My name is Diana (she/her), and I am a Spanish psychologist studying an MPhil in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies, funded by La Caixa Foundation. I've been involved in volunteering, student representation, and research that aims to further wider feminist aims, especially for LGBTQ+ people.
My work has four key aims:
- To analyse how public, private and internal debates co-constitute transness, subjectivity, and mental health.
- To present a testimony of the effects of transphobic ideology in the UK on young trans people.
- To create research that is aware of its risks (does NOT contribute to endangering trans people) and makes a contribution (DOES support trans liberation and worthy lives).
- To be accessible to audiences in gender studies as well as psychologists/sociologists and the general trans community.
I am currently working on my MPhil dissertation titled "Public debates about transgender people in the United Kingdom". This work was inspired by my time as an intern at a Sexual and Reproductive Health Unit in Spain, and my observations of the way gender identity, sexuality, and power influenced our conceptions of mental health.
Public debates about transgender people in the United Kingdom have increasingly dominated the public eye since the proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) in 2018. This proposal caused an outpouring of outrage and suspicion towards transgender people from various groups, including those following a “gender critical ideology”.
Subsequently, the current political and media climate puts the legitimacy of transgender people in constant question. Literature within the area of gender studies tends to focus on either addressing anti-transgender claims, or theoretical explorations into transness. Psychology has recognised the negative effects of anti-transgender ideology on transgender people yet struggles to integrate its perspective with more critical trans studies or gender studies. In particular, research on LGBTQ+ mental health can be unspecific about which sorts of messages and influence are causing distress.
My dissertation seeks to ascertain how mental health can be understood in light of anti-transgender ideology in the UK, how transgender people survive under a hostile environment, and the benefits of psychology as a resistance tool. The research will be situated within the wider transfeminist, queer, and transgender studies literature, specifically looking at necropolitics, futurity, and affect theory. These perspectives will be put into conversation with the main models in psychology that theorise the consequences of prejudice (e.g., the Minority Stress Model).
The fieldwork I am planning for this study will consist of an initial exploratory survey followed by semi-structured interviews with transgender adults who reside in the United Kingdom. The interviews will explore issues such as how to negotiate trans identity, what has their interaction been with gender critical rhetoric, and the impacts on their mental health. Through this analysis, the project will re-valorise psychology within the transgender studies field, contribute to understanding the anti-transgender wave in the UK, and provide recommendations for better ways of caring for transgender people's mental health.