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PARENTING HEALTH & WELLNESS
Our Children | Winter 2021
The transformative power of music How music therapy is helping trans and non-binary youth find their voices By Jill Chappell
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n innovative mental health program is connecting 2SLGBTQIA+ youth with their authentic voices. Funded by the Mental Health Foundation of Nova Scotia, Trans-Formative Voices is a program that treats gender dysphoria by providing voice and music therapy to transgender and non-binary youth. “A lot of our work is centered around coming into your voice and the identity of your voice and who we are as people,” says MacKenzie Costron, founder of Find Your Voice Music Therapy. “For the transgender and non-binary community on their journey of transitioning, when their voice, speaking or singing, doesn’t connect to who they feel they are as a human, that can be very unsettling.” Find Your Voice Music Therapy is currently running its first youth cohort of Trans-Formative Voices for teens aged 13 to 17. The eight-week program includes six private and two group sessions, operating under a pay-what-you- can model. Teenage participants don’t need to wait until after puberty to participate, either. In fact, learning the skills and techniques to find a gender-
affirming voice before puberty can help ease that transition “When you’re a transitioning, transgender individual, you want everybody to see you as you see you, and there’s a lot more to that than putting together a new wardrobe,” says Aimee Copping, a recent participant in the program. “You find yourself having to take on new ways of walking, new ways of feeling, new ways even of interacting with other people and it can all get a bit overwhelming.” The distress someone feels when their birth sex doesn’t align with their gender identity is known as gender dysphoria. In recent years, the number of Canadian adolescents reporting dysphoria has soared. The jump is believed to be a reflection of a demand for services that has long gone unmet due to stigma. A survey released by Statistics Canada this summer shows transgender Canadians are more likely than their cis peers (people who identify as the sex they were born with) to have seriously contemplated suicide and been diagnosed with a mood or anxiety disorder.
