During and after the 2016 United States (U.S.) presidential election, discriminatory policies and stigmatizing rhetoric have been increasingly directed toward the transgender community at state and national levels. Transgender and/or nonbinary (TNB) adolescents, already at elevated risk for poorer health relative to their cisgender (nontransgender) peers, may have been adversely impacted by the shifting sociopolitical climate. This secondary analysis used qualitative data from the Trans Teen and Family Narratives Project to investigate how perceived shifts in the sociopolitical climate following the 2016 election affected families with TNB adolescents in the New England region of the U.S. (states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont). Data included two waves of semistructured interviews conducted with TNB adolescents and their caregivers and siblings (N = 20 families, 60 family members). Two coders analyzed transcripts using a thematic analysis approach. Emergent themes included: contemporary life for trans people in America (e.g., being discriminated against and dehumanized), perceptions of the national sociopolitical climate (e.g., anger toward political figures), forms of resistance and advocacy (e.g., confronting misinformation), and factors amplifying or buffering effects of the sociopolitical climate (e.g., the formation of alliances or coalitions within the family). Findings indicate the 2016 election spurred the redefinition of communication boundaries within, and outside, the immediate family, particularly regarding online communication and social media. TNB adolescents and their families anxiously anticipated changes in the sociopolitical climate and their foreseen impact on TNB adolescents' rights and safety. Implications for family therapy, intervention design, and policy reform are discussed.
This article discusses the 'liberation health' model for social work practice and explores how this model may be used to bring conversations about race and class into the therapy room. It begins with a review of mental health social work teaching in the United States and moves on to
demonstrate differences between traditional and liberatory practice methodologies. The term 'liberatory' is used in this article to refer to a variety of anti-oppressive theoretical frameworks, with an emphasis on the work of Paulo Freire and Ignacio Martín-Baró. Additionally,
the author demonstrates interviewing strategies for bringing conversations about intersectionality into the therapy context.
Social work in the US has failed to respond to the largest legislative attack on the rights of transgender and non-binary people in the history of the country. Hundreds of laws have been proposed over the past several years, aiming to ban transgender and non-binary people from public life, as well as criminalising gender-affirming healthcare and attempting to remove transgender youth from supportive families for forced detransition. Beginning with the Trump administration, these bills have exponentially increased in number, now being proposed in more than 60 per cent of the US. This article critically reviews the ways in which national social work organisations have failed to address both the systemic erasure of transgender people in their pedagogy and the behaviours of specific actors within the social work profession who are actively helping to draft anti-trans legislation and advocate for conversion therapy, contravening both the evidence base and code of ethics.
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