A Better World Is Possible, but for Now We Have To Live in This One
Managing the Impacts of Election-Related Distress in Trans Communities & Engaging in Radical Hope
As we approach the presidential election, trans and nonbinary are experiencing high levels of distress related to the sociopolitical environment. The increasingly hostile sociopolitical environment has had a negative impact on our mental health, which has been documented in the research for years. And there’s a noticeable intensification happening with the threat of a Trump presidency and the ubiquity of anti-trans campaign messaging as we get closer to November elections. I wrote about all of this in my previous post if you want to dig into that:
Managing Election-Related Distress
I recently had a conversation with journalist Imara Jones about how trans people can manage our distress related to the upcoming election. And I love the way she phrased her question about this. She asked what can trans people do to avoid becoming dysregulated to the extent that they aren’t able to show up as their best selves. I loved the phrasing because it doesn’t pathologize the distress or even ask how do we avoid the distress. Instead, with this phrasing Imara acknowledged that distress can lead to overwhelm that affects our functioning in ways we want to avoid. If she had asked me how do trans people avoid feeling distressed, I’d have said we can’t. We are living in distressing times. As I noted in my last post, we are living in a public health crisis and it’s a reasonable response to be scared and sad and angry right now.
So the first thing that we do with our distress is honor it. Bear witness to your own hurting and fear and when possible and appropriate, share it with a trusted person who has capacity to contain that emotion (a trans-knowledgeable therapist is a great person for this). Do your best to not move into avoidance. Sometimes we dismiss or invalidate negative thoughts and feelings, because it feels more comfortable to convince ourselves that things aren’t bad. It’s the head in the sand approach and it’s appealing but it’s not effective. When we try to escape reality, reality eventually catches up to us. This is true both at the emotional level and from a collectivistic resistance standpoint: we need to not fully look away or disengage. Research supports this as a specific approach for addressing sociopolitical-related distress. In a recent study that asked trans and nonbinary adults what was helpful in therapy regarding sociopolitical-related distress, a common theme was the value of therapists bearing witness (Puckett et al., 2023; reach out to me if you’d like a PDF).
While we can’t avoid distress and are best served by acknowledging our feelings, we can focus on regulation of distress. When we feel anxiety, that heart rate and blood pressure increasing, ruminative or obsessive thoughts, difficulty concentrating on other things, dry mouth, upset stomach - those are all signs that our nervous system is moving into threat response, getting us ready to react to immediate threat, and if we stay in that spot we can get stuck in survival mode. This sort of reaction to threat is great and very helpful when the threat is a bear charging at us. All of our systems are oriented to perceiving and escaping or fighting danger. But the current and upcoming crisis is one that requires complex thinking, attention to lots of different emotions, strategic planning, interpersonal communication, coalition building, community connection, etc. All stuff that we can’t do if we’re stuck in threat response or survival mode. So fear, concern, sadness, yes - honor these. But when we move into unhelpful levels of anxiety or overwhelm, the priority has got to be on de-escalating. And that means intentional relaxation, soothing, resting. I often recommend the TLC Care Package the Transgender Law Center put together as a source of re-regulation, including this guided centering meditation. This also can mean taking a break from the news, letting someone else take the lead in the activism project — perhaps temporarily. Maybe it means feel-good food or TV, or sitting with a calming pet. It definitely means making sure you’re well resourced: tending to eating enough, being nourished, getting enough sleep, water, human interaction.
We also are best served when we sit with the both/and. Facing the reality of the awfulness and scariness of these situations is imperative, but also we aren’t doing ourselves or anyone else any good if we get lost in only that. We survive shitty realities by connecting to the joy and pleasure and meaning that exists alongside the shit. I have this print by trans artist Brit Chida (they/them) hanging on my office wall to illustrate this point. Even if everything is bad and everything stays bad, practicing joy alongside the badness transforms the overall experience.
In this world where some of my trans siblings are being denied safe and legal access to the affirming hormones that changed my life and when children are being killed in Gaza and asylum seekers are locked up in for-profit detention facilities, there’s also a caterpillar in a chrysalis hanging right outside my door, slowly becoming a monarch butterfly. There’s also trans people who meet up on Friday mornings and go on joyful bike rides. And there’s love all around. Micro experiences of joy and awe are critical to hold onto. Victories and loving relationships are worth celebrating and pleasure is worth relishing. It does not diminish the horror or the pain of atrocities to recognize and experience sweetness in life, as well. In fact it’s necessary to surviving and having the energy to resist the atrocities. Psychologist Dr. Em Matsuno recently guested on the Liberation Now podcast to talk about ways of fostering trans and nonbinary joy. I highly recommend giving that a listen.
Related to awe and joy and pleasure is humor. Psychology doctoral candidate Danny Shultz is studying the use of humor as a coping strategy (among other things) in the queer community, and I love this because it comes up a lot in sessions. Find things to laugh about!
We can also prevent feelings of powerlessness related to the election or sociopolitical climates/structural issues from becoming pervasive feelings of powerlessness and depressive hopelessness in all domains of our life. Be intentional about engaging in smaller-scale empowerment. I love watching trans people grow and build things: vegetables, pollinator gardens, families, housing. That chrsysalis I mentioned is there because my spouse planted milkweed. It’s actually been incredibly empowering to see a direct impact we can have on our environment. Mutual aid is a powerful source of this as well. Maybe we feel less like we have a say over the direction the country goes in, but we can grow plants that help our neighborhood ecosystem and make sure a community member has someone to talk to when they’re struggling or has enough to eat tonight.
Related, invest in trans community and alternative structures of care. Sense of belonging and connectedness to other trans folks is a well-established resilience factor in trans communities (e.g., Austin & Rogers, 2020 - PDF here; Barr et al., 2016). Research also shows that queer and trans people coped with distress related to the Trump presidency from 2016-2020 and other crises through connections to community (Abreu et al., 2023; Gonzalez et al., 2022). Trans community is also a way that we can build structures of care and support and protection that don’t rely on mainstream (cis) institutions and government officials. Elections become less scary when we are less dependent on government structures for our needs. Trans community has historically been how we’ve met our needs and taken care of each other. It’s only been in the last 10 or 15 years that *some* trans people have been welcomed into neoliberal political spaces. Our history and particularly the radical histories of racially minoritized trans people involved investing in each other and protecting and serving each other. So push through that social anxiety or inertia and show up for the trans events, join Discord servers. You can think of this casually or you can think of it more intentionally: I am only 20% joking when I call my group of neighborhood friends our apocalypse survival pod.
This doesn’t mean you have to divest from American democracy entirely. And many people have told me their capacity to cope has increased as they’ve gotten more involved in political activism and/or get-out-the-vote efforts. One of my clients said “the antidote to anxiety is action.” That said, activism is tricky for trans folks because it can increase our visibility and can thus increase our risk for experience enacted stigma like harassment, non-affirmation, or victimization. So you can be selective in how you engage: do what feels accessible to you. Evaluate the psychological cost/benefit in addition to the political.
And while you may opt to continue participating in electoral politics (as I plan to), I will suggest divesting from the American mythology of it all. If you were raised to believe in our country being morally superior and invested in justice for marginalized people, it can be a hefty dose of disillusionment to confront our country’s nasty history and current power systems. But as a psychoanalytic/psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists, I am a big believer in disillusionment: we must rid ourselves of the illusions of things in order to confront the reality. If we stop believing the myth of America and Americans as inherently good, we stop getting discouraged and disheartened and surprised when Americans and American systems inevitably do harm. And we can start investing in strategies that actually address the reality of the issues we face. We are more likely to be able to build the society we deserve if we are honest about what we’re working with right now!
Speaking of our histories, I get a lot of hope and empowerment from trancestors and trans elders. I listen to Beverly Glenn-Copeland at least once a week. I listened while writing my previous post when I was feeling heavy.
Trans people have been badass and survived all sorts of sociopolitical hostility in the past, had meaningful experiences and lives within those contexts. Engage in our histories. Become a casual (or serious) student of trans resistance.1
Engage with evidence and experiences that counter the sense that “everyone” hates us or doesn’t care. If we spend much time on Twitter or look at Fox News polls, our minds can quickly distort the large numbers of people with anti-trans or ignorant views into much larger numbers. I remember in the aftermath of the bomb threat to Boston Children’s Hospital’s gender-affirming clinic, I spiraled a bit and had a day where it felt like most of the strangers around me harbored aggressive anti-trans beliefs. This is not true, but my brain was overwhelmed and moving into a protection technique that wasn’t actually serving me. Not surprisingly, research shows that exposure to positive messaging and activism from allies is associated with better mental health (e.g., Flores et al., 2018 - full PDF here; Horne et al., 2022). This exposure helps us put the bigots in perspective. One of my most grounding experiences is my work with PFLAG Charlotte, witnessing the mostly cis parents and community members there working hard for understanding, progress, and resistance. On a related note, limit your exposure to the news and hateful content! In a recent study presented at the American Psychological Association’s 2024 convention, Alex Colson and colleagues in ASU’s Empowerment Lab reported that nonbinary participants found disengaging from the news for periods to be helpful in coping with distress. Staying informed is important but doom-scrolling is harmful without net gain. You might set designated times for reading news/commentary; and be selective about who/what you follow on social media - consider muting sociopolitical content occasionally.
I want to conclude with the concept of radical hope, which is connected to a lot of what I’ve written about here. It stems from the Radical Healing framework developed by psychologists Bryanna French, Jioni Lewis, Della Mosley, Hector Adames, Nayeli Chaves-Duenas, Grace Chen, and Helen Neville (2020; full PDF here). This is a framework for envisioning and working toward wellbeing and liberation for people of color. In that original paper, the authors write beautifully about radical hope:
Hope is a necessary condition of working to improve human existence—there must be some sense that the struggle is not in vain (Ginwright, 2016). Thus, radical healing requires radical hope. Hope allows for a sense of agency to change things for the greater good—a belief that one can fight for justice and that the fight will not be futile. Freire (1992) attested that hopelessness is paralyzing and immobilizing; in hopelessness, we lack the strength to recreate the world. Lear (2008) proposed radical hope for people who face oppression by the dominant culture. He argued that radical hope is an act of courage, when you face devastation and head toward an unimaginable future with the belief that something good will emerge.
The concept of radical hope can be adapted to be relevant for all trans folks, and is particularly relevant for trans people of color sitting at the intersection of racial oppression and trans-related oppression. Research has found that many trans people who are aware of anti-trans efforts experience hopelessness (e.g., Tebbe et al., 2022). In my experience, clients and loved ones who are struggling the most in the fact of election-related distress tend to be weighted down with hopelessness. But radical hope is not a passive belief that things will get better. To borrow from the title of French and colleagues (2023) qualitative study exploring this concept in communities of color, radical hope is the belief that “we can create a better world for ourselves.” Radical hope is active, collectivistic; it exists in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. In this team’s paper called Radical Hope in Revolting Times (what an excellent title), they outline that communities and individuals develop radical hope through key pathways, including:
(a) understanding the history of oppression along with the actions of resistance taken to transform these conditions,
(b) embracing ancestral pride,
(c) envisioning equitable possibilities, and
(d) creating meaning and purpose in life by adopting an orientation to social justice.
You can see how these pathways align with much of what I’ve written about. But a key component that I want to emphasize is envisioning better futures. A better world is possible. Practice imagining the world not going to shit, or it going to shit and a new world emerging alongside it. Maybe that’s too much. Maybe it’s better to imagine the hyper local. Imagine a community in which trans people are safe and can easily affirm their gender in myriad ways and have that affirmation reflected back from the people around them, too. Imagine a life where transness is celebrated and you can go through your day without experiencing anything counter to that. And engage in collaborative work that moves toward that, reminding yourself that what you are doing is building that better world.
I know this is starting to all sound very lofty and idealistic but without a clear map for what it means concretely. I’ll give you a practical example. I mentioned earlier that there’s a group of trans and queer folks that gets together on Friday mornings to ride bikes. This is the Happy Valley Coffee Ride, a trans- and queer-centered ride to trans- and queer-friendly coffee shops. This is a short and slow weekly ride I started specifically because I wanted to meet local trans people and because I believe in the liberatory and healing power of riding bikes and wanted to create a space where trans people could have access to that without dealing with any anti-trans b.s. or other marginalization and oppression. On Fridays, as I am biking at a casual pace and making sure we’re all staying together, I listen to the conversations happening, and I envision a world where all trans people feel this at ease and free, and I ground myself in the belief that by participating in this every Friday, we are helping that dream move closer to reality. That’s an incredibly powerful antidote to the mental health effects of seeing strangers shouting ignorantly about my life and passing harmful laws.
A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson; Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (revised edition) by Susan Stryker; Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek; Happy Birthday, Marsha! (short film) by Tourmaline & Sasha Wortzel; Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson; Paris is Burning (film) by Jennie Livingston; Veneno (HBO series) and Pose; Our Work is Everywhere: An Illustrated Oral History of Queer and Trans Resistance by Syan Rose