Community First: The Importance of Community Engaged Research with Transgender and Nonbinary Communities

APF Springfield Committee Member Dr. Jae Puckett explores the importance of, and strategies for, community-engaged research with transgender and nonbinary (TNB) communities. Dr. Puckett runs Trans-ilience (The Transgender Stress and Resilience Research Team) at Michigan State University, a community-engaged research team focused on supporting the health and well-being of transgender and nonbinary communities through research and advocacy.

By building trust and fostering meaningful partnerships with TNB communities throughout the research process, researchers can help ensure that their work is ethical, responsive, and reflective of the needs, priorities, and lived experiences of the communities it aims to support.

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Strengthening research through community partnership
Safety and trust are key to any research, but these factors are especially important when working with marginalized communities. Community engaged research is a valuable approach for building this strong foundation via meaningful collaboration throughout the research process. It’s important to note that meaningful community engagement is not a one-time activity; it requires building and sustaining relationships over time, and creating opportunities for communities to shape the research in ways that are responsive to their experiences and needs.

In my work with transgender and nonbinary (TNB) communities, I have found it critical to integrate community members into our efforts to ensure that community needs are front and center. In this blog post, I overview some of our research, discuss why it is particularly important when working with TNB communities, and highlight the ways our research team has integrated community engagement to enhance this work. 

What is community engaged research?
Community engaged research can take a variety of forms and is not limited to a single style or format. There is a spectrum of engagement – this can range from being community informed to community initiated, or even community led (Ket et al., 2019). What distinguishes these approaches is the degree of power, influence, and decision-making authority shared with community members. Depending on the project, engagement may involve partnering with individual community members, community organizations, or both throughout various stages of the research process.

At the lower end of this continuum, community members may be asked to provide input on a study idea, but may not be involved beyond that stage. At the upper end, community members may fully oversee the research in collaboration with the researchers, including decision-making  about the topic and design, implementing the study, and determining how the collected data is utilized. Community-engaged research can take various forms, each with their own principles, methods, and benefits. For the purpose of this blog, I focus more generally on community-engaged research as a whole.

Why is community engaged research important when working with trans and nonbinary communities?
Community engaged research is especially critical when working with transgender and nonbinary (TNB) communities. TNB communities have historically and currently been subjected to problematic research practices that disempower or pathologize these communities. Given these harms, there can be understandable skepticism or distrust from TNB communities about participating in research. 

Community engagement helps to address these potential harms by putting communities first and ensuring that findings, interventions, and resources are both relevant and accessible to TNB communities. Through doing so, research can better address the needs of TNB communities, rather than centering researcher assumptions about what is important. 

Community engaged research can also improve the quality of participant experiences. Research procedures may be more affirming, findings may be more likely to reach and be trusted by TNB communities, and community perspectives may reveal novel insights in their interpretation of data. For community members who are partners in the research, the engagement process can be affirming and empowering as well – a point I will revisit in this blog. Although community engaged research can be time intensive and comes with its own challenges, it strengthens the research and knowledge gained from a study and benefits the participants, the research team, and the community partners.

Examples from the Trans-ilience Team
I lead a community engaged research team at Michigan State University, called Trans-ilience: The Transgender Stress and Resilience Research Team. We strive to take a balanced approach of studying the hardships and strengths that TNB communities experience and the impacts on health and wellbeing. 

Community involvement looks different depending on the project we are working on, but our team is committed to ensuring that community members help shape our research and how we use our findings. Even as a TNB-led research team, we think it is important to integrate community members outside of academia to help guide this work. We have a shared value that TNB people should be included throughout the research process and that academic work should benefit the communities involved, not just researchers or the scientific literature. 

With all of this in mind, Trans-ilience established our current Community Advisory Board (CAB) about 7 years ago, and this board is broadly involved in our research efforts. The CAB is always connected to the work in some capacity, serving as a partner throughout various studies and initiatives. This enables us to build trust with the communities we serve, while also ensuring that community voices and needs are at the forefront of our work.

Depending on the study, the CAB may provide input on the topics studied, aims, methods, interpretation of findings, and dissemination of results. The CAB integrates into most of our work in various ways, whether that’s helping us to refine a research question, giving feedback on measures, or helping us to share research findings in ways that will directly impact TNB communities. Their involvement is sometimes very focused; for instance, they recently provided feedback to help strengthen our conceptualization and measure development of a TNB-focused resilience questionnaire. Other times, their involvement is more extensive, as seen in our work related to healthcare experiences for TNB people. In that realm, the CAB identified important practices that could improve care, and the research team brought in empirical literature to expand upon these areas. This collective effort resulted in a list of recommendations for providers, which we made publicly available on our website. We also translated this into a video series and an academic article published in collaboration with the CAB (Puckett et al., 2023). We were simultaneously working on a data-driven publication about TNB people’s suggestions for improving healthcare, which a CAB member joined as a co-author (Puckett et al., 2024). 

The CAB also helps us think beyond publishing the work in academic outlets, and guides us in ensuring our work makes a more tangible impact on TNB people’s lives. For example, a few years ago, we were working on a paper about the positive impact of legal gender affirmation (legal name and/or gender marker changes). As a result of discussions among our research team and the CAB, we decided to implement a program that helps local TNB people navigate making changes to their name or gender markers. The conversations with our CAB about the challenges community members were facing, in addition to the importance of supporting people who seek to make these legal changes, were critical to extending that work beyond academic realms. Bringing together the team’s lived experiences and the findings from our research, we developed partnerships with several local nonprofits, and have now been running this program for over 3 years. I’m proud to say that as a result of these efforts and local partnerships, we’ve helped nearly 300 TNB individuals navigate the legal gender affirmation process so far. 

More recently, we have collaborated closely with the CAB on the development of the Healing, Empowerment, and Affirmation for Resilience Transgender Communities Program (HEART), an intervention to promote resilience for TNB individuals. CAB members have played a very important role in this initiative, including co-designing the format and configuration of the program and the content. We are looking forward to sharing this in the coming year, and will be working with the CAB to design the study to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention. 

Impact on Community Members
When discussing community engaged research, we often focus on how it strengthens the research itself, whether through the quality of the interpretation of findings, or improving the practical application of the work. However, it can also meaningfully impact the community members who participate in the research. This is one aspect of co-impact that can come from participatory research (Banks et al., 2017). Participatory impact describes the ways that researchers or community partners come to be impacted by the process of the research itself, entailing changes in how one thinks about their experiences, skillset acquisition, empowerment, and so forth. 

In one of our research studies, we sought community input from TNB people on the minority stress model and how it fits with their lived experiences. In this study, we used participatory research methods to collect and analyze the data. This approach to focus groups (called YouthGO; Stacy et al., 2018) entailed generating data with participants, and then training participants in the basic steps of thematic analysis. Participants were then guided in their own analysis of the data from their focus group. At the conclusion of those focus groups, participants shared their experiences of the participatory methods used. These reflections highlighted four important takeaways about how the research process itself and how the use of participatory methods impacted them: 

1. Participatory Methods can Promote Comfort and Healing in Community. Our research team is TNB led and involves TNB community members in shaping this work, which many participants shared made them more comfortable participating. Participants also shared that being able to connect through this specific format of focus group provided them opportunities to learn from others and to rethink some of their own experiences. For example, one participant shared, “Thank you all for giving me this opportunity to, like, learn from you. Cause it’s definitely left me with lessons & experiences that I hadn’t previously considered.”
2. Engagement Processes Promote Insight. This approach to having participants analyze their own data brought on deeper reflection about the meaning of their experiences as well as shared and unique experiences across participants. As one participant said, “I do feel like I’m leaving with some different ways of thinking about things. So, I’m grateful for that.” These shifts in their thinking were specifically tied to the data analysis process and how that impacted their perspectives. 
3. Having Influence in Research Promotes Empowerment. Participatory methods allowed participants to shape the key takeaways from the study, and participants reflected on this being empowering for them. For example, a participant shared the following reflection on the findings they co-created with others: “But it also just feels good to be part of something like this that can help, you know, people in the future.”
4. Involvement in Research and with Other Participants Promotes Validation of Lived Experiences. There were a variety of sources of validation, including facilitator responses to participants’ stories, from fellow participants, from the information about minority stress reviewed at the start of the focus groups, and from generating themes in the data analysis portion of the focus groups. This participant exemplified this sentiment, when they shared “I can say it was just cathartic. But, like [name] was saying, I’m just like wow, I feel honored and heard, and like people have shown up and been like, ‘let me tell you’ and just feels good, you know.”

Although some of the benefits shared above can be seen in participating in affirming research more generally, it was clear that participants’ responses were driven by being in a TNB-led study, by a research team that integrated community input and prioritized participant influence and agency throughout the process. 

These impacts were from a single study, but could even be strengthened when community engagement is built through ongoing relationships. When community members have the opportunity to contribute across multiple projects and over longer periods of time, they can build deeper trust in the research process and understand that their expertise is valued. As we think about the overall impacts of community engaged research, we should continue to consider the positive and long-term impacts on the participants who make this work possible, too. 

Strategies and Reflections to Consider in TNB Community Engaged Research
If you’re interested in community engaged research, I want to offer a few strategies, reflections, and resources that might support your efforts. 

For starters, it is important to consider your goals for community engagement. As mentioned, there are a range of ways that you can approach this, from gathering community input to integrating community members or community organizations as partners, and there’s a spectrum for how engaged that process could be. It is helpful to be clear at the start of a project about your goals, and to come to some agreement about the level of community engagement you are aiming for. You might have limitations imposed that make it difficult to have deeper engagement – for example, perhaps you have a strict one year timeline for a project, and realistically, you might need to limit engagement to obtaining community input. With these limitations in mind, you can thoughtfully consider how to integrate community members, while being transparent about the degree of involvement and what this will look like in practice. You can also approach this with openness and decide on the level of involvement with the community members or organizations you’re working with, rather than having this be predetermined. 

It is also important to build deep and meaningful long-term relationships with those involved, whenever possible. If you’re able, researchers should strive to build partnerships that extend beyond a single project or grant cycle. Many marginalized communities have been subjected to extractive research practices that take knowledge or feedback but then provide little in return. Through having a strong and genuine relational foundation, this builds trust and rapport that will ensure more positive outcomes in the partnerships, and will hopefully provide openings to address any missteps that happen along the way. Another consideration is about honoring the community members’ or organizations’ input. If it is possible, paying folks for their participation can be very important to honor their time and contributions. You may also consider exploring co-authorship on publications, and take other steps to promote the development of community members or organizations you’re partnering with. This may include covering fees for a training that is related to a project needs, or skill development that will enhance their participation in the research process.

If you are new to community engaged research, here are a few questions to consider as you explore these options: 

• Who is this research for – academics and researchers and/or for TNB people (Minalga et al., 2022)? 
• Who identified this as an important area of study? 
• What voices have shaped your study aims or research design and what are the implications of this? 
• How will you ensure that this is a mutually beneficial relationship? 
• What processes will you have in place to address concerns that arise? 
• How will community members have power and influence over the work? 
• Are there limitations to how much you will be able to integrate meaningful changes to the research? 
• What stages of the research process will you have community involvement? 

I encourage you to reflect on these questions as you consider how community-engaged approaches can be integrated into your own research practice. This work is about so much more than a research strategy. It’s about committing to long-term, reciprocal relationships with communities and ensuring that research is conducted with TNB people, not just about them.

Resources for Learning About Community Engagement: 

• Marshall, Z., Kaposy, C., Brunger, F., & Welch, V. (2022). Trans research ethics: Challenges and recommendations for change. Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, 1(3–4), 187–210. https://doi.org/10.57814/2rv3-kf42
• Ricks, J. M., Arthur, E. K., Stryker, S. D., Yockey, R. A., Anderson, A. M., & Allensworth-Davies, D. (2022). A systematic literature review of community-based participatory health research with sexual and gender minority communities. Health Equity, 6(1), 640–657. https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2022.0039
• Shook, A. G., Lucas, R., Liang, C., Tordoff, D. M., Skytta, J. A. F., Kientz, J., Altman, M. R., & Ahrens, K. (2025). Navigating Challenges with IRB Review for Community‐Engaged Research with Transgender Youth in the United States. Ethics & Human Research, 47(6), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1002/eahr.70002
• Singh, A. A., Richmond, K., & Burnes, T. R. (2013). Feminist participatory action research with transgender communities: Fostering the practice of ethical and empowering research designs. International Journal of Transgenderism, 14(3), 93–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2013.818516
• Travers, R., Pyne, J., Bauer, G., Munro, L., Giambrone, B., Hammond, R., & Scanlon, K. (2013). ‘Community control’ in CBPR: Challenges experienced and questions raised from the Trans PULSE project. Action Research, 11(4), 403–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750313507093
• Vincent, B. W. (2018). Studying trans: recommendations for ethical recruitment and collaboration with transgender participants in academic research. Psychology & Sexuality, 9(2), 102–116. DOI: 10.1080/19419899.2018.1434558

• Four Corners TNB Health Research Advisory Network: https://howardbrown.org/era/research/community-based-research/ 
• Transcend the Binary’s Community Led Research: https://www.transcendthebinary.org/our-community-engaged-methods/ 

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References

Banks, S., Herrington, T., & Carter, K. (2017). Pathways to co-impact: action research and community organising. Educational Action Research, 25(4), 541–559. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2017.1331859 

Key, K. D., Furr-Holden, D., Lewis, E. Y., Cunningham, R., Zimmerman, M. A., Johnson-Lawrence, V., & Selig, S. (2019). The Continuum of Community Engagement in Research: A Roadmap for Understanding and Assessing Progress. Progress in community health partnerships : research, education, and action, 13(4), 427–434. https://doi.org/10.1353/cpr.2019.0064

Minalga, B., Chung, C., Davids, J. D., Martin, A., Perry, N. L., & Shook, A. (2022). Research on transgender people must benefit transgender people. The Lancet, 399, 628. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02806-3

Puckett, J. A., Wiklund, L. O., Louis, C., Gallik, C., Brown-Wren, L., Chu, H., Rodriguez, J., Langeni, N. S., & Strong, E. (2023). Clinical practice with transgender and gender diverse clients: Setting up an inclusive practice and training considerations. Practice Innovations. https://doi.org/10.1037/pri0000209

Puckett, J., Giffel, R., Brown, F., Gallik, C., Kimball, D., Chu, H., Mustanski, B. S., & Newcomb, M. E. (2024). Suggestions for improving healthcare for transgender and gender diverse people in the United States. International Journal of Transgender Health, 25(2), 233–250. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2022.2150736

Stacy, S. T., Acevedo-Polakovich, I. D., & Rosewood, J. (2018). Youth Go: An approach to gathering youth perspectives in out-of-school time programs. Afterschool Matters. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1195646

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APF’s Franklyn Springfield Awareness Fund is dedicated to funding efforts to disseminate information to combat stigma and discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ Community.

Community-engaged research is essential to building knowledge that is ethical, relevant, and impactful. Your support allows APF to continue investing in research and programs that elevate LGBTQIA+ voices, address pressing community needs, and create a more equitable future.

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