thank you so much. Thank you for putting sexuality front and center, it’s an important topic. I’m honored to be a part of this conversation. Thank you.

[00:01:53] Jasper: We totally agree. The topic of our conversation is going to be really supporting young people as they discover and explore their genders and sexualities, and just all the different things around that. Before we jump in or as a way of jumping in, I want us to do something we’re doing more and more on this podcast, which is disclose to our listeners the positions that we’re coming from. I think that this is important, especially when we talk about things like race, gender, and sexuality. Really, anything that intersects with power, which is really anything that we might talk about. It’s good for these disembodied voices to be attached to some subject positions.

For myself, I’d love for our listeners to know that I’m a cis-gendered man, I’m white and while my sexuality is complex, I’m in a monogamous, basically heterosexual relationship. I’ll leave it there, I don’t always know how much to give. I’d love to ask you, Markie, what position do you come from?

[00:02:47] Dr. Markie: Yes, I really appreciate you acknowledging positionality because I think it’s really important. I usually start any presentation or a teaching opportunity talking about my positionality. Some of the things that are probably important, I’m originally from a small village on the road system in Alaska called Houston. It was heavy First Nations and the majority First Nation and then white, and then it was very, like working class, low income. When the internet became available as I aged and when we had more connectivity, growing up where I did, that’s a lifesaver.

In addition, growing up where I did, I’m just so excited to see people and meet people. Because if you spend more time staring at moose than you do people, you’re just excited about the world and the people in it. I think that there’s no way to take that apart from my own where I am now as a person.

Other identities, I’m a Gen Xer, I am bisexual, my kid and I have fights over whether or not I really should be calling myself pansexual. I don’t feel like that change in identification is necessary for me. I’m also androgynous, I use she/they pronouns, not the same thing is non-binary because I very much feel myself gendered and it depends on the day and the tasks and so I think that’s a more helpful way to lens it for me.

Then I am consensually non-monogamous, my kid is raised by a couple of parenting partners and a primary partner, and then a biological father. We’re more in a polyam-type network, but it isn’t– I think when people hear polyamorous or consensual non-monogamy, their mind immediately goes to sex and that’s only a small part of those relationships and not really a big part of my dynamic.

Then I’m kinky. I have real specific interests that I enjoy in terms of erotic orientation. That probably gets talked about the least just because our society still has a tremendous amount of judgment around people that have kinks and fetishes. Overall, I would say, I’m a fourth-wave feminist, meaning that ultimately, I just believe in empowering the most minoritized voices. That’s often tied to positionality in the intersection of where someone is standing on the globe and at what point in time.

Then I’m white-appearing, my family has a complicated background. My dad’s originally from Norway, so my father and his family immigrated, my mom is Basque and English and German Jewish. There’s a lot going on there and I certainly think that all of that influences how I see the world and therefore how I see my work.

[00:05:45] Jasper: Yes, thank you so much. It’s so generous to reveal things about yourself. I think it’s a way of making yourself vulnerable or putting yourself out there.

[00:05:53] Dr. Markie: I totally agree, and it’s what we also expect. It’s what we expect our clients to do.

[00:05:58] Jasper: As a therapist, yes.

[00:05:59] Dr. Markie: Yes, and sometimes our students. If we’re not willing to set the same example, then how can we expect other people to do it?

[00:06:08] Jasper: Yes, that’s great. Well, I want to hear a little bit more about your background but I thought we could get into it through a question that– I’ve done a little research, I think I have somewhat of an answer for myself, but I don’t think everybody knows what sex therapy is in general. I thought maybe you could tell us, what is sex therapy? Also, how did you come to choose this as your career?

[00:06:29] Dr. Markie: Yes, absolutely. I actually think that’s a- it is actually a hard question and there’s still a lot of debate really on what sex therapy is. Sex therapy is a specialized– Some people feel it’s a specialization within larger umbrellas of therapy. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, sex therapy is within the scope of practice within that profession. Many people would say, “Well, that’s just an area of specialization within family therapy.”

I think that’s true, but many people also consider it its own standalone field. I think that the reason people feel it’s important enough to be a standalone field is that really the topic of sex and sexuality hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention, just in therapy practice in general and then also across therapy settings in terms of education. Like learning about therapy, very few people get a lot of sexuality education. Myself and many people feel that sex is as fundamental as other basic needs. If it’s right up there with eating, drinking water, using the bathroom, and getting sleep, then we probably should at least be assessing around sexuality and sexual difficulties when we’re working with clients.

[00:07:54] Jasper: I think a lot of people hear sex therapy and they think of like, “Oh, that’s where there’s a therapist who’s in the room while you’re having sex with your partner or they’re somehow, they become a surrogate and they’re engaging in sex with you,” but I understand that’s not quite what you mean, in this case.

[00:08:10] Dr. Markie: No, it isn’t. That’s definitely not what we do. There is a whole field that does have sex with people that they’re trying to help within a sexuality context and that would be sex surrogates. There’s actually a whole professional organization, the International Professional Surrogates Association, which internationally helps guide that practice. Unfortunately, in the US, it’s not recognized, and so you can’t go to a sex surrogate here in the United States, and sex therapists don’t have sex with their clients. They’re just as boring as other therapists.

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[00:08:49] Jasper: Yes. How did you come to be a sex therapist?

[00:08:52] Dr. Markie: Actually, I never know how this will sound but I actually had no intentions of ever being a therapist. I actually wanted to be a sex educator. I actually got all the way done with my undergrad which was focused on psychology and criminal justice because I thought I was going to be the next FBI profiler, even though I didn’t know that was not a real job. Went to school for that, and then I was a sociology of sexuality teaching assistant my last semester of college. I was like, that’s it, I just want a legitimate excuse to talk about sex with everybody for the rest of my life. What job is that?

Sexuality is what led me into the field, it wasn’t at all the therapy part. That’s just been an added gift and a bonus, learning how to better listen as a human and have more compassion and empathy. I’m grateful for that part of the journey.

[00:09:49] Jasper: That’s great. Well, I really want to center our conversation around the ways that we can support young people, as parents but also as family members and teachers, and community members because we all have young people in our lives, at least I think almost everyone, but I want to talk about how we can help these young people as they discover and explore questions of identity and sexuality.

I think a good place to start in on that would be by laying out the many areas of diversity in human sexuality and you specifically advocate for visibility and acceptance of people with diverse gender and sexual expressions, which I think our listeners might be more familiar with, but also with erotic and relational diversity. You use this acronym GSERD, Gender Sexual Erotic and Relational Diversity. Can you explain why this be umbrella term is useful?

[00:10:43] Dr. Markie: Yes, absolutely. I would love to think that I was brilliant enough to have came up with this idea myself, but the idea originated about five or six years ago in the UK through Dominic Davies and Meg-John Barker, who I’m great friends with and they’re brilliant scholars and clinicians. They took a look at what was happening globally and more historically in terms of the alphabet soup or the LGBTIAQ+, depending on what alphabet you’re using and which letters go in that acronym. They said, Gosh, that’s wonderful and we need all those identities and that’s really important. Especially in the US, we’re much more identity-ist than they are in Europe and the UK.

This is not, I hope listeners understand this, this is not like throwing the champagne out with the cork, it isn’t like we’re going to get rid of the alphabet. The idea here is it just is more all-encompassing. The problem with just that alphabet is it only focuses on sexuality and gender and it doesn’t even do it in a really comprehensive way. Then on top of that, it is not focused on relational orientation or erotic orientation. There’s no real room for consensual non-monogamy polyamory per se, and there is no room whatsoever for kink BDSM folks.

I mean, we all have what my professor in college, [unintelligible 00:12:21], which is a great name and how do you not go into the field of sexuality with that name, but we all have what he used to call erota centrism, which is this idea that I think what I like and do sexually is right, and ultimately, I think what everybody else likes and does is not right because it isn’t what I like and do.

[00:12:41] Jasper: Yes. I think that’s a really useful idea, this erota centrism that we all judge our own or have a tendency to judge our own way that we relate to the world sexually as the norm or as the way things should be and anything outside of that as foreign and maybe scary. I think that’s a useful thing to keep in mind as we are interacting with other people and especially people over whom we have power as adults or as therapists. Could you give us an example or maybe a couple of examples of how young people can face stigma, like from therapists or from their families or both, about not their gender and sexual diversity, but their erotic or relational diversity?

[00:13:24] Dr. Markie: Yes, absolutely. Young people, we don’t have good data. We barely have data on young people in terms of gender and sexual orientation. We don’t have hardly any data on their erotic orientation or their relational orientation. I think that speaks volumes already. I think it’s because we’re so afraid to talk with young people about those identities, even though, guess what, they have the internet, they know they exist and that’s part of why the need to broaden our way of thinking is so helpful because they’re having contact with all sorts of people.

Parents will automatically assume they might not be in a space right now of assuming that their young person is the gender they were assigned at birth and they might not be in a place where they immediately assume their kid is heterosexual. However, they’re definitely still in a place most of the time where they assume, oh, you’re going to prom, who’s your date? Right? It isn’t, are you going with a group of people or are you going to take two dates, right? There’s an automatic assumption–

[00:14:37] Jasper: Or, are you going to go by yourself because you don’t want to be in a relationship.

[00:14:39] Dr. Markie: Right. Maybe you’re more asexual and that is not acknowledged at all even though we do have data that says that young people are more asexual than previous generations. That or, I’m always cautious of this, that or we’re just measuring it more now. It’s hard to tell, but there’s no space for that. The other thing is there’s no space for young people are engaged in technology and have been their whole life, unlike my generation where there’s a pretty clear demarcation of before and after.

[00:15:13] Jasper: Like the internet.

[00:15:15] Dr. Markie: Yes, but I was still young enough to be a young person when it happened but an adult, there is no separation. Guess what? They might just be attracted to technology. It might have nothing to do with humans.

[00:15:29] Jasper: Well, I super want to talk about digisexuality later. Like this idea of being someone who’s more sexually in the digital universe, but I want to move and talk about the idea of coming out, which I think is a classic narrative in our culture. The idea that there’s a specific moment when you’re like, “Mom, I’m gay,” or whatever. I think that this can be super useful and there’s a National Coming Out Day. In your work, you prefer to talk about visibility management. I want to ask why do you want to move away from this idea of coming out towards a more visibility management model?

[00:16:07] Dr. Markie: Yes, I think coming out is a really important process for many people in terms of their GSERD identities. For many people, early on, especially once they’ve come to terms with their own identities, they then start to want to share that, and that’s great. Not everybody has the power and privilege and positionality to be able to share that so that’s one of the issues that I have with just the idea of coming out is it’s not experienced equally and equitably, but the bigger issue is the concept of visibility management of which coming out as a part of.

Again, it’s just encapsulated within a larger umbrella. This is the idea that because society, dominant society sets up what I think of as invisible walls, that means that a whole bunch of people aren’t seen because they’re not visible. Like if you’re kinky, you’re not visible. If you’re polyamorous, you’re not visible. The dominant society defaults to people being straight and heterosexual and cisgender and not kinky and monogamous. That invisibility makes it so people who have GSERD identities they have to come out in order to be seen.

Then it isn’t just a one-time process, that’s the other misunderstanding with coming out is there’s this idea that you’re just going to do it once. The thing of it is you then have to continually do it all the time because society keeps having all these walls of invisibility everywhere you go. Sure, you come out to your family as a young person, but then now you have to come out at school, and then now you have to come out at work, and now you have to come out in college. It’s never just a one-time process.

When you’re in relationships with people like partners, your kids, I’m a parent, now you also have to think about visibility management because the walls of invisibility are high. If my kid has a performance at school and the school only allows for two people to come to the performance because they make the assumption that everybody has two parents, then that puts my family in an awkward position and that’s upsetting, right?

Now I either have to make the choice of if I want to actually email this school and say, well, my kid actually has like four parents. Can we all come? Because I don’t know how to make choices around this. Maybe I don’t make that choice. Maybe we just make a choice as a family whether or not we’re going to be visible to attend this performance. That’s the frustration I think is this idea that coming out is this one-time thing and that everybody can do it and that everybody should. Quite honestly, the bigger issue is the dominant society needs to tear down their walls of invisibility so that people don’t have to go through that anymore.

[00:19:06] Jasper: Yes. That’s beautiful. I also want to bring up another one of our society’s classic narratives. This one is the idea of the talk, which is like this one conversation where after a decade-plus of absolute silence around sexuality, you then sit the kid down and you’re like, so this is what sex is and this is how to do it. This is how to be safe, whatever it is that you tell it. This is maybe the most extreme version of this narrative in our society, but you never speak to the child about it again either. It’s just like this one-shot.

I think it’s pretty obvious in 2021 how ridiculous that is. I mean, kids are getting ideas about sex, not just from their parents’ conversations or their parent’s relationship, but also from the internet, from classmates, from school. This idea is pretty ridiculous, but I want to ask you, how do you recommend parents and the whole community of adults around a child, how should we be approaching discussions and bringing up or answering questions of gender, sexuality, and erotic and relational diversity?

[00:20:17] Dr. Markie: This is a great question because the thing of it is I agree with you. I think that way of conceptualizing the big talk, you’re only going to talk about sex once with your kid or a kid and that’s it, I think that is still happening. It seems dated as an idea but it is definitely still happening and a lot of that’s because people repeat what they learned from their own families around sexual legacy, and that’s often what happened in their family and there aren’t good examples of something else to do instead.

Really the something else to do instead is first of all, sexuality and gender and I would even go ahead and argue relational orientation and erotic orientation, they’re just an everyday part of a person’s existence to varying degrees depending on who they are. It’s just the air we breathe and so to not acknowledge that air throughout the lifespan I think is a really big missed opportunity and it puts a lot of pressure on parents to wait for a particular time to have conversations when honestly, you can have pretty natural conversations that are age-appropriate and often driven by the young person across the lifespan.

It really starts from the very beginning, like when someone becomes pregnant, instead of focusing on what their genitalia looks like, focusing on just, “Yes, I’m pregnant with a baby.” “Well, what are you going to have?” “I’m going to have a baby,” just really making gender something that’s more broad and fluid even from the very beginning sets up a different conversation on gender then that you have with kids, and here’s the bottom line, kids are going to, whatever this means, naturally default to whatever is the most common anyway.

People freak out and I’m like, listen, not all kids are going to be genderqueer. The majority of people still are cisgender. Just talking about gender isn’t going to make your kid gravitate towards one gender, it just helps them be broader in their thinking. It helps them be more patient and understanding with other people if they operate outside of cisgender.

[00:22:39] Jasper: That makes so much sense that when you’re talking with your kids about diversity in these different areas, you’re not just saying, “Hey, I’m not going to disown you if it turns out that you are X, Y, or Z,” but also you’re setting them up that when they learn that their friend is in some way not the same as them, they’re not going to be mean or scared.

[00:23:01] Dr. Markie: Right, and when they see an all-gender bathroom, they’re not going to have a panic attack over that. It shouldn’t even matter. Their bathrooms at home are all gender. It really just making it natural and you can do the same thing in each of these areas like sexual orientation. You can easily talk about like, if your kid’s like, “Hey, I have a crush on someone at school.” Instead of assuming that someone is a differing gender than the kid, you can just say like, “Wow, really, tell me about them.? Just broaden it. This isn’t like you have to do, like, I don’t think as a parent it’s your job to have to teach your kid about like the history of Stonewall and like, you know– [crosstalk]

[00:23:52] Jasper: I think that could be good.

[00:23:53] Dr. Markie: Yes, it should be taught in school, absolutely, and my kid knows about it, but you can do things that are really subtle that make a huge difference, and so it’s not just one conversation, it’s definitely over time. Now, having said that, the majority of kids still learn from their friends. It isn’t even the internet, they still learn from their friends who are learning from the internet, and actually, most kids still to this day, kids in adolescence will report they wish they had learned more from their parents.

It isn’t that people don’t want to hear about their familial sexual legacy, it’s that it feels so always something that’s special and only talked about this one time and that’s all we’re going to do. That’s crazy because think about it, you remember Disney movies as a kid. I know this is controversial but it would’ve been nice if at some point my mom might have said, “I was obsessed with Sleeping Beauty.” It might have been nice at one point if she had said, “Hey, what do you think about consent in that situation? Do you think that she consented to be kissed by someone in order to wake up?” That’s a natural conversation and Sleeping Beauty play is a whole entire area in kink BDSM.

You don’t have to name something as kinky, but you can start to apply basic ideas from the culture, which are like there needs to be consent, it needs to be talked about, how do I have conversations with my young person about that? Well, guess what it naturally happens.

[00:25:36] Jasper: I want to ask about one of these other things that can be named though, which is you made this argument that there’s an emerging sexuality called digisexuality, which I think we alluded to earlier and you think this is something that’s emerging we’re going to see more and more of it. Can you explain this term digisexuality and why it’s a useful thing to point at and observe?

[00:25:59] Dr. Markie: Absolutely. My colleague, Dr. Neil MacArthur, and I who’s, I can’t actually believe this is still a title, is a sexual ethicist and sexual moral philosopher in sexuality at the University of Manitoba. About five or six years ago, Neil said to me, hey, I think we need a term for somebody and this is the definition of it, who their sexual experience depends on the use of advanced technology. We needed a label for that and I was like, okay and he was like, let’s call it digisexuality and I was like, yes, that totally makes sense.

When we went and did our homework, we found, and I’m sure the Urban Dictionary is always 100% accurate, no sarcasm at all, we found that someone had been using the term digisexual to describe having a strong sexual interest or passion in animals living in the digital world like Digimon, but our term is really meant to be broad. Digisexuality has two waves. The first wave would be that now when I ask people almost everybody if they’ve engaged in first wave digisexuality, almost everybody says yes that has access to technology in the modern sense of the way.

This is like, have you ever used a dating app? Have you ever done webcamming? Have you ever used more modern sex toys? Have you used social media? Have you watched porn online? That’s all first wave digisexuality and the majority of people definitely have done that. The number one sex toy consumers are actually cisgender women and queer people. I think that always surprises people because when we think of digisexuality, usually we think of the stereotype that gets portrayed in Her or Lars and the Real Girl or Westworld where we see these white young or older cishet men who are depressed and alone.

We think that’s who’s using in digisexuality, but at least in that first wave, that’s not really who it is. The second wave is where the technology is so immersive that it need not involve a human partner to enjoy the technology itself. Whereas in the first wave, the technology is a mediator usually between the person and a partner or partners or humans in general. Second wave is like robots, sex dolls, virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial agents, and almost everybody that I talk to have not had much chance to engage in second wave. There’s lots of reasons for that, but a lot of it has to do with affordability more than almost anything.

[00:28:45] Jasper: I wanted to bring up digisexuality because I think it’s this useful thing where for a lot of people who otherwise might consider themselves liberal-minded, the idea is still foreign. At least the second waves’ digisexuality, and there’s this knee-jerk aversion that to me is a good analogy to what I see more conservative folks feeling when they consider homosexuality or non-monogamy or kink.

I think that a lot of us like to think that we’re going to be really flexible in accepting new things, but I think this is maybe a good place to ask a question of just, do you have any suggestions for parents or other people who are no longer young people who just accept whatever is coming at them in culture and if we find ourselves maybe repulsed or disgusted when we first consider an emerging or newly visible sexuality.

[00:29:41] Dr. Markie: I love that you’re broadening it that way because I don’t think digisexuality will be the end-all-be-all of this. As things grow and change, identities and experiences grow and change with technology and apart from that. How do we not yuck people’s yums that start to emerge, and people are really freaked out by especially sex robots, it really freaks them out, and there are two things that I think are happening. One is that erota centrism we already talked about, and then two, actually technophobia.

In many ways, people are technophobic, and actually, unfortunately, therapists tend to be more technophobic than just the general population, and when you merge centrism and technophobia together, you get digisexual phobia, which is this I’m terrified of this, and I’m terrified for my kid, but the thing we need to understand already is this younger generation has never not had technology in their life.

They’re also developing an identity across the lifespan, and most Western scholars see that happen in adolescence about age 12, and that includes a sexual identity, and so if they’ve never not had technology and their identity is developing, there’s no way that technology has an influence how they see themselves sexually. There’s just, I don’t know how it would not be possible, and the average age of online personal first-time pornography viewing in this country ranges from, this is the average, 11 years of age to 13 years of age, and the researchers that I read also like to note that about 90% of those people are doing homework while they’re engaging in online pornography use.

I think a lot of things. One, I think this is a bigger issue than just parents, and so those of you who are parents or work with parents, please take a deep breath. You can’t do all this on your own. We as a society have to figure out how we’re going to offer more comprehensive sex education to young people because it’s sort of not sex workers, porn people’s job to teach our kids about sex, but yet that’s falling on them.

[00:31:54] Jasper: That’s such an interesting point.

[00:31:55] Dr. Markie: You shouldn’t expect that your kid is going to learn how to do sex or what’s healthy all the time in terms of sexuality by watching sexual athletes. They’re entertainers, it’s their job, they’re not educators. We as a society have to figure out how to offer a better education. That’s part one, but that’s a bigger issue, and it’s bigger than just being a parent.

[00:32:17] Jasper: Yes. Well, I think it’s so it’s so useful for us to consider this, and I don’t hear many people out in the wider world, talking about these things, or trying to just game out how we’ll be able to move through them, and not even in the future, but how in the present we can support people across the board who are we’re dealing with this broader range of things that our society doesn’t always have space for yet.

[00:32:44] Dr. Markie: Yes, absolutely.

[00:32:45] Jasper: Well, we are out of time, but thank you so much for coming on the show, Markie. It’s been a total pleasure talking with you.

[00:32:52] Dr. Markie: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much, Jasper, for having me.

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[00:33:04] Jasper: To find more information about the Couple and Family Therapy program at Antioch, New England where Markie teaches, follow the link in our show notes. We’re also linking to Markie’s personal website where you can find more information about her books, publications, and other talks that she’s given. We post these show notes on our website, theseedfield.org, where you’ll also find full episode transcripts, prior episodes, and more.

The Seed Field Podcast is produced by Antioch University. Our editor is Lauren Instenes. A special thanks to Karen Hamilton and Melinda Garland. Thank you for spending your time with us today. That’s it for this episode. Join us next week for the next conversation in our series about sexuality, and don’t forget to plant a seed, sow a cause, and win a victory for humanity. From Antioch University, this has been The Seed Field Podcast.

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