This year has brought rapidly worsening, crisis levels of distress to the already beleaguered LGBTQ+ community in the United States. LGBTQ+ people find their marriage, employment, housing, and healthcare rights, as well as their physical and emotional safety under constant and unrelenting threat. According to Erin Reed’s well-regarded Trans Legislative Risk Assessment Maps, only twelve US states retained the highest safety level as of March 2025. Twenty-three states received the lowest rating, and two were labeled “Do Not Travel” for both transgender youth and adults. Many of the same families who fled states that criminalized gender affirming parenting and healthcare over the past four years, are now fleeing the US all together. According to a Williams Institute press release in May 2025, 48% of transgender adults in the US are already internally displaced or considering a move within the country and 45% wish to leave the country. For undocumented LGBTQ+ folks, the risks are as dire as they possibly could be.
In just a few months, we have seen the terrain of mental health treatment for LGBTQ+ people transform in dramatic and unrecognizable ways; from care disruptions due to both clients and providers fleeing the country, to a widespread shift from more typical treatment frameworks to chronic crisis models. This webinar uses a combination of the most up-to-date research and powerful clinical vignettes to give clinical a visceral sense of how patients are being impacted on the ground. How do we balance working with clients’ inner worlds when their outer worlds lack the stability and safety needed to do that work? What is our role as providers, and how do we ethically care for ourselves and our patients when government policies criminalize science-based treatments for gender diverse youth and adults? Liberation Psychology can offer empowerment-based perspectives on the flexibility, creativity, and advocacy needed to transform not only our work with LGBTQ+ clients, but also the political and healthcare structures we operate within.
At the conclusion of the webinar, participants will be able to:
- Describe a visceral sense of what LGBTQ+ clients might be experiencing, and identify three sources of up-to-date data on LGBTQ+ minority stress.
- Describe a research example of the past impacts of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation on the community and use it to provide a hypothesis as to how current anti-LGBTQ+ policy might be impacting LGBTQ+ people.
- Use a research-driven argument for how minority stress toward LGBTQ+ youth impacts the mental health of all young people negatively.
- Describe three shifts that might be necessary in clinical work with the LGBTQ+ population over the coming months and years.