Course to assist with 'Representing Transgender and Non-Binary Clients'

The National Association for Public Defense (NAPD) will conduct an online course on “Representing Transgender and Non-Binary Clients: A Skills-Based Approach” Fridays, June 9-July 14, from 1 to 2:30 p.m.

This course will help participants gain hands-on experience with key skills that will help to have deeper, more comfortable and more client-centered conversations with transgender or non-binary clients. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in a small group learning session that will help turn the skills heard about during video lectures into practice.

Leading the course will be Connor Barusch, a transgender public defender and public defender trainer in Massachusetts. Barusch developed this course using the decade of experience he has as a public defender working with his own clients as well as consulting with other public defenders in Massachusetts and throughout the country with questions about working with trans and non-binary clients and witnesses and work as a trans activist and trainer since 2003.

The target audience for the course includes public defenders, social workers, investigators, paralegals, or anyone in a public defender office who works with clients.

Learning objectives include:

• Participants will be familiar with basic terminology and concepts relating to sexual orientation and gender identity.

• Participants will be able to ask their clients what name and pronouns they would like to use in various situations. Participants will have tried asking at least three people they encounter in their lives outside the training who they do not already know to be trans what pronouns to use for them and will have decreased their anxiety over pronoun use.

• Participants will be familiar with common barriers faced by trans and non-binary clients in the criminal legal system.

• Participants will be able to demonstrate and explain at multiple client-centered strategies for addressing disrespect to a transgender person when practicing in a small group.

• Participants will understand how to balance confidentiality and disclosure when working with transgender clients.

• Participants will able to identify and implement verbal and non-verbal signals that they are open and affirming toward trans, non-binary and LGBTQ clients.

• Participants will know what to do when they mistakenly misgender a client, colleague, or friend.

• Participants will be able to identify (and hopefully advocate for) at least one way their office could change in order to be more welcoming to trans or non-binary and LGBTQ clients.

• Participants will have an introductory ability to incorporate transgender and non-binary issues into storytelling related to a client, witness or other person such as a mitigation argument, closing argument, motion argument, or other.

This course will last six weeks. Each week will involve:

• Some course videos and reading to be done at attendees’ convenience (1 hour)

• Participate in course online forum (30 minutes)

• Live instruction and small groups (90 minutes)

• During the last week, there will be less video content to review but participants will need to spend approximately 2 hours working on a project or workshopping a case to prepare for the small group session.

Cost for the weekly online course is $400 per individual. To register, visit www.publicdefenders.us and click on “events.” Anyone with questions may email Talen Francis at events@publicdefenders.us.