How Resiliant Are You?
To thrive as a trans person in a hostile world, you’ll need resilience. What is resilience and how resilient are you, personally?
by Veronica Esposito
As the world closes in on trans people and doors close around us, it is more important than ever to stay mentally healthy. Therapist and writer Veronica Esposito brings you the first of a three part series on resilience and how to build and manage it.
Part I: The Hurricane
Note: Most of the papers linked in these articles are freely available via Google Scholar. In many cases it is not possible to provide a download link because the links generated by search engines are not permanent. Readers are encouraged to read these papers for themselves by visiting https://scholar.google.com/, entering the title of the paper, and clicking on the link marked “[PDF]” for the full text of the article.
Imagine the average day of a trans person circa 2026. They wake up and prepare breakfast, and over their morning coffee read about the latest thing the president has said to slur their community. While checking the news they also hear about a proposed law in a largely transphobic state that would chip away at trans people’s dignity and ability to live. They see that a leading paper has published yet another opinion column arguing against trans rights, and they ruefully note that it’s full of falsehood and mischaracterizations that no editor seemed to challenge before publication.
On the way to work their phone pings, an automated message from their doctor reminding them to do some bloodwork for their HRT prescription. On the message they’re deadnamed, which has happened every now and then for years—no one at their medical provider seems to know how to make it stop, and so the matter has just become moot.
After work they meet a new friend for drinks, and as they chat, our imaginary trans person carefully avoids certain details of their past, as they’re not sure if they’re ready to come out to this new friend as trans or not. After drinks, as they’re winding down at home, they think about an upcoming gathering that they'll be attending over the weekend and start to worry that they’ll be rejected by the guests for being trans. As they drift off to sleep they think about what a curse it is to be born trans and wish they could just be a normal person.
This average day in the life of a trans person is filled with a bunch of different stressors that they have to deal with, many of which are what social scientists call “distal” and “proximal” stressors. These stressors were first conceptualized in a paper by Ilan H. Meyer that discussed them in regards to LGB individuals. Meyer realized that in order to fully understand resilience in LGB populations, new concepts were needed; these concepts have since been applied to trans people as well.
So what exactly are distal and proximal stressors? Meyer defined distal stressors as “objective stressors in that they do not depend on an individual’s perceptions or appraisals”—that is, things that will be stressful regardless of how a person views things, meaning that they have little control over them. By contrast, Meyer writes that proximal stressors “are more subjective and are therefore related to self-identity.” These are things that largely depend on how we see ourselves—thus we have some measure of control over them.
In the above vignette, distal stressors might include the slurs of the president, that opinion column, transphobic legislative actions taken by states, or the seemingly impossible to end deadnaming at the hands of their medical provider. You can imagine distal stressors as being a little like the weather—we can’t really do much to change them, and we just have to figure out as best we can how to live with the stress they can cause.
In the example above, the proximal stressors might include our trans person’s choice to conceal their identity while building a new relationship, their pre-emptive expectation to be rejected at the weekend gathering, and their choice to see their own transness as a purely negative thing. These things are stressful in part because of their beliefs and perceptions.
All of the stressors I have discussed in this imaginary trans person’s life are forms of “minority stress,” which has been defined as “excess stress to which individuals from stigmatized social categories are exposed as a result of their social, often a minority, position.” You can think of minority stress as extra special “members only” stressors that members of oppressed groups get to experience, on top of the normal stressors that everyone experiences at some point or another. Minority stress was first conceptualized in 1981 in regards to LGBT individuals in the book Minority Stress in Lesbian Women by Winn Kelly Brooks, and it has since been generalized to apply to any kind of stigmatized group. It is now a cornerstone of our modern understanding of oppression.
All of these minority stressors have to be dealt with in some way in order for our trans person to survive and—hopefully—manage to thrive. If they’re not dealt with, they can have serious consequences: over time, our trans person might begin to lose hope and start to feel seriously depressed. They might get so overwhelmed by all the added burdens of being trans that they become burned out and withdraw from life. These stressors could also build up into disabling levels of anxiety, or our trans person could begin to internalize some of these stresses as self-criticism and self-hatred, leading to problematic levels of shame.
Resilience is figuring out how to deal with these stressors so that they don’t turn into serious issues that prevent someone from living an amazing life full of happiness, new experiences, creativity, hopefulness, and community. You can think of resilience as interdicting distal stressors before they’re able to get to us and cause serious mental health issues; resilience is able to intercept proximal stressors before they’re able to join forces with distal stressors to do the same. They’re a little like antibodies that can help keep us healthy and happy, even when the world tries to take us away from our true selves.
If it feels like it’s so much harder to be a resilient trans person these days, that’s because the distal stressors have been dialed way, way up, and our forms of resilience are often being tampered with. To use the weather analogy, maybe in the mid-2010s, all the average trans person needed was an umbrella to handle the moderate rain of distal stressors. But now that rain has been augmented into something more like a hurricane, and that umbrella just won’t do. What’s worse, maybe 10 years ago it felt like so many more people were out there wanting to give us shelter from the rain, but now it seems like many of those people are disappearing as institutions and cultural figures turn against trans acceptance.
Even for those who have been very resilient, what worked previously probably just isn’t enough right now. We need to be really on the ball, and we need to find as many ways as we can to deal with all these stressors, both the distal and proximate ones.
Trans and Nonbinary Researchers to the Rescue
Our understanding of resilience is in many ways still in its formative stages—it was only about 20 - 25 years ago that we began looking at resilience from a holistic perspective and applying it to virtually everyone. Our understanding of resilience as it pertains to gender and sexual minorities is younger still. We’ll be looking at this more throughout the series and how trans and queer scholars have added to our knowledge.
In recent decades, a number of essential trans and nonbinary researchers have been doing incredible work to help us best understand resilience as it pertains to trans people. Among them are Jae Puckett, Rylan J Testa, and Em Matsuno, whose work this series draws on heavily. In addition, we are indebted to scholars from other marginalized groups, such as the Black scholar Bryana H. French, who have advanced our understanding of minority stress and radical healing. (Keep an eye out for mentions of their work throughout the series—with links so that you can read it for yourself)
The verdict of this research is clear: when it comes to stress and resilience, there are factors unique to trans people, and our understanding of how to best build trans resilience is still evolving. Through these efforts we have made great strides forward in understanding the unique stressors that impact the lives of trans individuals, and what works best for us to be resilient in the face of the onslaught, the coming years are likely to seriously advance our understanding and the tools we have in the fight to thrive.
So How Resilient Are You?
Take a moment to consider your own life. If you’re trans, what kinds of distal and proximate stressors do you face as regards that part of your identity? How has your experience of stress changed since Donald Trump took office last year? What coping mechanisms do you use to be resilient, and where do you think you could build up your skills?
In answering these questions, a good place to start in doing our own resilience work is to get a baseline reading of your current stressors and resilience level. There are a number of different measures of resilience out there, among them the Brief Resilience Scale, the University of Washington Resilience Scale, the Ego Resilience Scale (also known as the Ego-Resiliency Scale), and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support. Unfortunately, due to the work of Puckett and colleagues, we know that these measures miss important forms of stress and resilience unique to trans people.
For a measurement tool that better captures the full experiences of trans people, we turn to the scholar and counselor Rylan J. Testa, who has been a leader in formulating ways to understand trans minority stress and resilience. As a part of his research he created a tool called the Gender Minority Stress and Resilience Measure (GMSR).
The GMSR is not a do-it-at-home test that you can take to measure your resilience—rather, it’s a measurement tool for researchers who want to study various factors that may impact the stress and resilience of trans people. This means that it doesn’t have a scoring feature where readers can tally up their responses and be told how stressed or resilient they are. But it is a good starting point for exploring the various stressors and resiliences that may be impacting you.
Readers are encouraged to download that measure at the link above, read through the various prompts, and self-evaluate for areas where they might be particularly stressed or not, and where they rate high or low on resilience. This will help give an idea of where your strengths and weaknesses are. This would be a wonderful piece to bring into a therapy session to explore with your therapist, or something to talk more about with a trusted trans friend.
Beyond the GMSR, other initiatives are afoot. Matsuno has spearheaded the creation of various measures of stress and resilience, including one specifically designed to meet the needs of nonbinary people, and one that parents and their trans children can use to see how well the latter are being supported by the former. Readers who fall into these categories are encouraged to follow the above link and check out these tools.
Mastuno and Puckett continue to be on the cutting edge of resilience studies, currently working on their own tool to best conceptualize resilience in trans people of color. Even as so many forces in this world seek to destroy our resilience and sap away at our ability to thrive, trans and nonbinary researchers continue their work of better understanding what makes us resilient to more and more granular degrees, working to best understand how best to instill resilience into our community.
A Road Map
This first part of the Resilience Series has sketched out just what resilience is and how it looks specifically for trans people. We’ve learned why it feels so much harder to be resilient these days.
Part II will center around the history of resilience—how the concept emerged in the 1970s and evolved to our present-day understanding. We’ll look at the difference between coping and healing and why that’s crucial for trans lives.
Part III will turn to an in-depth look at specific tools to use to build resilience. We will examine trans-specific ways of healing and thriving, in spite of the enormous assaults on our rights and our community.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.