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This chapter explores age-based variations in the healthcare experiences of transgender people. Specifically, we outline how transgender people narrate their experiences with coming out and transition in later life as well as possibilities for future research and clinical practice concerning older transgender populations. To this end, we begin with a review of the limited literature on older transgender populations including the ways such findings converge and diverge from studies of younger transgender populations. Then, we analyze data gathered from older transgender people throughout the United States concerning their experiences with health events, healthcare providers, and healthcare settings. For this empirical analysis, we draw on over 250 qualitative responses from transgender people over the age of 40. The findings of this chapter demonstrate the importance of adjusting existing healthcare protocols to provide adequate care for aging transgender populations. Specifically, our analyses highlight gaps in access and quality of healthcare delivery as well as issues related to medical education, trans-inclusive protocols, and sex-gender segregated medical traditions. The implications of our work here reveal important possibilities for expanding transgender healthcare access as well as existing barriers to such access. We specifically utilize the case of our respondents and the existing literature to illuminate gaps in needs assessment and healthcare delivery concerning older transgender populations. We will conclude the chapter with recommendations for bridging such gaps in research, education, and system operation.

Transgender people experience significant health and healthcare disparities in comparison to cisgender people. Limited access to quality, trans-competent healthcare in the USA is a central social determinant of these inequities. In this chapter, we expand on the burgeoning literature on accountability structures and transgender healthcare through an analysis of individual interviews with cisgender medical providers about their and their colleagues’ capacity to provide trans-competent healthcare. First, we find that providers report unfamiliarity and uncertainty concerning transgender people, their healthcare needs, and related issues. Although providers regard such ignorance as a structural problem within medical education and practice, the solutions they proffer rely on the benevolence and personal initiative of individual providers to seek out trans-specific information and training. This upholds the boundaries between what is considered “normal” (i.e., cisgender centered) healthcare and trans-competent healthcare. Second, we find that cisgender medical providers who want to provide quality healthcare to transgender people engage in emotion work that prioritizes the comfort and ignorance of their cisgender colleagues and inhibits institutional change. In sum, we argue that, regardless of their intentions, cisgender providers engage in practices that maintain healthcare as a cisnormative accountability structure and, in turn, contribute to the persistence of transgender health and healthcare disparities.

This chapter aims to analyze the sociabilities, information-sharing behaviors, and types of social support among users of French non-mixed trans Facebook groups. First, our national survey (N = 405) reveals that the different uses of these groups (information retrieval, emotional support, etc.) vary according to the age and education levels of their trans users, or according to their progress on the transition pathways. Second, we perform a lexical analysis of the messages (N = 70,488) posted, since 2013, in a sample of 24 groups, in order to identify the main topics of discussion. This analysis leads us to emphasize the diversity of social support provided by trans people to one another, via posts and comments. These findings deemphasize the benefits of institutional support because they suggest, alternatively, that trans people are organizing themselves to avoid challenges associated with medical institutions and the French “therapeutic shield.. Such individuals use Facebook to this end, sharing information or support in order to create a safe space managed with a transfeminist ethic, and allowing themselves to make gender-related choices more autonomously, far away from normative judgements (in particular those expressed by the medical profession).

This study builds on existing research to explore how transgender and non-binary people navigate complex terrain when it comes to strained and ambiguous relationships with families of origin. This chapter draws on 23 in-depth interviews with trans and non-binary adults (ages 19–41) to examine the ways that respondents navigated ambiguous and complex family relationships marked by mixed messages and contradictory behaviors from parents regarding their sexual and gender identities. I find that respondents engage in a range of strategies – correcting, conforming, and concealing – to bargain for belonging within families of origin through their work to preserve family ties. Beyond experiencing the emotional costs of ambiguous parental support, I find that some respondents also experience financial strain and inadequate housing, stemming from unstable, distressing relationships with their parents. This chapter demonstrates that ambiguous support from family and complex familial relationships may contribute to a cycle of precarity for trans and non-binary adults. Finally, I show that for respondents, connections to local queer and trans communities and supportive partnerships buffered the negative impacts of familial ambiguity. However, not all respondents had access to community support, intensifying their experiences of marginalization. This chapter contributes to the literature working to destabilize the support versus rejection binary used to characterize LGBTQ experiences and has implications for better understanding the pathways into poverty that trans and non-binary people experience.

This study explores the health-seeking process for queer and/or trans people, and factors involved in their healthcare negotiations and decisions to seek care. The data included 20 semi-structured interviews of people who identify as queer and/or trans in the southeastern United States. Qualitative analysis was conducted using constructivist grounded theory to inductively analyze accounts of healthcare events, behaviors, and experiences of queer and/or trans people. Participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 57, with a majority identifying as trans/gender nonconforming (65%) and those remaining identifying as queer, cisgender individuals (35%). Both queer and trans identities can overlap, therefore, I use the term “queer and/or trans.” Categories generated through the coding process were as follows: (1) mental health concerns, (2) negotiating gendered and heteronormative assumptions, and (3) significance of participants creating a bed of knowledge. My analysis asserts that these data indicate that queer and/or trans participants manage not just healthcare decisions, but the hopelessness attached to seeking this type of help.

Over the past decade, there has been an increase in the number of transgender adolescents that receive gender-affirming hormones. While the long-term repercussions of taking hormones are understudied, it is possible that one of the impacts is infertility. Although infertility is not definite, healthcare professionals are still responsible for discussing fertility preservation with transgender adolescent patients, which encourages a population of young people to determine whether or not they want to biologically have children in the future. Drawing on in-depth interviews with healthcare professionals, parents, and transgender adolescents, this study explores the thoughts and perceptions pertaining to fertility and how these three groups work with one another throughout transition. My findings show that (1) adult participants (parents and healthcare professionals) have mental barriers, which include fear of regret and grief over the loss of anticipated biological motherhood, (2) there is a delay in the conversation happening between the healthcare professionals, parents, and trans adolescents, and (3) trans adolescents reject fertility, but are open to building a family. I argue that cisnormative and transnormative ideologies overshadow these conversations, which could result in limiting the potential for queer biological parenthood. The chapter ends with suggestions for how to make conversations pertaining to fertility preservation more expansive to dismantle transnormativity.

In this chapter, I address how criminal justice policies, and discrimination and prejudice within the US criminal justice system, negatively affect trans men. By focusing on trans men’s unique incarceration experiences using 15 in-depth interviews, I recommend four key policy changes for correctional facilities: (1) allow trans men to choose the gender of the correctional facility in which they are housed; (2) allow trans men to wear undergarments that align with their gender identity; (3) provide trans men access to trans-appropriate healthcare; and (4) implement harsher penalties for non-compliance of Prison Rape Elimination Act Standards. These four policies would improve the life chances of trans men during their incarceration and post-incarceration.