Intersectionality and the No-Finding Finding In Transgender Older Adults’ Narratives of Housing Precarity

Background & Purpose: The meaning of housing precarity for many transgender people is complicated by challenging experiences of injustice throughout their lives. In the United States, nearly one third of transgender adults have experienced homelessness in their lifetime and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and additional sexual and gender diverse (LGBTQ+) youth broadly have been found to be at 120 times greater risk of experiencing homelessness than those who identify as cisgender and heterosexual. This study applies intersectionality to understand the meaning of trans people’s narratives of housing precarity with the goal of developing actionable insight for the advancement of housing justice.

Methods: We conducted a sequential structural, dialogic, and visual narrative analysis of 20 biographical interviews and 5 portraits of transgender older adults who had experienced homelessness or housing precarity throughout their lives. There were three phases; in the first, we foregrounded intersectionality as a critical axiological and epistemological foundation for the study, and backgrounded trans and queer history while we formed interpretive questions. We then conducted multiple corpus readings of the transcripts and engaged in extensive reflexivity, which ultimately lead us to determine that a narrative analytical approach would be best suited to our questions. The second phase included the structural and dialogic narrative analyses where multiple rounds of coding were conducted in Dedoose software. The final phase involved the visual narrative analysis of the five portraits, guided by the findings from the structural and dialogic analyses.

Results: Our analysis yielded an unexpected finding – what we call the “no-finding finding” – whereby the challenges and trauma that housing precarity often engenders were rarely described in such terms. Within this main finding were two sub-findings; first, bracketing, where we claim that in the context of intersectional oppression, the meaning of housing precarity is at times nested within narratives of such profound struggle that lived experiences may be thematically underemphasized. Second, in the absence of emphasis on housing insecurity and its associated trauma, we found that participants exemplified a sense of pride and contentment with having survived into older age.

Conclusions: The no-finding finding represents the significant impact of intersectional oppression and trauma experienced across the life course for some transgender people. Critically, the lack of substantive material and themes associated with housing-related hardship does not equate to a lack of importance – rather, it demonstrates the opposite. This finding has implications for both the assumptions underlying housing justice policy and the advancement of narrative methodology rooted in intersectionality. Future research dedicated to an intersectional perspective to understand the complexity of social justice issues may explore the application of the no-finding finding – where an unforeseen lack of thematic emphasis is a possible entry point for other types of narrative analyses, such as structural, dialogic, and visual – to develop previously overlooked insights that promote social justice.