Positionality & Personal Details

I’m a conditionally white, trans masculine, gender defiant, bi queer, neurodivergent (AuDHD), mad, disabled, polyamorous, kinky, pagan, Italian immigrant (with recent citizenship privilege) in my 50s. I live with my two nesting partners, Root and Michael, our adult daughter and her boyfriend, our youngest child, and one dog (Sirius) and three grandkitties (Puffin, Aurora, and Jellieroll). When I am not working, writing, parenting, or organizing, I can be found reading, sitting by the lake, crafting, watching TV and movies, making music, reading tarot, cooking, dancing, doing ritual, and hanging out with my household.

Current Work & Passion

I love collaborating with others in service to the vision of a more liberated world for all of us. This has taken many forms over the years. Most recently, I let go of being involved in the thriving practice of mostly trans, nonbinary, gender expansive and queer providers I had co-founded back in 2016. This has enabled me to focus on my health, due to diminished capacity, and to dream into what is next for me. I am currently nurturing my solo practice, Transforming Perspectives, which offers consultation, clinical supervision, short-term therapeutic services, including marathon relational therapy, as well as training and speaking services. I am also starting a brick and mortar space where I live to offer goods, services, and education about sexuality and spirituality. I hope that this space, Pleasure & Belonging, will also be a third space for trans, queer, and disabled folks especially within my local community.

Over the years, I have also been engaged in my communities as a volunteer in a number of ways, including serving on professional Boards as well as community-based non-profit Boards. I am Past President for the Minnesota Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (MAMFT) and Past Chair of the Trans and Queer interest network of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). I am currently Board Chair for a New York-based arts and education non-profit, I Giullari di Piazza, and I am one of the co-founders of Glittermoss, an emergent collective of local, interdisciplinary, and multimodal, trans and queer healers.

While I strive to work fewer hours to honor the needs of my bodymind, my AuDHD loves engagement so I am always a little bit too busy, but somatic and spiritual ancestral practices help me stay as present as possible. As I figure out some sort of balance in my life during this transition from academic to group practice to solopreneur, I also hope to have more time to write the numerous books, zines, and poems that are constantly flowing through my bodymind and to keep sharing some of my thoughts through podcasts, videos, and social media.

Training & Professional Background

My training and professional backgrounds reflect my main special interest, that is humans and all the ways in which we connect with ourselves and one another! My first degree is in Linguistics and was completed in 1993 in Rome, Italy, at the Universita’ degli Studi Roma Tre. I also studied two years of Religious Studies at the Gregoriana University in Rome but did not complete any degrees there. In 1994, I achieved a Postgraduate diploma in Deaf Studies and Sign Language Communication from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, where I first moved with a 6-months long scholarship from the European Union in 1993.

After working for a non-profit focusing on Deaf people and technology, I was fortunate enough to be awarded a full teaching scholarship also at the University of Reading to complete a PhD in 1999 in what would now be called Gender Studies. My focus was on the intersection of Disability, Gender, and Education, but I also gained invaluable experience teaching in Higher Education during this time, especially around areas of health inequities and gender. After some time teaching mostly non-traditional students in Higher Education, I chose to become a therapist and completed my Master of Sciences in Systemic Therapy at the University of Bedfordshire (UK) in 2006.

When I moved to the so-called United States in 2008, I completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota. I am also trained (but not certified) in Dance and Movement Therapy, alongside being certified in Narrative Therapy, Sex Therapy, and Somatic ExperiencingⓇ. I am a Clinical Fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) as well as being an Approved Supervisor and Supervisor Mentor for both family therapy and sex therapy, and WPATH certified gender specialist and mental health mentor. I have published several books, chapter contributions to edited books and anthologies, and peer-reviewed papers on gender, disability, Deaf education, sexuality, spirituality, relationships, mental health, and HIV. I have also been a Principal Investigator for the National Institutes of Health.

Over the years I have worked in a broad range of therapeutic services, including within schools, at home, in larger health services contexts and in private practice. I have also trained, spoken, and presented to audiences in North America, Australia, Africa, and throughout Europe, as well as online.

Influences & foundations of my work

All my work is rooted in liberation approaches across theology, pedagogy, mental health, philosophy, and public health. My work and approach is interdisciplinary in nature and is deeply influenced by decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, and womanist thinking. Much of what I know, I have learned from Indigenous, Black, Brown, Immigrant, Trans, Deaf, and Disabled scholars, community organizers, philosophers, writers, and artists. I am grateful to have been brought up with ancestral practices and a sense of belonging to place, language, and culture even though I chose to emigrate due to a combination of class status, socioeconomic reasons, lack of opportunities, and being who I am at a time when it seemed impossible to be authentically myself where I grew up. I believe that healing cannot occur in isolation or within the mind alone since we are embodied, relational beings and I practice accordingly.

To learn more you can visit:

Website: www.alexiantaffi.com
Books: https://bookshop.org/shop/xtaffi
Instagram: @xtaffi and @genderstories
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iantaffi/
Monthly Newsletter: https://alex-iantaffi.myflodesk.com/subscribe
Podcast: https://genderstories.buzzsprout.com/ (or anywhere you listen to podcasts!)
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TransformingPerspectives