Improving Mental Healthcare for Queer and Trans Communities of Color

L’s Story

“Do you wanna get AIDS and die?” is what my mother told me when I came out as gay. At 16 years old, this stung hard. It reverberated in me, echoing all other things that told me there was something wrong with me. Looking back, I can remember being 13 holding a knife in the kitchen, wishing for the courage to end things. If I hadn’t found that phone number for the anonymous LGBT email list, I wouldn’t have made it to 16. Throughout my teen and college years, I built up small communities of people around me. I found amazing friends, friends whose parents told me that they’d take me in if I was ever kicked out of my home. Friends who got me tested for HIV after a scare. A chosen family. But for a long time, that chosen family didn’t look like me. It was hard for them to understand what it was like for me being a young queer Filipinx person and the extreme isolation that came with that. I found community, but I was still on its fringe, until I found APICHA - a NYC-based community health center that had groups and programs for queer and trans Asian/Pacific Islander youth. I traveled just under an hour on the train into the city and then another 20 minutes on the subway to get there. There were so many other queer and trans Asian people, so many more than I had ever known before. I finally started to connect with all of me - my full humanity - and so much of the pain I had started to heal. I met amazing social workers who held our space with such compassion, humor, and fierceness. I knew I had to get my MSW and become one of them, to give back the care I had been given so much.

Sarah’s Story

I grew up in a predominantly white community, so I was already a “token minority” amongst my peers. I didn’t need to stand out any more than I already did. But I knew I was still different. Throughout childhood, I got message after message that being queer couldn’t be an option for me. If I wanted friends, if I wanted to escape the bullies, I needed to be straight and cisgendered. I fought it for years. I lied to my friends, family, and myself, pretending to be a straight girl in order to be accepted. I developed a core belief that I could accept others for being queer and gender diverse, but I couldn’t accept that within myself. One can only do that for so long before it catches up to them. In high school, I

began to physically hide myself away, too. I withdrew from my social support and isolated myself. While I was once a very confident, outgoing person, social situations became a source of stress and shame for me. My junior year of high school, I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I talked with my therapist about feeling like I didn’t know who I was and my fears of social rejection and failure. We worked together for two years with little improvement throughout our time together. Over the next decade, I worked with several therapists to address my trauma, internalized homophobia, and explore my intersections of race, queerness, and gender identity. Learning self-compassion and acceptance, I have been able to embrace and show gratitude for the compassion, love, and support that I have been gifted. My hope is that this program will increase accessibility for an informed, safe space where other LGBTQIA2S+ people of color can navigate their own journeys of healing, too.

Why We Do What We Do

There have been so many other kids like us - queer and trans youth of color who find it so hard to find a place that fits them. Thankfully, we have seen an emergence of evidence based mental health care for LGBTQIA2S+ individuals of color, even within the Metro Detroit area. Unfortunately, the demand for intersectional, competent care is high, and many queer and trans individuals are still dealing with the pain of isolation and rejection. Many of the clients we see as clinical therapy interns at FairSky Foundation are queer and trans people of color who looked for us specifically because there are so few people queer or trans therapists of color. We’ve been there. We get it. Unfortunately, there are significant barriers for queer and trans clinicians of color, which makes dissemination of culturally humble training all the more necessary. The U.S. mental healthcare system can be a challenging place to navigate for our communities. Many therapists lack the particular experience and empathy, grounded in radical acceptance, needed to support queer and trans folks of color. Some of our work has been to help our clients even heal from past racist, homophobic, and transphobic therapists. Our program will bolster therapists’ capabilities of working with a population that is misunderstood by providers outside of the experience of queer and trans people of color.

With this funding, we would like to work with FairSky Foundation’s sexual and relational health program, The Unison, to develop evidence-informed training for clinical mental health professionals. These trainings would include information on LGBTQIA2S+ focused sexual and relational health; impacts of racism on mental, sexual, and relational health for LGBTQIA2S+ people of color; and cultural humility and responsiveness in serving LGBTQIA2S+ people of color. The curriculum will not only cover therapeutic best practices but also coaching and institutional best practices for agencies to better serve LGBTQIA2S+ communities of color.

This is why we feel our proposal is important. We can help spread some of that knowledge necessary to support queer and trans communities of color and challenge mental health providers to do better. We want to not only make sure that providers are more culturally humble in supporting their clients. We also want to create opportunities for mental health organizations to be more affirming for our people. We know that through our work, more queer and trans people of color will have an easier time finding their chosen families and communities and that we can help save so many lives.

*Note: If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. For LGBTQIA+ specific mental health crisis support, visit https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help/ or call the Trans Lifeline: (877) 565-8860.*