Resilience in Transgender and Nonbinary Communities: Adapting Conceptual Frameworks and Addressing Measurement Challenges

Transgender and nonbinary (TNB) people experience a range of minority stressors, such as discrimination, harassment, and victimization. In addition to reducing these systemic issues, understanding more about resilience and what promotes positive outcomes for this marginalized community is essential. Furthermore, the importance of research on resilience has grown as we see increasing amounts of anti-trans legislation sweeping across the United States. Although we look to resilience research to learn more about what can help TNB people to persevere in the face of marginalization, the findings in this area have been mixed with considerable challenges related to the measurement of resilience. This chapter discusses the current state of the literature on resilience with TNB communities and identifies opportunities for advancing this area of study through refined measurement of the construct of resilience. Measures of resilience often reflect a general ability to “bounce back” from challenges, yet for TNB people, there can also be unique forms of resilience, such as self-defining one’s own gender experience or developing critical consciousness. We seek to address the mismatch between lived experiences of resilience and quantitative measures of resilience for TNB people by presenting a multidimensional conceptualization of resilience in TNB people’s lives. We also discuss the implications for social action and how this varies across our understandings of resilience.