Summary

They explore the impact of fear on behavior, including aggression and the failure to recognize one’s own power in socially privileged groups.
The conversation delves into the recent legislation in New Brunswick, Canada, requiring parental permission for children under 16 to use their chosen names or pronouns, leading to some politicians resigning in protest.
They address the harmful accusation that trans people are grooming children, highlighting the vulnerability of trans and gender nonconforming individuals to violence and the importance of cultivating an atmosphere of openness and trust for children to express themselves authentically.
Kai Cheng Thom shares her upcoming book, “Falling Back in Love with Being Human,” and encourages listeners to educate themselves on anti-trans legislation and advocate for trans rights and equality by contacting local politicians.

[00:00:00]: Introduction

[00:00:19]: Welcoming Kai Cheng Thom

[00:00:35]: Introduction to Kai’s work

[00:01:38]: Kai’s curiosity and question

[00:02:53]: Kai’s personal experience

[00:04:05]: The motivation behind becoming a therapist

[00:05:27]: The wounded healer archetype

[00:07:49]: Collective healing and community psychology

[00:09:46]: Creating a sacred space for dialogue

[00:13:32]: Kai’s journey as a writer

Transcript

[00:00:00.780]
Marcia: Ruthless Compassion is a podcast about how you can turn your emotional shit into fertilizer for success and see your darkest moments as opportunities to transform into a powerful kindness warrior. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review wherever you listen.

[00:00:19.160]
Marcia: Welcome, Kai Cheng Thom, to the Ruthless Compassion podcast. So happy to have you here today.

[00:00:24.490]
Kai: Thank you so much for having me. I am really delighted to be having this conversation. I have to tell you, I love the title Ruthless Compassion. It’s like, I think that’s everything that I stand for.

[00:00:35.070]
Marcia: Great. Well, we can talk about that. But before we do it, I always like to ask my guests, what you do, tell us a little thumbnail about who you are and what you do.

[00:00:46.600]
Kai: Great. This question is my biggest fear because like most millennials, I’m a multi hyphenate and I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m going to try. I’m Kai Cheng Thom. I live in Toronto or Tkaronto, Treaty 13 territory, and I am essentially a mediator, a dialogue facilitator, a professional coach, and a writer in various genres. That’s the thumbnail. Then if I were going to expand on that a tiny bit, I would say I’ve been in the intersection of mental health, social justice movements, and personal development work for the past 14 years or so. Really, my big curiosity and my big question is how can we love one another as a practice, even if we are coming from really different places? Literally ideologically, politically, how can we love each other across difference, not in a way that maintains the status quo, but that pushes towards positive change?

[00:01:38.690]
Marcia: Yeah, that’s the challenge.

[00:01:40.860]
Kai: Yeah, just that.

[00:01:42.840]
Marcia: Just that. Not much else really. Well, more important than ever in these really super polarized and angry times, right?

[00:01:52.850]
Kai: Yes.

[00:01:53.500]
Marcia: So how did you come to doing this work? I’m always interested in the journey. How did people get to do what they are doing?

[00:02:01.080]
Kai: Thanks for asking that. Well, I mean, the Coles notes of the childhood origin stories. I’m a millennial and I was born in Vancouver in the 90s. M y parents are fairly traditional Chinese Christians, actually. I was growing up, I didn’t really hear much about diversity in terms of sexual orientation or gender identity. I was a little queer kid growing up. I came out in high school, which was a big disaster, in the typical way. It was the early thousands by that time. Some things had changed for the better and some things hadn’t. Maybe some things changed for the worse as well. I experienced a lot of backlash from peers, from the school itself, actually, from teachers and administration, which was really.

[00:02:53.050]
Marcia: Not great. Sorry to hear that.

[00:02:54.830]
Marcia: Thank you. Then my poor parents, they just didn’t know what to do. They My mother, who is a doctor actually, had just never received any education about it. My mother’s a doctor, so she thinks she knows everything. I’m so sorry. I know you’re a doctor too.

[00:03:09.560]
Marcia: Fortunately, I don’t think I know anything, so we’re good there.

[00:03:13.160]
Kai: My mother is like, If I didn’t learn about it in medical school, what does it even mean? Her world falls apart? Sorry, mom. I know she’s probably listening at some point anyway, but Hi, mom. Exactly. It was a big crisis for us. That for me was a trial by fire into the personal experience of being a diverse person and being impacted by discrimination and systemic gaps. But I was also really impacted by the political gaps, differences in understanding that are systemic that no one could control. The administration of the school was bad, but they clearly hadn’t had any support or education around this issue, and neither had my parents. Like most therapists, I took this original wound, I took it to grad school, eventually, and became a couple and family therapist. I worked for several years in.

[00:04:05.570]
Marcia: Can I just back you up? Can I just back you up for a second totally. Like most therapists, I took the original womb and I went to grad school. You say it so nonchalantly, but I have to say that that’s a very astute statement because you’re right. I think a lot of people who become therapists, nurses, social workers, doctors come from a place of… Something happened to hurt them, whether it was having a family member who was sick or having their own wounds, and then they’re motivated to do this helping work. I just wanted to underline that, underscore that because I didn’t want to just rush by that because I think you’re right. I think you’re right. I think being motivated by your own wound is a very powerful motivation and can see you through a very arduous educational journey, whereas other kinds of motivations might not. The wound is very highly motivating. It makes you follow through.

[00:04:58.270]
Kai: Absolutely. Well, yeah, while we’re pausing here now, I’m thinking about all my beloved classmates and teachers and peers and how when we get really down to it, the honest peer supervision conversation usually goes back to that original wound. It’s beautiful. I honestly think the wounded healer is a beautiful archetype, particularly when we hold it in community without shame. If we’re always trying to hide that we’re motivated by our wounding, then it comes out in a weird way when we do the work. But yeah, anyway.

[00:05:27.120]
Marcia: If you own your stuff, then it makes you more compassionate. And if you deny your stuff, then you can cause harm. And I think the wounded healers who don’t own their stuff are the ones who end up really creating a lot of difficulty within themselves and in their clientele. So we got to own it.

[00:05:43.050]
Kai: Yes. We don’t want to lose the distinction between our needs and their needs, which is very easy to do from a place of woundedness, which I mean, that probably loops into the conversation about discrimination and saviour crusades that end up discriminating as well. We’ll get to that, I’m sure. But in terms of the origins, I guess the rest of it just is that I did family therapy for a while and I actually specialised for quite some time in trans pediatric mental health. I was working with gender creative, gender nonconforming, and trans identified children who I must say, by and large, did not require therapy, maybe supportive counseling, but not therapy. The people who needed therapy were usually as you’re nodding and smiling, the parents because they’re terrified, so who wouldn’t need therapy? Of course, Diane Aaron Soft, who’s this great psychologist out on the West Coast, who’s really formative in shaping the trans pediatric mental health scene, she always says that parents of gender nonconforming youth have their own gender wounds, I think she calls them gender ghosts triggered. You’d see a lot of dads come in and be like, Oh, well, when I was a kid, if I acted the way that my little boy was behaving, then I t have been, and that’s the doorway into the original wound.

[00:07:03.630]
Kai: Same for mothers speaking of lots of fears. Lots of fears come up. That’s the work I was doing. The long story compressed, I started to really wonder about moving outside of the clinical consulting room and into a larger social sphere to do this work. I ended up becoming a mediator and a dialogue facilitator in community spaces because I wanted to support people to bridge differences and work through some of our wounding in public. There’s the important work of therapy, which happens in private. Then I think there’s a collective healing that has to happen in public. That profession, I think, hasn’t totally been invented yet in the West. That’s what I’m going for.

[00:07:49.360]
Marcia: You want to talk a little bit more about that work?

[00:07:53.110]
Kai: Oh, for sure. Yeah. Well, I think the work of collective healing is something that a lot of Indigenous scholars and practitioners of community psychology have been talking about for a while, where they talk about responses to the trauma of colonization in the clinical sphere aren’t adequate because the trauma of colonization happens in the community. There has to be community healing. When I think about that in the context of, say, transphobic social movements or homophobic social movements, and then the corresponding movements for queer rights or trans rights, the same is true for racial justice movements versus white supremacist movements. That to me is like a wounding. There’s a collective wounding that happens when our social fears drive us into these politically polarized places. And so the way that the work can happen, I think, is first of all, bringing people into a space. And then there’s many beautiful traditions that already exist around this. Indigenous people from North America and also other communities around the world would do circle practice, like the practice of using talking circles to build peace between communities. In South America, the revolutionary tradition of theatre of the Oppressed, developed by Augusta Wall, would have groups of people actually create interactive theatre that was about addressing conflicts inside of community.

[00:09:17.390]
Kai: I think there’s a lot of other ways that we can go about it, and I’ve dabbled in many different forms and techniques as a dialogue facilitator. But I think the heart of the work is bringing people together to have a conversation. But just in therapy, we’re not just talking the way we would normally talk out there in the broader world. We create a sacred space so that the words that we speak and the feelings that we embody can bring us into a different place with one another. Does that make sense?

[00:09:46.130]
Marcia: Yeah, absolutely. I always thought that, especially when I did group therapy, I always used to call it a sacred space because you create a container that’s safe and it’s transcendent. That’s the sacred piece of it. You transcend the ordinary and you become something better and you grow in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise. I definitely see it in that way. I’ve experienced it as a group leader and I always found being in that group setting was very uplifting.

[00:10:17.160]
Kai: Absolutely. Of course, it’s scary as heck because you don’t know what the other people are going to do or say. But then when they do and say the thing that feels good or right, it’s so transformative.

[00:10:27.120]
Marcia: Even when they say terrible things, I’ve had times where people really lost their you know what. I actually had to say on a couple of occasions, I think it’s time for you to go home now and just cool down because you are not in any shape to participate. And then when they left, they had a chance to reflect on how their behavior was unacceptable. That’s the ruthless of ruthless compassion. It’s like, you can’t play nice with others. Maybe you need a time out. Then the other members would say, Gosh, I feel so safe. No one ever protected me like this when I was little. No one ever told the bully that they weren’t allowed to participate anymore. Everyone always defended the bully or protected the bully and abandoned me. And this is a different experience. And boy, I see it can be different. So for me, that was also a good experience. Just sometimes saying to the bully, no, you can’t do this. You can’t try to blow up the group just because that’s your way of getting negative attention.

[00:11:28.100]
Kai: Right. And that, I mean, I’m so curious about how you do that. I’m always curious how people do that because the fine line is standing up to the bully without dehumanizing the bully. That’s the million dollar question for me in the facilitation. How do we do that?

[00:11:47.210]
Marcia: I’ll give you a tiny thumbnail. So very quietly, very gently, very firmly with respect. But the ruthless compassion is there are consequences to actions. There are rules in the group that everyone knows about to begin with, and there’s no attacking. There’s no attacking allowed. There’s a lot you can express whatever feeling you have. You can say, I’m really angry. I’m really angry at you, or you, or you, or all of you. You cannot say, you are a X, Y, or Z. You cannot threaten. You cannot stand up and lean over people. You cannot attack. You cannot threaten. When someone’s getting into that mode, it’s like, You need to calm down. You need to sit down. You need to calm down. You need to take a breath. Let’s look at what you’re feeling. Are you okay? And if they can’t or won’t calm down, take a breath, tune in to what they’re feeling and what they need, and then they just want to keep escalating, sometimes the best thing to do is to say, Okay, I think you need to go home now and reflect on what happened, and then we can talk about it later if you’d like.

[00:12:51.570]
Marcia: But right now, you’re not fit for the group, so off you go. They always go. Sometimes they turn back and they say something.

[00:13:00.520]
Kai: The parting shot.

[00:13:01.340]
Marcia: That’s right, the little parting shot. But then when they leave, the whole group goes, and they go, Wow, we don’t have to sit here while someone’s attacking us and pretend that everything’s okay. We don’t have to sit here while someone’s attacking us and not give this person a consequence. To me, ruthless compassion is sometimes behaviours have consequences, and sometimes the consequences are you don’t get to play anymore. That’s how I do it.

[00:13:28.720]
Kai: I love that. I love that. Thanks, Marcia. That’s gorgeous.

[00:13:32.930]
Marcia: Getting back to you because you’re the guest. Oh, right. Yes. I wanted to talk to you about how you ended up becoming a writer because you’ve written quite a few big deal books. I wanted to talk to you about all your cool books that you’ve written and how you ended up doing that.

[00:13:50.450]
Kai: Thank you for the question. Yes. Well, it’s all happened. I’m one of those authors for whom it happened by accident. I was very much a reader as a kid and really relied on escapism through reading in order to get through some of the difficulties in childhood. And then I just started writing as one does, and then just kept on doing it. And yeah, I’ve had a lot of fun doing that. I’ve had the fortune to be able to write books in a few different genres, like a poetry collection, a novel, a book of essays, these sorts of things. I love all the different genres, picture book. And yeah, one thing just led to another. I’ve also said I benefited from growing up in the Internet era where I was putting my writing on the internet very brazenly. When people were reading it, really one thing led to another. One day an editor just reached out and said, I like your stuff. Do you have a novel? I said, Well, sure, it’s not done, but we all took a leap together. Then ever since then, let’s see, the first book came out when I was 25, so that’s almost 10 years ago.

[00:15:00.110]
Kai: They just kept on coming out. I don’t know what happens. It’s magical.

[00:15:04.330]
Marcia: You wrote this book called Fierce Fems and Notorious Liars, a Dangerous, Trans Girls Confabulous memoir. That was your novel, right?

[00:15:12.640]
Kai: That’s the.

[00:15:13.060]
Marcia: One, yes. When you say confabulous memoir, what does that mean?

[00:15:18.310]
Kai: There’s a bit of a double meaning to that. People think it’s my memoir. It’s not my memoir. It’s a novel. It’s the memoir of a fictional character. I’m going to say this on a podcast. When I was a teenager, I had a bit of a lying problem. I was one of the adolescents who was a tall tale teller. It’s funny, having been a therapist, adolescents, I’m being like, Hey, I think that some of these stories don’t quite line up. What are they about? What’s the truth to that? When I’m with adolescents like that, the question I’m always going for is, What is the truth that is being expressed through this potentially not factual tale? That’s what this memoir is about. The conceit of the novel is really that at the time as I was writing it, things have really changed now, but at the time when I was writing it, there was an inherent pressure for trans women writers to only write straight autobiography, like explaining my sensational transgender life to the non trans audience. It’s like, yeah, exactly. There are some great memoirs out there, but I didn’t want to write one of them.

[00:16:22.210]
Kai: But I felt like I had to. Then I thought, well, what if I wrote a memoir, but it was all lies? Then I remembered that I’d had this lying problem as an adolescent and how much fun I’d had when my lies didn’t catch up to me, but how much fun I’d had telling tall tales and the hidden truth inside of those lies. That’s what the novel is about, adventure, excitement, defying expectation, and the truth of the heart that’s hard to express sometimes through literal fact.

[00:16:54.320]
Marcia: Well, what did they say? All good writers are good liars, right?

[00:16:57.480]
Kai: Because we have to be, don’t we?

[00:16:59.850]
Marcia: Yeah. We have to take things that we know and twist it around, right? We have to take our own stories and the stories of the people around us and tweak them so that we don’t get in trouble.

[00:17:11.190]
Kai: Exactly. Well, that’s the thing with writers and with adolescents who tell tales. At some point, often there’s a fear of telling the truth because of the punishment that will ensue. There’s a lot of angles to look at in there.

[00:17:26.690]
Marcia: For sure. You wrote that book, so that was your novel. Then you wrote poetry and a children’s book, and then you wrote, I hope We Choose Love, a Trans Girl’s Note from the End of the World. That was your book of essays on transformative justice. You want to talk a little bit about that one?

[00:17:43.190]
Kai: Oh, sure. That one’s way less fun. It’s a serious book and it feels very much like a person in their mid 20s, being very serious, I think now. It’s good, I guess. I was writing a lot of it during the first years of the Me Too movement. Really a lot of the book, it’s scattered, but one of the main themes is responding to intimate partner violence, but within the queer and trans communities. It’s very serious. The Me Too movement had so many pieces to it. One of them, I think, that was difficult for a lot of queer and trans people is the story was very much about sexual violence perpetrated by men onto women. In queer communities, it doesn’t quite look like that because, of course, gender and sexuality is moving in different directions. I think also there was a part of the Me Too movement that was very much like a punitive response, like, Lock up the bad men. I totally get where that comes from. But when you’re in a small community, and I’ve heard people from Indigenous communities and smaller racialized communities in North America say similar things, when you’re a small community, basically everyone knows a perpetrator really well.

[00:18:57.510]
Kai: Your best friend has been a perpetrator. Your uncle, your uncle, your brother. The response of like, Well, just lock them up, doesn’t really solve our problem. I don’t think it really solves a problem in larger society either, actually. The question is, What is the other way? What is the solution? That’s the question transformative justice asks. That’s what I go into in the book. Of course, when you bring up this topic, you’re going to get a lot of different perspectives from many different sides, and all of them have some grain of the truth. There’s the truth in we need to be able to respond to violence in a way that transforms it and transforms the person. Then there’s also the side that’s like, Why would we focus all our energy on transforming a violent person when we should be focusing on what a survivor wants and needs instead? I think probably you’re a ruthless compassion is a part of the answer here. It’s probably a bit more complex than group therapy in some ways because of the severity of violence. But still, there’s this firm boundaries with a humanizing approach that I really dream about.

[00:20:00.800]
Marcia: Yeah, for sure. No, I definitely recall some of my patients who had domestic violence in the queer community. And yeah, it was tough. It was tough for them. And they didn’t get the support because it wasn’t in the news in that way. It wasn’t the thing that people were talking about. So it wasn’t as recognized. And especially when it was a female perpetrator, a female identified perpetrator, it wasn’t taken as seriously. That’s unfortunate because violence is violence. It doesn’t matter whose fist it is.

[00:20:34.690]
Kai: Exactly. Yeah. Well, I’m glad that those patients had you. We all need somewhere safe to tell the story.

[00:20:40.880]
Marcia: For sure. Well, I’m glad you wrote the book. Thank you. And speaking of books, so now you have another book. It’s true.

[00:20:50.250]
Marcia: I don’t know if you sleep at night, but when you have time to do all this. But you wrote this book, Falling Back in love with being human, Letters to Lost Souls, and that’s just out. So what’s that one about?

[00:21:05.410]
Kai: Thanks for asking. Yes, my publisher will be very happy that we’re talking about it. So it’s Falling Back in Love with Being Human. It’s going to be released on August 1st. And if you’re here in Toronto, the launch party is at August 2nd.

[00:21:19.670]
Marcia: Where is it?

[00:21:21.080]
Kai: It’s at the Society Clubhouse on Queen Street.

[00:21:23.620]
Marcia: Send me all the thinks.

[00:21:25.380]
Kai: Definitely. We’d love to see you there. And anyone who’s listening who’s in Toronto, we’d love to see you there. But yeah, Falling Back in Love with Being Human. Oh, I love this book. I always love the most recent book, the most. Then I write up another one and I’m like, oh, okay. I love this one the most. Anyway, I’m really worried about having children for this reason. I want to love them all the same amount no matter when they were born.

[00:21:47.140]
Marcia: Wait till you have cats, it’s the same way. You always love your latest cat.

[00:21:53.090]
Kai: The best. Really? Okay. I’ll bear that in mind.

[00:21:58.520]
Marcia: Then you feel guilty and you have to give the other one’s cuddles.

[00:22:01.800]
Kai: Okay. Well, then it’s not too bad. If we’re doing the redistribution, then it’s okay. This book, Falling Back in Love with Being Human, the subtitle is Letters to Lost Souls because it’s a book of love letters actually, but they’re not like romantic People always think I’m writing letters to my lovers, which would be a fun, different book project, I think. But no, the concept for this got started in 2020. A few months after the pandemic began, and a certain author whom you may have heard of, JK Rowling, put out a statement on her website actually saying, she was taking a stand where she said, I’m going to try to be really fair here because I read that statement several times. I think she was saying she supports trans rights and trans people, but she really doesn’t support certain forms of trans rights activism. And she was expressing a lot of concern about, for example, some trans feminine people using public women’s washrooms and also expressing some concern about the way that trans pediatric medicine, gender affirming medicine has been deployed in various countries. As you probably know, that blew up. Some of her statements since, I found quite a bit more provocative than that original letter that she wrote.

[00:23:14.840]
Kai: But at the time I actually, I was watching a lot of my community, who many of them, because I’m a millennial, were very into Harry Potter when it was new and still were into it actually after, really being heartbroken and then lashing out with a lot of anger online. Then a lot of JK Rowling’s followers were lashing back in anger. It was all a mess. But I really felt, having read that letter pretty deeply, the thing that I took away, for better or worse, right or wrong, was that she referenced her own history of intimate partner violence, actually. The trauma that was pushing her to act in these ways that she felt, and I believe probably feels, that she’s protecting women with her political stance. I wrote a letter back. It was an open letter. I don’t know if she ever or wrote back, but it went a little viral on the internet. The letter was, it’s a love letter to JK Rowling. I think it’s trying to do this ruthless compassion thing. It was like, No, I really disagree for these serious reasons, and I really get where you’re coming from. Then I just kept on writing letters in that vein, not to JK Rowling, but to people and to places and things and groups that I found more challenging.

[00:24:24.580]
Marcia: There’s a letter to Dave Chapelle in there. The falling back in love with being human letter for me is like trying to love people who may not love me back. And yeah.

[00:24:39.870]
Kai: That’s the book.

[00:24:41.020]
Marcia: Who may even wish you harm.

[00:24:43.020]
Marcia: Yes. So how do you do that? How do you feel love for somebody who might not love you back or who might even wish you harm? How do you find that in your heart to love them?

[00:24:55.550]
Kai: Well, for me, it is a process. I think it’s a two step process. I think I’m quoting this from like, Tibetan Buddhism, actually. But the loving kindness practice is starting with ourselves. We have to start by loving ourselves. I think if we try to love a perpetrator or someone who is hateful or harmful toward us without loving ourselves, we end up getting into this weird, fau nning, toxic dynamic. We have to start with ourselves. There’s so much for me, I’m sure for everyone on the planet, but for trans women, we’re always taught not to love ourselves. I think all women are being taught not to love ourselves in a lot of ways. I have to start there. What have I been told about myself? That I’m a monster, that I’m the predator, that I shouldn’t be around children, and my career has been at work with children. All that stuff. I just have to really be with all the wounding that’s there from that and breathe some love and compassion into that. Then the second step is looking at the other person. Once we’ve loved ourself or it, I think it’s easier to look at the other person and see that they are, as you said, coming from a wounded place.

[00:26:06.690]
Kai: The unfortunate thing about discrimination or bigotry or prejudice is the wounded place in there also has such an intense element of fear. Fear makes us behave in small minded ways. I don’t actually think it’s the emotion of anger or hatred that drives us to human rights abuses. It is fear. Absolutely.

[00:26:29.980]
Marcia: Absolutely.

[00:26:31.640]
Kai: Great.

[00:26:33.600]
Kai: Am I just spitballing here? Yeah, I’m glad to get me. I can empathize with fear because I have been really afraid. I’m really scared of transphobia actually. I’m like, right, that’s what that other person is feeling on the other side. That allows me to come from a more loving place, to know that they are feeling fear, even if what they’re doing with it is violent.

[00:27:03.310]
Kai: This is Dr. Marcia Sirota. Thank you for listening. Please leave a review and your comments wherever you listen to podcasts. And don’t forget to sign up for my free newsletter at marciasirotamd.com, where you’ll learn about upcoming online events as well. Also, we love getting referrals from our listeners about future podcast guests, so please email us at info@marciasirotamdcom.