Satisfaction Middle San Antonio is responding to an uptick in demand for counseling companies as President Donald Trump and Texas elected officers intensify their assaults on the LGBTQ+ group, officers advised the Present this week.
“This yr we’ve already supplied 800 hours of free counseling,” Satisfaction Middle Board Director Cristian Sanchez stated. “We’ve seen an elevated want for our companies, and that simply comes from adjustments in regulation and coverage and adjustments in discussions concerning trans folks and different LGBTQ those who create extra exclusion, discrimination and stigma.”
Because the worry builds for San Antonio’s LGBTQ+ residents, particularly those that determine as transgender, the Satisfaction Middle is increasing its programming by providing free, one-off, one-hour counseling periods.
“I’m telling you there are extra individuals who want free counseling,” Sanchez stated. “Individuals who have psychological well being crises — their psychological well being has slipped.”
The expanded counseling companies arrive because the LGBTQ+ group braces for much more assaults from right-wing political figures. Final week, unbiased journalist Ken Klippenstein reported in a Substack submit that the FBI is seeking to categorize all transgender people as terrorists.
“On the subject of the FBI labeling trans folks as terrorists, it’s clearly ridiculous, stigmatizing and never supported by proof,” Sanchez stated. “I don’t know the place that’s, the place that’s going and the way that can virtually impact folks. However, I do know issues like the toilet invoice are going to have an effect on our group very virtually.”
Certainly, over the last legislative session, Texas GOP lawmakers handed a slew of anti-LBGTQ+ laws, together with the Senate Invoice 8, which restricts transgender folks’s capacity to make use of restrooms in state-owned buildings. Home Invoice 229 strips away gender identities aside from the one assigned at delivery on authorized authorities paperwork.
The Satisfaction Middle’s new counseling companies might be supplied by interns within the means of incomes their masters’ levels in social work, Sanchez stated.
It’s not that the Satisfaction Middle doesn’t wish to pay licensed counselors, Sanchez stated. Nonetheless, the group is without doubt one of the many who’s misplaced funds amid Trump’s drastic federal finances cuts.
Sanchez stated the Satisfaction Middle is actively making use of for personal grants, however there’s simply not sufficient cash to go round.
“We’re getting rejections saying, ‘We love what you’re doing, we wish to assist it, however we simply have too many functions,’” Sanchez stated.
Nonetheless, the Satisfaction stay defiant, and below new management added final yr, they’re wanting to proceed their work, he added.
The San Antonio Satisfaction Middle, positioned at 1303 McCullough Ave., is open noon-6 p.m. Tuesday via Thursday and noon-8 p.m. on Mondays.
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