2027 Conference Theme

Weaving Lineage: Sixty Years of Pedagogy, Pleasure, and Practice

AASECT traces its founding to 1967, which makes 2027 our sixtieth-anniversary conference.

The theme puts four questions to the membership: Where did our knowledge come from? Who carried it, including those the literature never credited? What did we get wrong, and what did it teach us? And what are we handing to the professionals who will hold this work for the next sixty years?

Weaving is present tense on purpose because labor is still underway, threads from different traditions worked into a fabric that has to bear weight. A weave also shows its repairs, which gives us honest language for the parts of our history that needed correcting. Lineage names an inheritance and an obligation at once, and is broad enough to include the community traditions and the practitioners of different cultures, languages, theoretical approaches, and disciplines whose contributions shaped this work.

Why this theme, and why now

The anniversary is a milestone.

A lineage theme gives us both the momentum to capture and honor those that came before us.

With sexuality education, gender-affirming care, and sexuality research under sustained scrutiny, a documented professional and evidentiary lineage answers the charge that this field is improvised with six decades of standards, training, supervision, and peer review behind it.

Educators tend to enter through pedagogy and therapists through practice, while counselors work the ground between them. Pleasure is the common thread, and where all three meet.

Weaving leaves presents the work as ongoing, lineage also implies legacy for what is to come next.