Wellbeing, gender diversity & speech pathology

Description: A high priority goal of health care for gender diverse people is to support their wellbeing. Compared to people who are not gender diverse, gender diverse people experience additional stress due to their minority position. This type of stress is known as gender minority stress and has a substantial negative impact on gender diverse people’s wellbeing and their participation in everyday life.

Some gender diverse people seek support from speech pathologists. Goals in speech pathology are, for instance, to assist the gender diverse speaker to modify their voice production, to support the client to develop helpful behaviours such as introducing themselves with their preferred pronouns or to for communication partners to develop supportive communication patterns. These practices can contribute to the gender diverse client’s wellbeing positively. Another way to support a person’s wellbeing is to assist them to reflect on their own identity and their lived experiences in dialogue with others. This kind of identity work can help a person to gain a different perspective on circumstances in life, on their self-view and to experience meaningfulness in life.

This way of working with gender diverse clients in speech pathology hasn’t been discussed in speech pathology literature yet.

Dates

State ongoing
Start 2022-11-01
End 2025-02-28
Form updated 2023-07-24

Report authors

Julia Tanase

Location

Australia

Aims

To explore relationships between gender diverse people’s wellbeing, their identity, and their voice production.

To explore the possible influence speech pathology practices might have on gender diverse people’s wellbeing, their identity, and their voice production.

To explore speech pathologists' perspectives on gender diverse people’s wellbeing, their identity, and their voice production.

To explore how speech pathologists see their role in health care for gender diverse people.

Keywords

speech pathology

gender diversity

wellbeing

identity

voice

Category

research

Inputs

individual

Julia Tanase

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Task: Conducts research, writes thesis
Compensation: other(La Trobe University Graduate Research Scholarship)

group of individuals

Community advisory group consisting of gender diverse people (3)

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Task: Consultation with the PhD researcher in different stages of the project about the appropriateness of study material and relevance of project contents
Recruitment: Personal contacts
Communication: Online meetings, written feedback
Barriers: Financial compensation of community advisory group members is limited due to limited funding
Compensation: paid

other resources

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