'Everyone wants to be seen and accepted': A thematic analysis of gender and sexual identities between and beyond the binary

Historically, those who hold minority sexual and gender identities have been pathologized, discriminated against and marginalised. However, much less is known about those who hold multiple minority statuses concurrently and are gender and sexually diverse (GSD). Similarly, literature that explores the intersection between GSD between and beyond the binary is scarce. Yet, GSD communities experience poor mental and health outcomes and high suicide rates that have been associated with social rejection. The present study included 119 GSD participants across trans, non-binary, Bi+ and ace communities. Participants completed an online survey which contained questions relating to their sexual identity, of which 43 made unsolicited references to their gender identities. Subsequently, this study aimed to explore how GSD individuals experience their gender identity in relation to their sexual identity via reflexive thematic analysis. Three main themes were identified. Findings highlighted the importance of attaining gender congruence to attain sexual congruence and alterations in sexual attraction during gender affirmation as being understood in both psychological and biological contexts. Additionally, participants experienced their GSD as being gatekept from all angles. Particularly, invalidating familial interactions towards GSD were detrimental to positive self-concepts beyond cishet ideals. Consequently, participants risked becoming their own barrier in the expression of their own GSD to find shelter amongst cisheteronormativity. Importantly, participants exhibited self-acceptance and resilience in the form of affirmative interactions. These findings showcase the importance of acceptance and resilience building within and outside of GSD communities. Furthermore, this study proposes pathways towards resilience and recovery through the understanding and dissemination of expert companionship to institutions, professionals, allies, and GSD communities alike.

Older Adults and Their Families: An Interactional Intervention That Brings Forth Love and Softens Suffering

When assisting older adults and their families, the most useful family nursing conceptual skill is embracing the belief that “illness is a family affair.” This illness belief summons a systemic or interactional focus specifically on relationship communication patterns. Uncovering maladaptive and distressing familial interactions, a family nurse can intervene and offer ideas for more loving and caring interactional patterns. Three brief and one detailed clinical case example, illustrating how to conceptualize interactional patterns and how to intervene, are offered. This article also presents the author’s firsthand caregiving experience with its accompanying joys and pitfalls. Despite her decades of clinical practice and professional assistance to numerous elderly families, the caregiving and interactions with her father held no guarantee of being filled with consistent care and love. Although not easily applicable to one’s own family, focusing on the interrelationships with the elderly and their families, the embedded interactional patterns become the crucial ingredient to facilitate more satisfying and loving relationships.

Resisting and Redirecting: Agentive Practices Within an African American Parent–Child Dyad During Digital Storytelling

This article examines the digital storytelling practices between an African American mother and son. We used agency as a theoretical framework to explore how the two exercised their own power to collaborate on their digital story. As digital technologies became part of their practice, challenges and tensions arose when both participants attempted to override each other’s agency, as demonstrated in their interviews. Data were collected during digital storytelling workshops conducted at a university computer lab, church, and the participants’ home. Using thematic coding, we analyzed audio-recorded interviews to determine the participants’ agency in the context of their digital storytelling activity. We found how a mother and son worked together through resisting and redirecting when creating a digital story, and how their digital storytelling practices displayed evidence of agency. Implications include how familial interactions in digital storytelling practices contribute to the ways agency is conceptualized for families, educators, and researchers.

Conferring Advantage

This chapter considers familial relationships as obstacles to the realization of egalitarian ideals. It has been argued that the conflict between the family and equality is in fact much less stark than is commonly recognized. Parents and children can enjoy healthy familial relationships, and parents can exercise all the rights needed for those relationships to make their distinctive contribution to well-being, without our having to tolerate anything like the kinds of inequalities of opportunity to which familial interactions currently give rise. This argument, however, still has family values on one side of the line and distributive considerations on the other. The chapter suggests the former be incorporated into the latter, as it were, by treating familial relationship goods as distribuenda: that is, as among the goods that people should have opportunities, perhaps equal opportunities, for.