Hi! My name is Christina Tesoro.
I’m a writer, therapist, and holistic sex educator, and I’m so glad you’re here. Starting with a new therapist – whether it’s your first time in therapy, or you’re returning after some time away – is a big deal, and a vulnerable, courageous step of self-care and self-love toward healing. Here’s some information about me to help you assess whether you think we’d be a good fit for working together.
My journey to becoming a therapist started in 2015, when I began working with queer and trans youth at the Ali Forney Center, and with adolescent survivors as the Rape Crisis Health Educator at Mount Sinai’s Adolescent Health Center. From there, I started studying at the Institute for Sexuality Education and Enlightenment, with a focus on supporting queer, trans, and gender expansive people in all relationship styles (monogamous, ethically/consciously non-monogamous, polyamorous, relationship anarchists, and everything in-between) to create more liberated, authentic, values-aligned, and pleasure-filled lives.
While pursuing my Master of Social Work, I served as a fellow within the Sex Worker Giving Circle, a historic cross-class, multi-racial, intergenerational giving circle and fundraising initiative by and for sex workers and hosted by Third Wave Fund (Spring 2018 & 2020). I graduated from the Silberman School of Social Work in 2019, having served my second-year internship at the Institute for Human Identity, one of the oldest psychotherapy group practices in New York City specifically created to offer queer and gender affirming therapy for LGBTQ+ individuals, couples, and polycules.
Noticing a glaring absence of representation of sex workers and their health and mental health care needs within my social work program, my thesis project was titled Death to Whorephobia: Creating Sex Worker Cultural Competency in Social Work Practice and involved interviewing 40 current and former sex workers across the United States about their experiences with psychotherapy and mental health care, and devised competency practices in their own words. In 2020, I adapted Death to Whorephobia into an eBook, which has been included on the syllabus for human sexuality courses at the University of Virginia, where I have been a guest speaker, since 2021.
In 2020, I also co-edited Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex, an anthology by and for sex workers, under my pen and stage name, Janis Luna (for whom my practice is named). My writing has also been featured in numerous sexuality anthologies, including The Edge of Sex: Navigating a Sexually Confusing Culture from the Margins, The People’s Book of Human Sexuality: Expanding the Sexology Archive, and the upcoming Bisexuality Beyond Binaries: Celebrating Multiple Bisexual Identities in a World of Erasure, set to be released in late 2024. You can also find me on Autostraddle (as Christina and as Janis), Catapult, PS Mag, and Medium, among other places scattered around the Internet.
As a therapist, I have had the incredible good fortune to be supervised by Lissy Navantu, LCSW, and Dee Dee Goldpaugh, LCSW, with whom I have given the space and support to delve deeply into relational therapy, somatic therapy, and psychedelic integration work. In 2024, I also completed certification in Family Constellations work under the guidance and mentorship of Luisa Muhr. In the summer of 2024, I passed my LCSW exam, and am forever grateful for the trust, support, and wisdom of my teachers.
Finally, in addition to my institutional training, I consider myself to be deeply and ongoingly community-made. To that end, no account of my education in the healing arts would be complete without me naming with awe and reverence the queer femme sex workers, single mothers, birth and death doulas, grief workers, and two-spirit warrior activists and healers who have held me in community, and deepened my work with their wisdom, wit, curiosity, and outstanding courage to create lives of beauty, joy, resilience, resistance, and pleasure.