Gender Identity & Trans-Affirming Care
Transgender and gender-diverse clients face unique challenges, from navigating identity development to managing societal hostility and discrimination. As political attacks on trans rights intensify, creating affirming therapeutic spaces has never been more critical. Gender-affirming care requires therapists to understand the difference between supporting exploration and imposing gatekeeping, while helping clients and families navigate complex medical, social, and emotional terrain. These articles explore gender-affirmative therapeutic practice, insights for supporting parents, and how to encourage "gender-pleasure."
Healing Oppression-Based Trauma
How Discrimination & Chronic Stress Impact the Body
The Transgender Community in Crisis
Confronting the Political Erasure of Trans and Nonbinary Identities
His generation of kids almost had to be gender- and sexuality-questioning to be cool, right? Maybe he was just mirroring what was happening around him. Read more
When politicians decide what gender-affirming care should look like, what happens to the mental health of our trans, nonbinary, and gender fluid youth? Read more
Data from recent Pew Center, The Washington Post, the Williams Institute, and Gallup surveys shows the current state of transgender children in the U.S. Read more
An Iranian-American therapist speaks to how the mix of grief, anger, and a new insistence on change in her former homeland, could be affecting clients. Read more
For trans folks, attuning to gender-pleasure allows them to resist harmful cultural scripts—but it can be a radical act of resistance for cis folks too. Read more
As young people move forward with new, more flexible frameworks for thinking about gender, it’s not always easy to bring parents along. Read more
Supporting transgender children doesn’t always mean rushing toward medical intervention. Read more
The key elements of gender-affirmative therapy for clients who are medically or socially transitioning. Read more
A new book debunks some fundamental myths about gender. Read more
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Susan Faludi explores the story of how the despotic father who’d once ruled her terrified family underwent sex reassignment... Read more
As a therapist, how do you work with conservative parents struggling to parent their trans child? Psychotherapist Jean Malpas shares three keys to acceptance. Read more
As cultural attitudes about gender variance have undergone a profound shift, much of what therapists believed about what it means to be transgender is now... Read more
Parents typically view their children in the largely gendered terms society lays out for them. Rearranging that internal mind map requires tremendous effort... Read more
Until very recently, most families with transgender children had never met another family like theirs. Now parents and children from the trailblazing Ackerman... Read more
According to Patrick Dougherty, the biggest problem men have in psychotherapy isn’t that intimacy and the language of emotion is such foreign territory, but... Read more
A therapist takes an unflinching look at a puzzling case that spanned 14 years, wondering if he made a wrong turn. Read more
Why do young boys tend to roughhouse while young girls lean towards relational play? According to Louann Brizendine, these and many other differences observed... Read more
Louann Brizendine talks about one of the key neurobiological distinctions between the sexes: the need to reproduce vs. the need to nurture the helpless. Read more
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