Presented at University of Staffordshire on 21 March 2026

The poems

The Naked Truth – my entry into my research

Unconditional Possible Girl – my creative synthesis

Say it anyway – who I am in relation to my work

Transcript for my lecture

My name is Lynne Jones. I’m a psychotherapist, and my work focuses on sex, identity, and relationships. I believe that if research doesn’t break your heart, it isn’t worth doing—so I invite you to brace yourselves as I condense a year of research, and a lifetime of experience, into a ten-minute presentation.

Thank you for inviting me to share research that sits at the intersection of two marginalised and often stigmatised identities – kink and transgender.

I am proud to introduce – a heuristic inquiry into becoming a kink-aware therapist working with transgender and gender-diverse clients. If you’d like to explore it further see the abstract or ask for the full dissertation.

Using interviews, journals, and poetry drawn from lived experience, I explore how deeply personal narratives can reveal more universal truths-and how poetry can open those reflections to wider audiences. Today, you are that audience.

At the start of 2025, the global sociopolitical climate around transgender identities shifted dramatically and the Executive Order – claiming to defend women from the radicalisation gender ideology set the context for my reflexivity. I chose critical realism as a research paradigm to better account for such systems of oppression shaping gender and sexuality

Ethically, I want to situate myself in this work. I am a cisgender woman. I am bisexual, and I’m part of a male-presenting BDSM/leather community, where I identify as a Leatherman. I am pictured in the slide with people from the Human Pup community – people who take on the persona of dogs. It was the realisation of my blind spots towards this community that was my entry point into the research and this is captured in the poem The Naked Truth.

My research culminated in the creative synthesis poem, Unconditional Possible Girl – a phrase that came to hold deep meaning for me.

I have continued to build on this research which has become a book of poetry and a 30-minute spoken word show that I will perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer under the name The Naked Truth.

My favourite poem from the research is Say It Anyway, a poem that highlights who I am in relation to this research. I’d like to leave you with this today.