Psychological Assessment Considerations Series: Minority Stress in the Assessment of Transgender and Gender Diverse Clients

Description

Presenters: Kelly Ducheny & A. Jordan Wright

 Overview:

This presentation will focus on assessment of minority stress in transgender and gender diverse (TGD) clients, including the potential impact that minority stress can have on identity development and mental health. We will focus on 1. What minority stress looks like in TGD populations; 2. How minority stress can impact identity development, gender dysphoria and mental health; 3. How minority stress may show up in and affect the assessment process and assessment results; 4. Measures to assess minority stress; and 5. How to integrate the construct of minority stress into clinical formulation. Minority stress theory and its adaptations for use with the TGD populations (Hendricks & Testa, 2012; Lefevor et al., 2019) will be used as a basic framework, as will models of evidence-based psychological assessment (Wright et al., 2022) and models for integrating context and culture into psychological assessment (Wright, 2021). Special focus will be paid to the link between minority stress and gender dysphoria (Lindley & Galupo, 2020), as well as several specific measures that can be useful in assessing these constructs with TGD clients.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify links between minority stress and other psychological constructs within the TGD
2. Discuss three survey measures that may be useful when assessing the experiences of TGD
3. Integrate information about minority stress in TDG populations within case