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There is a profound scarcity of research addressing the specific experiences of youth in care who are transgender and gender expansive. These youth face some of the most egregious mistreatment within the child welfare system. The limited scholarship addressing the experiences of youth in care who are transgender tends to be situated within legal journals and focuses on legal analyses as opposed to in-depth understanding of the experiences of these youth. This article illuminates the experiences of youth in the foster care system who are transgender and gender expansive by drawing upon a subset of data from a qualitative, community-based participatory research (CBPR) study with former foster youth in Los Angeles County who are LGBTQ Findings identify the formidable structural and systemic barriers experienced by participants in addition to sources of resilience.
In Los Angeles County, 19% of youth in the foster care system identify as LGBTQand the vast majority are also youth of color (Wilson, Cooper, Kastanis, & Nezhad, 2014). Approximately 5.6% of youth in foster care in Los Angeles identify as transgender (Wilson & Kastanis, 2015). Although there is a small and growing body of research regarding the experiences of young people in foster care who are LGBTQ, there is a profound scarcity of research addressing the specific experiences of youth in care who are transgender and gender-expansive1- who face some of the most egregious mistreatment within the child welfare system. The little scholarship that addresses the experiences of youth in care who are transgender tends to be situated within legal journals and focuses on legal analyses as opposed to an in-depth understanding of the experiences of these youth. Additionally, this scholarship does not focus on the voices of the young people themselves. Some of the specific obstacles faced by youth within the child welfare system who are transgender and gender-expansive include difficulty accessing gender affirming medical services (Turner, 2009); sex-segregated facilities that place youth based upon the sex they were assigned at birth (Love, 2014); and mistreatment ranging from chronic environmental and interpersonal microaggressions in which youth are misgendered to explicit violence and harassment by peers, foster parents, and workers within the system (Mallon, 2009; Olson, 2009). Additionally, without meaningful opportunities for education, job training, and employment, youth in child welfare...