Join us for an online discussion next Wednesday November 23, 2022 from 3 pm till 4.30 pm (CET) (pre-registration latest Tuesday November 22 here)

Organised by SEXDEM in collaboration with LEGS research team

On the initiative of Anambar Aditya Chaudhury, for this third online SEXDEM event, we have invited Amrita Sarkar and Reubs Walsh to talk about their activist, research, artistic and scholarly activities. Amrita Sarkar has been working for transgender community for more than two decades in India and transnationally, counselling, making films and working in capacity building initiatives among other things. Reubs Walsh is a researcher and trans activist whose ongoing research in cognitive neuroscience deals with transgender health. Both are part of TPATH (Transgender Professional Association for Transgender Health) and will talk to us about their ongoing projects.

Speakers: Amrita Sarkar and Reubs Walsh

Organizers: Anambar Aditya Chaudhury (PhD student LEGS) and Heta Rundgren (postdoctoral researcher SEXDEM and LEGS)

Don’t forget to register 22 November latest by filling out this short form. We will share the zoom link the day before the event with registered participants.

Here’s how our guests describe their work:

Amrita Sarkar

Amrita Sarkar has working for the LGBTIQ+ community and especially for the transgender community for more than two decades and has been involved in numerous capacity building initiatives for the transgender communities at the national and international level. She is one of the founding members and the Secretary of IRGT – A Global Network of Trans Women and HIV. She is a member of TPATH (Transgender Professional Association for Transgender Health), IPATH and a Faculty Member of WPATH (World Professionals Association for Transgender Health). She is a part of the Transgender Technical Working Group, formed by the National AIDS Control Organisation. Amrita is currently working as the Advisor: Transgender Wellbeing and Advocacy, at Alliance India, Delhi.

In India, she led various programmes designed for the transgender community. One of them was to help build the capacity of trans-led organisations, which was supported by SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) and was India’s first national level trans capacity building programme. She has been a part of the core working group formed by the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), India to design trans specific intervention programmes under NACP IV and V (National AIDS Control Programme – Phase IV and V).From time to time, she was involved in spreading awareness around the individuals identified with non-binary sexuality and gender identify through educational institutes, corporates etc.

She has also made three films on transgender issues. She is a trained counsellor and has completed her post-graduation in social welfare. She has received an Honorary PhD for her work for the transgender community members.

Reubs Walsh

Reubs J Walsh is a founding member of TPATH (the transgender professionals association for transgender health), a trustee of GIRES (the gender identity research and education society), and a junior fellow and the press officer for CATS (the center for applied trans studies).

They are presently a PhD candidate in clinical, neuro- and developmental psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where they have been studying role of the social environment and social-cognitive development in mental health risk, mostly in a community sample of adolescents as part of the #SOCONNeCT project, in which they’ve focussed on how personal and social identity interact with cognitions, behaviours and the social environment to determine mental health outcomes, using sociometric, behavioural and dynamic-systems methodologies alongside self-report psychometrics. They've also been investigating how these processes differ in autistic and trans people, and how those differences might arise. They hope that by examining these social processes from a cognitive neuroscience perspective we will be able to develop stronger theoretical frameworks that can integrate across bioreductionist, (computational) cognitive, and social levels of analysis.

They also enjoy their many collaborative relationships which allow them to work on projects investigating such diverse topics as the neuropsychology of political conflict, the neuroendocrinology of adolescent self-other distinction, and transgender mental and physical health.

They plan to complete their postdoctoral studies at the Einstein lab in the University of Toronto, where they will investigate the contributions of various biological and biopsychosocial processes related to gender/sex to the healthy ageing of brains, using a gender-diverse sample and a mixture of qualitative, behavioural, biomedical and (principally) multimodal neuroimaging methods to begin to disentangle these effects. They hope to be able to shed some light on the role of social and biological correlates of gender in cognitive ageing, dementia, and emotional brain-health in older adults, as well as opportunities for improvements in trans-specific healthcare, especially in older adults.