Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working With Gender-Variant People and Their Families

Explore an ecological strength-based framework for the treatment of gender-variant clients

This comprehensive book provides you with a clinical and theoretical overview of the issues facing transgendered/transsexual people and their families. Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families views assessment and treatment through a nonpathologizing lens that honors human diversity and acknowledges the role of oppression in the developmental process of gender identity formation.

Specific sections of Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families address the needs of gender-variant people as well as transgender children and youth. The issues facing gender-variant populations who have not been the focus of clinical care, such as intersexed people, female-to-male transgendered people, and those who identify as bigendered, are also addressed.

The book examines:

• the six stages of transgender emergence
• coming out transgendered as a normative process of gender identity development
• thinking "outside the box" in the deconstruction of sex and gender
• the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as the convergence, overlap, and integration of these parts of the self
• the power of personal narrative in gender identity development
• etiology and typographies of transgenderism
• treatment models that emerge from various clinical perspectives
• alternative treatment modalities based on gender variance as a normative lifecycle developmental process

Complete with fascinating case studies, a critique of diagnostic processes, treatment recommendations, and a helpful glossary of relevant terms, this book is an essential reference for anyone who works with gender-variant people. Handy tables and figures make the information easier to access and understand.

Visit the author's Web site at http://www.choicesconsulting.com

Arlene Istar Lev, Arlene Istar Lev