Transgender Lived Experience in Social Work: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Background: To date, social work literature regarding transgender and gender diverse (TGD) individuals situates TGD individuals as objects of social work knowledge and intervention, although recent scholarship suggests that TGD individuals’ lived experience might afford them a unique vantage point, underscoring the need for peer perspectives in practice. While this existent work represents an important foundation, it fails to address the assumption that transgender individuals are recipients of social work services. Given that this implicitly suggests that professionalization forecloses lived experience, this work aims to answer two primary questions: (1) What is the nature of “transgender lived experience” (TGLE) in the social work literature? and (2) Who is permitted to have “lived experience” within this body of literature?

Methods: Using professionalization and transnormativity as conceptual anchors, I engaged in a critical discourse analysis of the social work literature regarding TGLE. Databases were selected for their relevance to the topic and availability to the author. I screened articles using a sequential process: initially through a review of titles, then narrowed by abstract, and, finally, a full text review to arrive at the final collection of 14 articles. I then engaged in detailed analysis of the texts beginning with a close reading to uncover both specific and overarching conceptualizations of TGLE. I then grouped these passages into categories based on the type of “lived experience” being described as well as who was situated as having access to that “lived experience,” and then further refined these categories into themes.

Results: My analysis resulted in four overarching themes: (1) TGLE as everyday experience, (2) TGLE as marked by pain and difference, (3) TGLE as inescapably medicalized, and (4) TGLE as expertise. These themes interact with and build upon each other to create an understanding of transgender lived experience that overlaps significantly with a transnormative reality in which TGD people are given unique knowledge based on their daily experience of marginalization and medicalization. This analysis also revealed three occasionally overlapping categories of individuals who have lived experience: (1) social service users, (2) children, and (3) (some) professionals.

Conclusion and Implications: TGLE within social work is articulated as a totalizing discourse centered around a wholly painful experience of othering that can only be ameliorated through medical intervention. While this experience can confer expertise upon some individuals, transnormativity and professionalization operate in concert with this discourse to situate TGNC people as transgender in the first place, foreclosing any other subjectivity. This definition mimics discourses of professionalization that separate practitioners from their clients, implicitly situating the social work professional as someone who has not experienced adversity themselves. When this coalesces with the totalizing discourse of TGLE, it serves to situate TGD professionals first as service users, undermining the expertise that their professional training imparts. Future inquiry into the experiences of TGD social workers is needed to begin to further understand how professionalization impacts their experiences, as well as ways social work education can be adapted to better suit the needs of TGD students.