Seal Dwyer is building community and healing trauma in the St. Cloud area

HOST: In celebration of LGBTQ Pride Month throughout June, MPR News is featuring stories about transgender and non-binary Minnesotans making an impact. Today, we are going to hear from Seal Dwyer, a non-binary licensed marriage and family therapist from Saint Cloud, who focuses on helping people heal from trauma that can impact their every-- every part of their lives. Dwyer is a passionate advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, especially young people.

She's helping to start a queer community center in Downtown Saint Cloud to provide a safe space and resources. Dwyer ran for Saint Cloud City Council in 2022. She also teaches dance and yoga classes that focus on body positivity. Here's her conversation with MPR reporter Kirsti Marohn.

KIRSTI MAROHN: Tell me a little bit about your background. Are you from Saint Cloud originally?

SEAL DWYER: Yep, I was born and raised in Saint Cloud. I'm actually fifth-generation Stearns County, which is both good and bad. I love Saint Cloud. And Saint Cloud has a huge queer community. A lot of people like to say nasty things about Saint Cloud, but it's a cool town.

And there's a lot of history and a lot of just wonderful diversity. Saint Cloud, over the entire history of the town, has been having hard conversations on race and gender and all of those things since the very beginning. And so I think that's just a neat history and that we're continuing to have these conversations today.

KIRSTI MAROHN: And a lot of your work has focused on trauma therapy. Can you talk about what that is and why you feel that's important?

SEAL DWYER: So trauma is, I think, the epidemic that's driving all the other epidemics we're concerned about. I define it as an overwhelming experience. And the reason that is the only definition I use is because what is overwhelming to a five-year-old is different than what's overwhelming to a 35-year-old, and what is overwhelming to someone with resources is different than what's overwhelming to someone without resources.

When we as a society and when individual people have a lot of trauma, it impacts absolutely every part of our daily lives. It impacts relationships, our ability to work. It impacts our ability to connect with other humans. It

Causes addiction. It causes all sorts of physical ailments and long-term conditions. And so if we can deal with the trauma, we stop cycles that are generations long.

KIRSTI MAROHN: You've done a lot of advocacy work too with the LGBTQ+ community, and especially young people and teens. How do you see those two intersecting?

SEAL DWYER: Back when I was in grad school, one of my first professors said that therapists aren't supposed to be, political that our offices should be welcoming to all, that we need to make ourselves as bland as possible, and I just disagreed. If I make my office bland, I make cis white people comfortable. I don't make queer people comfortable. I don't make POC comfortable.

This is something where the norm is the people with the privilege. They don't need help. They got the privilege already.

My body is a political body. My undergrad degree was in women's studies. It's impossible to exist in a queer body in our society and not be politicized.

It's impossible to exist in a fat body in our society and not be politicized, to exist in AFAB body and not be politicized. There are so many intersections of identity where my body is political. And why would I not use that to help everybody else?

I have no problem being big and loud if it lets other people hide in the shadow behind me and feel safer. That's fine. I'm cool with that.

It's impossible to exist as a queer person and as a trans or non-binary person and not feel the hate in our country right now. So many of my people of all ages are experiencing PTSD symptoms just based on the political environment. People are having nightmares.

People are having flashbacks. People are putting together exit strategies to get out of the country. I would not be helping them fully if I wasn't helping them be safer in our political environment.

KIRSTI MAROHN: You focus a lot on body positivity too. Why is that important? And talk about your work teaching dance and yoga.

SEAL DWYER: So I've never been a small-bodied person, ever. I was a fat child. My mother used to joke that she put me on my first diet when I was four months old, which is a whole-- lots of childhood drama.

But I've never existed in a small body. And fatness is one of the still completely accepted places where people can abuse, bully, and be discriminatory. And so my journey to take back my body from the diet culture of my childhood and develop a relationship in a friendship with my body-- because it's the only one I've got.

I get to live here. And I should be able to exist in my body comfortably and at least have a working relationship. Some days, we're not friends. Some days, we're arguing with each other. But me and my buddy get along now.

And I used yoga as my way to give back to my body. Yoga literally means to yog. It means to connect mind, body, and spirit. That is what the Sanskrit word means. It's bringing the mind and the body back together.

I'd been in many, many yoga classes, and I'd never seen a teacher that looked like me. Small-bodied people teach yoga all the time, but they don't have flesh to get in the way. So they can show a pose, and I can be like, I physically can't do that pose.

And so in my journey through yoga and through dance and through burlesque and through all of these ways of showing up in my body, I was able to create the representation that I had needed that wasn't there. So then other people could come to my classes and be like, oh, I'm awkward, or I can't do this pose, or I feel really unsure in this silent environment.

My classes are not silent. We sing along to Grateful Dead and the Rainbow Connection. And we're chilling out and goofing off. And it's the most glorious display of community and just a bunch of people who hang out together and care about each other and are all in this journey together. And so in creating a safe space for myself, I created a safe space for other people.

KIRSTI MAROHN: You use that word community a lot. How do you describe it?

SEAL DWYER: Community is an active word, like love. It's a word that you have to show up. You have to have hard conversations.

You have to contribute. You have to allow yourself to be supported when you need it. And it's hard.

We live in a very individualistic culture. And we are not taught how important community is, and then we're all starved for it. And then we all went and spent three years in our homes and didn't talk to anybody and didn't get touched by anybody.

And so humans are a communal species. We absolutely need each other. Half of the people that I work with as clients are just starved for community.

They're isolated. They're alone. They don't feel safe. They don't feel like anybody sees them, especially when they're queer folks. And their families rejected them or their family--

Finding places where people have space where when they go there they're welcomed is everything. Watching someone walk into a space and be like, I'm having a bad day, and have three people come up and give them a hug is everything. That will turn that day right around. And so when we create community for the people who never had community, we change the world.

KIRSTI MAROHN: And is there something you would like people to know about trans or non-binary people?

SEAL DWYER: It comes down to something really simple. We just want to live. We're not trying to force hormones on people who don't want hormones.

We're not trying to mutilate children. We're not pedophiles. We're not any of the things that are being talked about.

Gender-affirming care reduces suicidality by 73%. So if you want to save the children, giving them the medical care that they need literally saves them. Calling somebody by the proper pronouns and by their name literally saves lives.

And whether you agree with it or not doesn't actually matter. Just doing it is all that matters. Just let us exist.

The process to get medical care to get mental health-- I have a nine-month wait list. The process to get the care is so long and so arduous, and folks are fighting for years for this. This is not some flippant decision.

Folks are working so hard for so long to get the care that they need so they feel comfortable in their bodies. It's not easy. It's not simple.

So like how we said about same sex marriage, if you're against it, don't have one, if you're against gender affirming care, don't get it. It's fine. Just let us have it if we need it.

KIRSTI MAROHN: Talk about that queer community center that you mentioned. What's your vision for that?

SEAL DWYER: My practice is growing, and we needed a new space. And because I blend my dance and movement classes with the therapy space, I was like, all right. And I've got a whole crew of like-minded folks who are like, we got to do this.

And there's community that's been building around the dance and yoga classes, and it's been building around all of this. And so when I started looking for a new space for my practice, I was like, OK, we're going to include this. And we actually formed a non-profit.

We're called the Rainbow Wellness Collective. And it's a group of a bunch of small businesses and organizations. My practice will be there, but then other organizations, such as Queerspace Collective is talking to us about joining and hanging out. St. Cloud Pride is talking about hanging out, some of the drag troupes.

Creating a space where there's couches and key rings and people can just chill out and feel safe, but also we're going to have a food pantry. And we're going to have a clothing exchange. And we're going to have a little library.

And our receptionist is going to have case management skills. And so they can hand out resources and referrals and stuff like that because, again, we need a place that's safe, that understands, that is able to be the connection. And so we wanted a visible presence.

We wanted to be Downtown. The visibility was important. People need to see that we're here.

So we wanted this visible presence. We wanted a safe place. We wanted a place that was accessible.

We've been working on creating that. We found a space. We'll be moving in this fall. Super excited.

And watching all of this grow and the excitement in the community, I have a feeling we're going to outgrow it quickly.

HOST: That was marriage and family therapist Seal Dwyer of Saint Cloud speaking with MPR's Kirsti Marohn. MPR's ChangeMakers series runs throughout the month, and it has included such fantastic conversations, with more to come. So you can read those conversations, you can see portraits at MPRNews.org/ChangeMaker.