[Reprint] How Childhood LGBTQ+ Stigma Can Harm Adult Relationships

This is so important to those affected by LGBTQ+ stigma and those who love them, I am reprinting it in its entirety (under Creative Commons license).

Childhood experiences of LGBTQ+ stigma can harm romantic relationships decades later – psychologists explain how to reconnect with yourself and your partner

Difficult experiences you had as a child may be putting a wedge between you and your partner. Dmytro Betsenko/Moment via Getty Images

Melissa Gates, Binghamton University, State University of New York and Christina Balderrama-Durbin, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Childhood rejection, discrimination and bullying can affect your well-being as an adult. If your friends, family or community pushed you away because of your sexuality or gender, these childhood experiences of prejudice can also affect your future relationships.

Many LGBTQ+ people encounter difficult experiences as children, including abuse, neglect and challenges at home, because of their sexuality or gender. Other negative experiences – including bullying, witnessing your peers be harassed or ostracized, and the need to conceal your identity to protect yourself – may make it especially challenging to accept your sexuality or gender as an adult.

Developing a negative self-view as a result of these harmful experiences during your formative years is not uncommon. Feelings of shame or unworthiness can carry into your 20s, 30s and beyond, harming your mental health along with your ability to form and maintain romantic relationships.

Fortunately, making meaning of your early experiences can help you heal, reconnecting and strengthening your relationships as a result.

Internalized stigma harms relationships

Our psychology research team focuses on understanding the connection between childhood anti-LGBTQ+ experiences, well-being and relationship health.

We found that a factor called internalized stigma can notably affect the romantic relationships of LGBTQ+ people. Internalized stigma refers to when society’s negative views and biases toward a part of your identity shapes how you think and feel about yourself. This can influence how you view romantic relationships and how you interact with your romantic partners.

People with higher levels of internalized stigma report more conflicts and less satisfaction in their relationships. Research suggests that internalized stigma can negatively affect key aspects of romantic relationships that keep people satisfied with their partners, including trust, connection and intimacy.

[personal] Bragging About My Younger Daughter

My younger daughter, Rose, is finishing up her residency in Family Medicine. She's also a strong advocate for gender and sexual minority patients. And she's just been recognized for her work:

(DEIA - Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Access)  

Orlando Heavy on My Heart

“Where were you when you heard?” In my life, that question has referred to so many terrible events. The earliest one I remember was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I was in high school and was old enough to have vivid memories of walking down the corridor, not yet knowing what had happened but knowing it was something dreadful, the hushed voices, and most of all, the expression on the face of my favorite teacher as he told us the news. I recalled this while driving my younger daughter to her own high school and turning on the radio to hear, “The second tower is down!” To each generation, I thought. Columbine, Charleston, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, the Oklahoma City bombing, the list goes on.

My older daughter and I were returning from our college reunion when we stopped for lunch and I glanced at the newspaper rack and saw the news about the Orlando shooting. That same sense of surreal horror swept over me. Both of us had the thought that the world, our world anyway, would never be the same. In trying to grapple with events like this one or the others mentioned above, I find myself looking for events in my own life. That’s a thing we primates do, we put things into personal context.

I am intimately familiar with my own journey through the brutal murder of my mother, but that is not a good analogy. Her death, as devastating as it was, was an individual, one-on-one act of violence. Nobody blamed her or in any way implied she was somehow responsible for what happened to her. Closer emotionally are the stories my father used to tell of his boyhood in a small village in the Ukraine just after the Russian Revolution, when Cossacks would ride into town, line up all the Jewish boys, and shoot them. Today we find such acts heinous; nobody says the Jews deserved what they got at Auschwitz.

Yet that is exactly what some public figures have been saying about the young men and women who were having a night of dancing off the stress of their lives at Pulse. That is one of the ways in which this shooting stands apart from the others.

I found that as the days roll past, my distress at the Orlando shooting increased rather than diminishing. I kept having the thought, Except for not knowing many folks who go to night clubs, that could have been someone I love. That same daughter I was traveling with is part of the LGBT community. So are my other daughter and her wife. So is my sister and her partner. So are so many people I love.

That could have been my child or my sister or my brother or my best friend. That could have been me.

Guest Blog: Article Review: Differences in Health Risk Behaviors Across Understudied LGBT Subgroups

From Open Minded Health: 

I’ve been saying for years now that the phrase “LGBT community” is insufficient when it comes to health. It’s not one community — it is multiple communities. The social issues and health issues that a gay transgender man faces every day are different from the issues a bisexual cisgender woman faces every day. There are some similarities and grouping the communities together has been politically useful. But it should never be forgotten that L, G, B, and T all face different types of health concerns and have different civil rights battles to face.

A study came out in August that has to be one of my favorites this year. Researchers in Georgia surveyed over three thousand lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer people. They asked about health behaviors of all kinds. And then they did statistical analysis, comparing the various genders (cis male, cis female, trans male, trans female, genderqueer) and sexual orientations (lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, queer, straight). Let’s look at what they found!

• Diet and exercise: The researchers asked about fatty foods, eating while not hungry, quantity of vegetables and fruits eaten, and about hours and types of exercise. Transgender women had the least healthy diet of all genders. As a group, they were less likely to eat many fruits and vegetables, and more likely to drink sugared drinks and eat when they weren’t hungry. Both cisgender and transgender men were also less likely to eat many vegetables compared with other groups. Genderqueer people and gay cisgender men were most likely to exercise.

GUEST BLOG: Article review: Cancer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) populations

From Open Minded Health:

Gender and sexual minority health isn’t just about HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, and mental health. It’s also about cancers, and our exposures to risk factors for cancers. Why? Because everyone can get cancer, and we all need both preventative and therapeutic health care.

Cancer is not just one disease, which is why it’s been so difficult to “cure”. Cancer is when a cell mutates and grows out of control. The cells begin to invade other tissues, and can spread throughout the body. Any cell can become cancerous. And different cancers are caused by different things and have different treatments.

A recent paper, published online ahead of print, looked at the data surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender/transsexual (LGBT) populations and cancers. They specifically looked at cancers which may be more common in LGBT communities: anal, breast, cervical, colon/rectal, endometrial, lung, and prostate cancers.

Why might these cancers be more common in LGBT communities? Perhaps because of higher levels of risk factors like obesity, smoking, and certain infections. Or perhaps because of lack of preventative health care.

But what do the data say? What data do we even have? So far it looks like we don’t have much information. Most studies about cancers don’t ask about sexual orientation or gender identity. But let’s take the data one cancer type at a time, just as the paper did…