TITLE: Sex, Intimacy, & Adoption

DESCRIPTION:

This We the Experts panel features adoptees exploring how adoption-related experiences, early relational disruption, and trauma can impact intimacy, attachment, and sexual well-being. Panelists will share how intimacy and adoption show up in their lives and relationships, including challenges around trust, vulnerability, boundaries, and self-connection. Through open dialogue, they’ll offer insight into pathways toward understanding, healing, and more embodied connection; moving conversations about intimacy away from shame and into critical thought grounded in compassion.

Points to Ponder:

How do attachment and trauma shape our experiences of intimacy?
What emotions centered on sex and intimacy may go unnamed or misunderstood within adoption narratives?
How do trust, loss, or attachment intersect with sex and relationships?
How does “healthy intimacy” look different for each person or relationship?

PANELISTS:

Anna Linde (she/her)

Anna Linde is a transracial adoptee from Brazil who was raised in Sweden and now lives in Thailand. She came to Sweden at six weeks old and grew up as an only child. Anna works as a sexologist (MSc) and counselor, focusing on the intersection of somatic healing and sexual liberation, work that is deeply informed by her own personal journey. She writes academic articles and publishes her own research, as well as ebooks and blogposts, all centering the intersection of mental and sexual health. She has lived in four different countries. Anna wants to join this panel to share how the lived adoptee experience, from a sexual health point of view, can shape and contribute to nuanced, embodied conversations about adoption, identity and wellbeing.

Dr. K E Garland (she/her)

Dr. Katherin Elizabeth (K E) Garland is a same-race, domestic adoptee, co-founder of Black Adoptees Meetup, and Adoption Knowledge Affiliates board member. She is also an independent scholar and award-winning creative nonfiction writer and blogger. Garland uses her lived experience as a Black woman, as well as storytelling strategies to demarginalize social issues. To this end, her essays have been published in several anthologies and online magazines.

Garland's debut memoir, In Search of a Salve: Memoir of a Sex Addict, illustrates how unresolved, interrelated trauma, including adoption, can lead to a behavioral addiction. Her book was long listed for the 2023 Santa Fe Writers Project.

She hopes to live in a world where truth liberates us, one word at a time.

Stephanie Fraser (she/her) Stephanie Fraser is a transracial adoptee born in India and adopted in 1977 from Mother Teresa orphanage. Raised in a white Catholic family alongside eight siblings — the only Indian child in her home. Stephanie grew up navigating identity, belonging without fully understanding the pieces of herself that were missing. She didn't realize until later in life that her love, trust, and intimacy issues were directly impacted by being adopted. Stephanie hopes to help others learn this earlier. For decades, she focused on building her life and career. Becoming a mother of two and creating a family of her own. It wasn’t until she became an empty nester that the quiet questions about her origins grew louder. Now, with her children grown, she finally has the space and courage to search for answers.

At the end of this year, Stephanie and 3 other Indian adoptees will return to India, standing together on the steps of the orphanage where their lives began. Their journey is one of reclamation — seeking truth, connection, and fragments of identity long buried by time and silence. Stephanie also hopes to advocate for change: reforming Indian adoption laws to allow adoptees greater access to their records, and providing free DNA kits to Indians who wish to search for biological family. Follow her journey on Instagram: @MaidenIndiaFilm

Meredith Ebersole (she/her)

Meredith is a closed, same-race domestic adoptee who grew up in a Mennonite community in the Midwest. She has experience working in sexual health and is passionate about the sex positivity and destigmatization movement, drawn to spaces that take curiosity seriously and refuse to let shame have the final word. She is currently a graduate student working towards a Master of Science in art therapy, where her work explores the intersections of embodiment, relational trauma, and reclamation. Meredith comes to this panel with a lot of lived experience and a deep belief in the power of wonder and agency. She is honored to be in the room and looks forward to the conversation.

Mee Ok Icaro (she/her)

Mee Ok Icaro is an LGBT Korean transracial adoptee. Adopted at 14 months old into a white evangelical family, she has spent decades navigating the intersecting losses of cultural identity, spiritual rupture, and sexual trauma. She is a plant medicine facilitator and co-founder of Inin Nete Sacred Plant Medicine Healing Center in Peru, where she has been apprenticing under Shipibo healers in the Peruvian Amazon for more than a decade. An award-winning writer published in the LA Times, Michael Pollan's anthology "Trips Worth Telling" and featured in Gabor Maté's New York Times bestseller The Myth of Normal and the Netflix docuseries [Un]Well, she has also completed a manuscript chronicling her healing journey through plant medicine. Mee Ok is honored to join this panel to speak to the role of chosen celibacy in healing sexual trauma through indigenous lineage-based practices, and to center the voices of adoptees whose paths to somatic and relational healing fall outside the conventional frameworks that manufactured the adoption industry.