The Personal Is Professional Is Political: A Roundtable of Transgender and Gender Expansive Scholars on Integrating Research, Organizing, and Advocacy to Promote Trans Justice

As transgender and gender expansive (TGE) social work scholars who engage in research that promotes equity and justice for TGE people, the personal is professional—and both are political. We are simultaneously navigating an increasing onslaught of anti-trans legislation, policies, and rhetoric across the U.S.; anti-trans efforts at local and institutional levels; and silence from social work professional organizations, while engaging in research, teaching, and advocacy rooted in our own TGE lived experiences. We are researching and living collective traumas while advocating and organizing with and for TGE people across the U.S., often with limited, if any, TGE community within our departments. We take the stance that our responsibility as social work scholars is to use research to advocate for progressive social change that aligns with our professional social work values and ethics. In the current sociopolitical climate that is increasingly hostile and violent toward TGE people, our scholar activism is both critically important and challenging to navigate.

The challenges we face as TGE scholars that promote TGE equity and justice are situated in the research, the systems in which we’re situated, and the broader societal climate. For example, we regularly face challenges to recognizing our work as valid, navigating systems that reinforce gender binaries, lack of support for TGE scholars with intersecting forms of marginalization (e.g. transfeminine and people of the global majority), and lack of mentorship by established/tenured TGE scholars. Additionally, given the highly visible and public nature of anti-trans rhetoric and pro-trans advocacy and activism, we are faced with significant invisible labor in the form of media requests, invitations to engage in consultation to promote TGE equity beyond our research and other capacities, and mentoring students and early career scholars while we are still early in our own careers. We are doing this work while navigating being on the job market, addressing systemic injustices at our current (or future) places of employment, and threats to tenure in states that do not support TGE communities.

This roundtable contends with these and additional challenges faced by TGE social work scholars during this hostile sociopolitical climate, with a primary focus on the integration of research, teaching, advocacy, and organizing to promote justice and equity for TGE communities. Panelists include early career and tenured professors who work to promote trans justice and equity as activist scholars in their institutions, communities, states, and nation. In this roundtable, we will discuss the complexities of engaging in research that intersects with our lived experiences during a hostile political landscape, strategies for integrating research and advocacy that aligns with our professional mandate to work toward social change, and identify moments of synergy and joy in this work. We will discuss how individuals living at the intersections of a TGE positionality and additional marginalized positionalities (transfeminine individuals, racialized people, disabled individuals, and having lower socio-economic status) continue to experience barriers to accessing social work education, which breaks the academic pipeline that could create positional diversity among TGE faculty in social work programs.