Stacee Reicherzer

I have to begin this week’s blog entry by explaining that I’m a union gal of old, having become a steward with the Communication Workers of America shortly after beginning my first career in telecommunications. Through those times, as well as in my later phone company years as a manager, I came to understand and respect the give and take that came from having a collective bargaining unit (our union) in assuring that the company’s logical goals of profitability were made with account given to the rights and needs of the workers who were building that profit.

I’ve been working with the LGBT community since 2003 when I began my Practicum experience during graduate school. As the resident transgender counselor, I was seen as a natural fit for all of the transgender clients who were seeking services. This was a good thing because I had a strong desire to give back. A lot of the work I ended up doing, as a result of transgender issues emerging as a specialization for me, was diagnosing Gender Identity Disorder. You see, trans people are required by their surgeons to have letters indicating their mental candidacy and readiness to undergo gender affirming surgeries and in some cases, hormone replacement therapies. What happens, then, is that people come to counseling solely for the purpose of procuring a letter, seeing it as a means to an end, or a hoop through which to jump on their way to living life fully. In honesty, this was certainly how I saw it when I underwent my own diagnostic process in 1993.

A friend recently forwarded me an interesting invitation from a publishing company seeking fiction submissions “by and about transgender people and culture.” I at-first filed the email away in that folder where I store projects that sound cool but that I know, deep down, I’ll never look at again until I’m frantically deleting in an effort to free space on my hard drive. My reality is that I’m never short of writing projects; and , while whimsical and fun, this project didn’t sound particularly worthy of a time investment when the payoff would be low in academic value when compared to journal articles and textbook chapters.

New PhD students talk a lot about their fears of doing research. Math anxiety seems to bleed its way into statistics and research methods courses. The consequence is that students develop a lot of self-defeating talk that centers around beliefs that the art of counseling does not marry well with scientific approaches to problem solving. Blame it on many things- that counselors do not typically score “I”s on the Holland, that counselor educators don’t do enough research and therefore do not mentor students in preparing them, that inadequate time and dollars are allocated for counselors to carrying out research projects. All of these things, indeed, hold grains of truth. However. I’ve found that a great deal of research on human experiences is best served by the skills and values that are the domain of the counseling profession. To illustrate this, I’ll share my experiences in my new case study.

Last week, a former client whom I hadn’t seen in over a year called me and asked for a session to debrief a depressive episode that had occurred over her Thanksgiving holiday. I was able to schedule her for the requested two-hour session, which allowed us the time and space we needed to not only address the issue at hand, but the time she needed to reflect on her journey. In truth, the time together was valuable for me, as well.