Please let me know if I misunderstood the question, but the first part was on the idea of hypermasculinity and how that impacts veterans in transition and their service.
As I mentioned, one of the things we noticed was that the more strongly a person adopts an unrealistic idea of hypermasculinity, the more rigid their belief system becomes and the greater the barriers to accessing help they create in front of themselves. Accessing help often leads us to take an approach whereby we admit to ourselves that we're injured, we need help and we need assistance. That's an extremely brave and difficult thing to do.
A lot of participants who have gone through the VTP often say it's the hardest thing they've ever done. Harder than any course, pathfinder or service they've done is sharing what they've gone through, because it makes them so vulnerable. They've expressed that nowhere in their training leading up to that was it something they were taught. Often in their education, as a student in elementary school or high school, there was not necessarily a course on emotions and how we process trauma, so adopting hypermasculinity in that role and being very rigid are very difficult.
That is a focus for me, and the lens I take to counselling is a feminist lens. That means we explore social gender roles and how those shape someone's path in their career and even in accessing help. Where do they go to access help based on the social gender norm they adopt? That's something very close to me in my current practice and in my interests.
The second part of your question, ma'am, was on female participants. We had a female participant who was a non-veteran, and she worked closely with the families and some female veterans to try to weave in those elements of the story. She was doing a doctorate in psychological counselling at the time, and she was able to provide that voice. Nowhere in our discussions following the play did we feel that the female veterans or witnesses in the room felt any barrier to approaching us. We didn't notice any barrier.