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Abstract

Black trans people frequently deal with the violent consequences of systemic erasure. Particularly, Black trans people experience structural racism and oppression that socially and economically isolates them, creating conditions for a unique experience of loneliness. In this essay, I engage queer of color critique to explore structural forces that work together to systematically and violently exclude Black trans people. The purpose of this conceptual piece is to advance loneliness theory to include structural isolation to explain manifestations of loneliness due to discrimination and oppression of Black trans people. I discuss my motivations and methods to engage in this work, my theoretical framework, followed by a critique of the theoretical underpinnings of loneliness research. Later, I identify and define three manifestations of structural isolation—anti-Black racism, cisheterosexism, and neoliberalism. Then, I discuss how these forces work together to produce structural isolation among Black trans people and how that isolation places them at risk for loneliness. I conclude this article with a discussion on how queer of color critique provides a framework for a more inclusive analysis of race, gender, and class in social work studies. Finally, I put forward my perception of the critical implications for social work.

Keywords

Black transgender loneliness structural isolation queer of color critique

Introduction

Loneliness is characterized as an unpleasant experience when social bonds do not match up with a person's needs or desires for social contact (Perlman & Peplau 1981, 1985). The persistent experience of loneliness can have a significant negative impact on one's mental health and wellbeing (Holt-Lunstad, 2017). Similarly, social isolation, characterized by an objective lack of social connection or social ties, is one factor that increases the likelihood of experiencing loneliness (National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, 2020). The large body of research on loneliness within social work and mental health literature primarily focuses on maladaptive individual-level personality traits and social factors that precipitate loneliness (Perlman & Peplau, 1981; 1985; Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018). Few studies consider structural factors such as racism and cisheterosexism that arguably also play a role in the production of loneliness.

Research shows that discrimination and oppression are factors that can socially isolate racialized gender and sexual minorities (Nelson et al., 2021), yet rarely included in loneliness scholarship (specific to mental health and social work) are the experiences of Black transgender people. To that end, the purpose of this conceptual piece is to advance a theoretical and conceptual framework of structural isolation to explain manifestations of loneliness due to discrimination and oppression of Black trans people. Using queer of color critique as my primary framework, I explore what structural forces work together to isolate Black trans people from broader society, creating conditions for loneliness?

Background

Loneliness and Social Isolation

In the United States, approximately three in five adults are lonely (Cigna, 2018). Many experts consider loneliness a public health concern, with some going as far as calling it an epidemic (Brown et al., 2022; Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018). Loneliness presents a health risk equal to smoking, obesity, and air pollution and it is tied to early mortality (Holt-Lunstad, 2017). It is also associated with distressing mental health symptoms and disorders including suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety (Mushtaq et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2018).

Like loneliness, social isolation is associated with distressing physical health symptoms and disorders (Holt-Lunstad, 2017). Specifically, social isolation is associated with an increased risk of dementia, heart disease, stroke, and premature death (Brown et al., 2022; Holt-Lunstad, 2017). It is also associated with risky health behaviors including smoking, physical inactivity, and poor sleep (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015). In the extant social work literature, social isolation is largely studied among older adults, but newer scholarship is emerging, indicating a need to understand the unique developmental circumstances to address isolation across the lifespan and in diverse groups (Brown et al., 2022).

An important contradiction exists concerning loneliness and Black trans people. According to Mosley, loneliness is regarded as a universal and “proper” emotion, yet Black trans people are often regarded as “improper” subjects (Mosley, 2022). This contradiction is exposed through numerous studies that often avoid analyses of race, gender, and sexuality based on an assumption that affect transcends these issues (Mosley, 2022). Black queer embodied theory, therefore, takes a back seat to favoring universal experience. While loneliness studies that center on the experiences of Black trans adults are limited, there are studies that address loneliness and/or isolation either with white older adults, Black older adults, white lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adults, or white transgender older adults separately. In each case, the authors concluded that there were structural factors that played a role in perceptions of loneliness (Agosto et al., 2019; Hughes, 2016; Taylor, 2019; Taylor, 2020; Taylor & Nguyen, 2020; ; Testa et al., 2015). Thus, a person at the intersection of Black and trans may experience confounding factors of discrimination and oppression that may contribute to greater loneliness.

Structural Isolation

Exploring loneliness among Black trans people necessarily requires a critical Black queer framework to analyze issues of power at the axes of race, gender, and class within the context of isolation. Therefore, I consider queer of color critique alongside other theories of loneliness in order to put forward the concept of structural isolation, which I define as the ideological, socioeconomic, cultural, societal, and institutional structures that implicitly or explicitly exclude people based on biased beliefs of normative racialized gender and sexual subjectivities. Specifically, I draw on the analytics of anti-Black racism, cisheterosexism, and neoliberalism as forces that amalgamate to structurally isolate Black trans people.

In the paragraphs that follow, I discuss my motivations and methods to engage in this work. Then, I describe my theoretical framework, followed by a critique of the theoretical underpinnings of loneliness research. Later, I identify and define three manifestations of structural isolation—anti-Black racism, cisheterosexism, and neoliberalism. Next, I discuss how these forces work together to produce structural isolation among Black trans people and how that isolation places them at risk for loneliness. I conclude this article with a discussion on how queer of color critique provides a framework for a more inclusive analysis of race, gender, and class in social work studies. Finally, I put forward my perception of the critical implications for social work.

Positionality

My motivation for this paper comes from my lived experience as a Black trans man and scholar seeking to understand the historical, economic, and political circumstances that impact Black trans people and their wellbeing. Academically, I’ve been interested in loneliness research for about 5 years after evaluating a peer-based community mental health program for those with serious mental illness. Approximately 60% of the participants reported loneliness in that study (Jenkins et al., 2022). I wanted to learn more about why, in a model designed to increase social connectedness, so many individuals were still reporting feelings of loneliness.

As a Black trans masculine person, I felt that belongingness and loneliness seemed to be tied to racism and cisheterosexism, but I did not have the language or education to articulate it. As I was meditating on what produces or elicits loneliness, I read a Johnson and LeMaster (2020) piece in which they described race, gender, and sexuality as the “colonial technologies” that maintain white supremacy, wealth accumulation, and power (p. 3). While this rang true for me, I wanted to explore what specific tools of white supremacy may be driving social exclusion for Black trans people and does that social exclusion produce a unique Black trans loneliness experience.

Method

I chose to engage in a queer of color analysis to explore the structural forces that isolate Black trans people from place and others and how that isolation may give rise to a unique experience of loneliness. Specifically, I used graverobber method (Tinsley & Richardson, 2014) to help pull together literature from various sources and across disciplines including popular culture, history, art, social science, and the humanities to reveal the connections between racism, cisheterosexism, classism, and loneliness. Borrowing from prominent queer of color critique scholars, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley and Matt Richardson, graverobbing is a way of unearthing “racism, misogyny, and transphobia that dominant narratives keep invisible…” (2014, p. 153). Tinsley and Richardson described the method as a metaphor for “exhuming” the lost and hidden stories of our ancestors and ourselves.

My reasoning for using this method and phrasing was the intuitive connection to reclaiming the stories that are missing, lost, hidden, and buried in loneliness research. Therefore, in tandem with queer of color theory and my lived experience, I used graverobber method as a way to discover the stories beneath the surface, within and across disciplines, and reassembled them in ways that told the story of structural isolation and Black trans loneliness. Even the way I sourced the literature for this article spoke to a graverobber methodology. As a social work scholar who dabbles in cultural studies and the humanities, I used my course syllabi from Dr. Marlon Bailey's queer of color critique course as a starting point and then scavenged the references for additional sources (Bailey, 2021). I also reviewed sources recommended by colleagues and organized the articles using reference software. Then, I synthesized the readings to identify themes and concepts that may contribute to or were adjacent to isolation (e.g., loss). Queer of color critique's role in this work was to provide a framework to critique theories of loneliness—namely, attribution theory, the evolutionary theory of loneliness, and Alberti's feminist perspective on neoliberal manifestations of loneliness. My position and relationship to this work served as a lens to interpret the examples based on my living experience and academic understanding.

Theoretical Framework: Queer of Color Critique and Structural Isolation

Using queer of color critique is an important shift in social work studies on isolation and loneliness. Queer of color critique incorporates aspects of intersectionality, which is a commonly used feminist approach in the social work discipline. In practice, intersectionality often does not include an expansive view of gender, nor does it entail a nuanced analysis of power and privilege as it relates to race, gender, sexuality, and ability (Bubar et al., 2016; de Vries, 2015). Therefore, issues, experiences, and concerns for Black trans people are often hidden in critical social work studies. The omission of Black trans experience presents an opportunity to bring queer of color critique into conversation with social work studies to expand how we include and understand Black trans experience.

Queer of color critique is an epistemological intervention that extends intersectionality (Brockenbrough, 2015). It builds on and draws inspiration from Black feminism, materialist analysis, post-structuralism, and queer theory (Ferguson, 2004). Queer of color critique is a constellation of ideas and concepts that help describe and understand the complicated links between race, gender, and sexuality. A key assumption of queer of color critique is that racism is understood to be sustained through norms of whiteness and cisheteronormativity and that gender and sexuality are regulated differently in Black bodies (Ferguson, 2004; Reddy, 2011). Specific to structural isolation, the links between anti-Black racism, cisheterosexism, and classism come together to isolate Black trans people from themselves and others. These structural manifestations are designed to force norms of whiteness and cisheteronormativity onto citizens to maintain social control (Reddy, 2011). Any deviation from said norms is often met with punitive action that is intended to sever social ties such as incarceration or institutionalization (e.g., residential treatment and social assistance programs). More specifically, these ideologies of normativity are designed to strip Black trans people from any sense of connection to themselves, their bodies, or others to force conformity to “respectable” ways of being and belonging in the world (Bey, 2021; Mosley, 2022).

This idea of connection to self and others is noted in Mosley's (2022) work on Black trans loneliness. Mosely theorizes Black trans loneliness using Blanco's lyrics in their autobiographical pop song, “Loner.” Mosley discusses similar sentiments (to loneliness) that come through in Blanco's lyrics that express feelings of longing and intimacy subverted by their gender expansiveness, recovery, and HIV status. The loneliness expressed in the song was contextualized by Blanco's experience of Black gender expansiveness and racial belongingness (Mosley, 2022). The “Blackqueernesss” expressed by Blanco's work highlights the imbrications of structural isms that sever social ties relevant to the notion of structural isolation (Crawley, 2018; Mosely, 2022). As humans, our axes of identity cannot be understood separately, nor are they static. Race, gender, and sexuality are linked in such a way that they cannot be disentangled, and can be understood differently in different contexts (Collins, 2000, Crenshaw, 1990; Ferguson, 2004). In the subsequent paragraphs, I use queer of color critique to discuss the limitations of underlying theories of loneliness to explain structural forces that undergird loneliness. Later, I define and discuss three co-constitutive manifestations of structural isolation—anti-Black racism, cisheterosexism, and neoliberalism.

Critiquing Theories of Loneliness

Early research on loneliness was grounded in attribution theory and focused largely on the relationship between depression and mental health, which is still seen in the literature today (Garro et al., 2022; Perlman and Peplau, 1981). Attribution theory explains why behaviors or events occur. It was developed to explain success and failure, arguing that one attributes their ability to control the causes of successes and failures to either internal or external forces (Weiner, 1976). Perlman and Peplau (1981) determined Weiner's model was appropriate for loneliness studies since “in western societies, one's social relationships are indicative of success” (p. 47). Perlman and Peplau (1981, 1985) used attribution theory to address the lack of conceptual frameworks to explain the motivational aspects of loneliness (Perlman & Peplau, 1981). On the one hand, the argument was that lonely people did not possess the motivation to resolve their loneliness, and on the other hand, loneliness acted as an alert system that drives one to initiate social connection. In either case, attribution theory pathologically locates loneliness in the individual. The onus to resolve loneliness is placed squarely on the individual, ignoring the social, structural, and systemic conditions that may also drive loneliness.

Building on the concept of loneliness acting as an alarm system and in contrast to an individualistic perspective on loneliness, Cacioppo and Cacioppo (2018) believed that loneliness had been unfairly associated with poor social skills and proposed instead the Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness (ETL). They believed that loneliness was not due to individual shortcomings, rather, the ETL posits that social and environmental factors are important aspects of loneliness. They suggest that, socially, we have moved from a dependency on mutual support to more individualistic pursuits in modern times and circumstances (Becker et al., 2021; Cacioppo and Cacioppo, 2018). That discrepancy presents a tension between the desire for social relationships and the need to protect oneself in an increasingly competitive society. Said another way, exposure to modern neoliberal political and economic forces contributes to a dilemma where one is grappling between the need for connection and protective social isolation.

While this is an important reframing of loneliness, there remains a need to incorporate critical Black queer theories to examine how oppression and stigma at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class undergird manifestations of loneliness. This is partially addressed by Alberti (2019), who introduces neoliberalism as contributing factor to loneliness. Alberti discusses neoliberalism in relation to older adults and retirement. Once someone is presumed to have lost their economic value, they are discarded in society, and structures are built to move them away from economic and community participation. Alberti goes on to discuss how neoliberalism is often credited with creating acute conditions such as homelessness, trauma and abuse, and lack of access to services, leaving underlying and other critical components of wellbeing unsupported. For example, those with complex circumstances such as homelessness, HIV, and/or trauma history are most at risk for loneliness, yet, meeting their acute needs becomes the singular point of intervention rather than a holistic approach that may consider resources for social and emotional support. Suffice it to say, addressing structural forces such as racism and transphobia are an after-afterthought to address loneliness without first developing a grammar to explain structural isolation.

Queer of color critique is well suited to develop this grammar. Black trans and queer-centered methodologies that disrupt dominant epistemological and ontological narratives can exhume structural drivers of isolation that underpin loneliness at the intersection of race, gender, and class. In a 2022 special issue of Feminist Theory, several authors discussed the myriad ways feminist theories can trouble and disrupt dominant narratives of loneliness. More specifically, the authors suggested several structural forces that may produce loneliness, including settler colonialism (Cvetkovich, 2022), medicalization (Jones, 2022), white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy (Magnet & Dunnington, 2022), anti-Blackness, transphobia, and HIV stigma (Mosley, 2022). Building on a structural feminist approach, queer of color critique is best suited to situate and center Black trans manifestations of loneliness through structural isolation.

Findings From the Literature

Anti-Black Racism

Anti-Blackness is the foundation of white supremacy upon which the United States was built (Bassichis & Spade, 2014; Sexton, 2010, 2012). Queer of color theorists argue that white supremacy is maintained through racialized social and bodily control (Ferguson, 2004). This is accomplished by creating hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality and by regulating bodies based on norms of whiteness (Ferguson, 2004; Reddy, 2011). Racialized norms of gender and sexuality reinforce the exclusion of Black trans people, often through violent means that seek to sever social bonds and communal belonging (Ferguson, 2004; Reddy, 2011). Inspired by Hortense Spillers, Calvin Warren (2017) engages ontology to answer a question of self-representation or manifesting a Black trans self in an anti-Black world. I cite Warren in this context not to take up a nihilist position, but to set up the tension between anti-Blackness and being/belonging. He raises an important question: if Black people have been historically reduced to a “thing” to justify captivity, can they exist in the world as a “self” rather than a “thing?” Related to structural isolation, I ask, how in an anti-Black world can Black trans people belong in a society that regards them as (un)belonging?

This is an important question for social work and how it understands itself as a helping profession within the confines of anti-Blackness. The dehumanization of Black trans people though gendered anti-Black racism is replicated within social work and health and human services when institutions that are charged with providing care and support, instead, become sites of exclusion. In a society that is built on anti-Black racism and violence, when Black trans people seek help, rather than being met by supportive organizational and community inclusion, they are often forced into punitive interactions with institutions that have historically harmed them such as residential treatment, emergency rooms, prisons, and jails (Sherman et al., 2021).

Cisheterosexim

Transphobia is associated with greater felt loneliness in transgender adults (Gates & Hughes, 2021). Transphobia is an inter/intrapersonal manifestation of cisheterosexism. Cisheterosexism is another structural regulatory technology that under white supremacy, imposes gendered norms based on essentialist notions of gender as binary and static (Medina, 2021; Stryker, 2017). In queer of color critique and Black trans studies, Blackness and transness are inextricably linked in part due to how the Black body and the trans body are made illegible through the lens of whiteness and cisheteronormativity (Bey, 2017). In addition, trans existence within Blackness is uniquely challenged since the Black social identity was created for and continues to be regulated in such a way as to render Blacks nonhuman and enslaveable (Snorton, 2017). For example, Christine Jorgensen, a white trans woman and a military veteran was able to demonstrate acceptable transness through the norms of white middleclass womanhood (Skidmore, 2011). On the contrary, Lucy Hicks Anderson was a Black trans woman who, upon marrying her husband, was the first trans woman to be tried and sentenced to federal prison for lying on a marriage certificate and “impersonating” a woman (Snorton, 2017). These two contradicting examples demonstrate the persistent structural isolation of Black trans bodies due to cisheterosexist and anti-Black racist ideologies.

Furthermore, structural isolation derived from cisheterosexist ideology is not only created and upheld by cultural outsiders but recreated by cultural insiders (Bey, 2017). As much as those of us who are targeted for discrimination want others to find solidarity in our shared oppressions, rejection and exclusion can come from others who are similarly marginalized to align themselves with whiteness (Bey, 2017). In some Black communities and families, transphobia can illicit rejection (Snorton, 2017). Family and peers may disown or reject their loved ones altering their sense of place and belonging (Franklin & Tanter, 2021). Bailey and Richardson's (2019) work, situated in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), describes a Black common sense understanding of masculinity and gender that is rooted in white supremacy. Institutionally, this may manifest as heavily gendered codes of conduct or racialized norms and behavioral expectations that exclude Black trans people (Bailey & Richardson, 2019). These self-imposed respectability politics necessarily isolate Black trans people from important Black spaces of belonging.

Neoliberalism

Alongside anti-Blackness and cisheterosexism, neoliberalism is a violent, elusive, yet diffuse economic and political paradigm that transforms all human and cultural value into economic value (Hong, 2015; Reddy, 2019). The ideology is powerful because it is not understood as an ideology but rather acts as common sense (Caplan & Ricciardelli, 2016). Through this common sense, neoliberalism disguises its role in maintaining white supremacy through the regulation of racialized cisheteronormativity (Reddy, 2019). Neoliberalism is characterized by principles of individualism, freedom of choice, merit, privatization, deregulation, and outsourcing (Caplan & Ricciardelli, 2016; Hong, 2015; Monbiot, 2016). By the 1980s, neoliberal austerity was far-reaching and included tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, outsourcing, and privatization (Caplan & Ricciardelli, 2016; Monbiot, 2016). By 1996, the social welfare gains of the Civil Rights movement were near completely dismantled (Reddy, 2019). Regressive legislative actions and budget cuts generated within a white supremacist system permit social exclusion for those most marginalized though socioeconomic deprivation and access to institutional support.

For Black trans people, the inability to access institutional support (e.g., social services, healthcare, and education) is indicative of the isolating power of neoliberalism's relationship with racism, sexism, and gender normativity. The social welfare state distributes assistance through strict regulation of normative social behavior citing neoliberal values of deservingness, merit, competition, and social worth (Reddy, 2011). Each of these values is a powerful instrument of white supremacy that is designed to benefit capital and commodify Black bodies (Ferguson, 2004; Reddy, 2011). As a racialized gender project, neoliberalism, in service to capital and free markets, constitutes the Black trans body as deviant to justify our place in society as surplus labor (Ferguson, 2004). When the Black trans body is neither deserving of social assistance nor respectable labor participation, Black trans people often find themselves forced to fringes of underground society and sexual economies (Ferguson, 2004). This further reinforces the narrative of the “deviant” Black trans body unworthy of social inclusion. With this in mind, I understand neoliberalism as a tool that severs social ties through austerity and the regulation of normative racialized gender performance.

Discussion

Anti-Black Racism, Cisheterosexism, and Neoliberalism

There are several ways in which anti-Black racism, cisheterosexism, and neoliberalism work together to produce structural isolation. Specifically, anti-Black racism and cisheterosexism undergird neoliberal ideals and reinforce what constitutes acceptable personhood. In Freedom with Violence, Reddy (2011) argues that the State authorizes freedom and personhood through an intelligible and rational performance of heteronormativity. The “rational being” is prescribed by the State through its institutions whose aim is to maintain whiteness and normativity through knowledge production, citizenship (Hong, 2015), and legal rights (Spade, 2015). For example, in social welfare policy, social assistance is predicated on deservingness and is most often allocated through a selective process of means testing, which has been criticized as ableist, heteropatriarchal, and racist (Hong, 2015; Minoff, 2020). Deservingness is based on one's ability to produce capital, and those who cannot produce have no value or function in society (Alberti, 2019). Thus, any deviation from normativity is punishable through state-sanctioned, violent erasure. Reddy writes, “Legitimate violence can thrive only when its enactment produces excludable groups, formations, practices, and meanings” (2011, p. 39). Therefore, the violent exclusion of the racialized queer subject is permissible because they are deemed non-normative, nonhuman, and exploitable.

Similar to deservingness, anti-Black racism, and cisheterosexism work together to prop up neoliberal ideologies by creating a false sense of merit and competition that requires individual versus more cooperative approaches. Human value and wellbeing are then based on material wealth accumulation at the expense of social connection and mutual support (Monbiot, 2016). It weakens our ability to form community and a sense of social solidarity (Becker et al., 2021). The progress of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was replaced by the belief that human worth was based on individual material wealth accumulation and high social status (Monbiot, 2016). According to Darity and Mullen (2020), wealth has become the primary avenue to freedom, choice, and access to social goods. It is a proxy by which to measure general wellbeing. This neoliberal flattening of human life to individual economic value has severe isolating consequences for people outside of white, cisheteronormative identities.

At the heart of deservingness, merit, and competition, neoliberalism generates structural isolation through social and bodily control. White supremacy endures through systematic and intentional mechanisms that maintain social control. The policing of Black trans bodies situates them at the bottom of a hierarchy of societal worth and value. Hong (2015) argues that the 1965 Moynihan Report was an early exemplar case of neoliberal ideas taking shape, particularly compulsory gender normativity, by characterizing the failings of the Black community as the fault of a decaying family structure and respectable social and domestic behavior. Respectability is policed along interlocking axes of identity including race, gender, and sexuality by which the State deploys its institutions to violently maintain normative expectations. Institutional exclusion through policing of gender and sexual norms pushes queer Black trans bodies to the fringes of society, making them vulnerable to violence and isolation from social bonds and support. Institutions regulate Black trans bodies through the threat of or actual over-criminalization and institutionalization, using jails, prisons, and mental institutions to sever social connections (Sherman et al., 2021). Black trans people often find themselves isolated from meaningful relationships, community, and State recognition since their bodies are regarded as violating a rational performance of gender (Reddy, 2011).

On the contrary, institutional erasure and existing on the fringes do not always equal invisibility (Koch-Rein et al., 2020). In many cases, a deviant characterization can result in a person being hypervisible. This is often highlighted by fetishization and may lead to ostracization, supplanting of any notion that they are deserving of belonging in polite society (Ferguson, 2004). Che Gossett (2017) describes trans visibility as a trap that is premised on the idea that “to bring a select few into view, others must disappear into the background, and this is always a political project that reinforces oppression” (p. 183). They go on to describe neoliberal trans visibility politics as an ongoing legacy in the afterlife of slavery and that concepts like “cisgender” cannot account for the racial ungendering that permitted captivity and segregation. The legacy of slavery's presence is felt and seen in current anti-trans legislation, where social and bodily control is reinforced through the logics of anti-Black racism and cisheterosexism. Bathroom bills use binary and essentialist viewpoints that harken back to images of the Jim Crow south which labeled sex-segregated spaces for men, women, and colored folks, highlighting that gender has always been invisibilized to serve a colonial legacy.

Invisibility and hypervisibility can in one instance erase and isolate transness and Blackness while simultaneously bringing negative unwanted attention that adversely impacts meaningful social connection. For example, crimes that are considered to be sexual and that “go against the natural order” are described as crimes against nature statutes (CANS) (Cornell Law School, 2020). Black women are largely overrepresented in CANS and since there remain challenges with appropriate data collection for trans people, it can only be assumed that Black trans women are also overrepresented in CANS (Ritchie, 2012; Stotzer, 2017). A study in Louisiana found that Black women in Orleans parish made up 30% of the population, yet they were 80% of the registered sex offender list, primarily because of solicitation of sex work (Barlow, 2017). For Black trans women, being registered on a sex offender list creates a hypervisible, unwanted negative stereotype and renders them an extremely socially isolated and perhaps lonely group.

In sum, deservingness, merit and competition, social and bodily control, and invisibility/hypervisibility demonstrate how anti-Black racism, cisheterosexism, and neoliberalism work together in various ways and in various contexts to produce structural isolation among Black trans people. Similar to the relationship between social isolation and loneliness, I argue that structural isolation poses a similar risk for loneliness due to the ideological, socioeconomic, cultural, societal, and intuitional structures that exclude and erase Black queer genders. This presents a need for the inclusion of Black queer theories and frameworks to highlight issues of importance for Black trans people. Incorporating queer of color critique into social work research and pedagogy frameworks would be beneficial to the inclusion of Black trans issues including isolation and loneliness.

Queer of Color Critique as a Social Work Framework

The assumptions that often underpin mental health and wellbeing [and social work as a discipline] place cishetero, white, and nondisabled clients as the norm in knowledge production and practice (Bubar et al., 2016). Said another way, when mental health practitioners and social workers teach in the classroom, support clients, and conduct research, the metric for healthy, well, sane, able, and successful is based on a white cisheteronormative experience. For example, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) is one of our most important, diagnostic, and guiding tools for mental health. However, when we interrogate the DSM and its origins, we uncover that the institution of psychiatry and mental health was created for social control; to pathologize race, gender, and sexuality (Johnson, 2019). For example, during chattel slavery, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a well know psychologist at the time, identified a disease concerning slaves called drapetomania, that “caused them to have the compulsive urge to run away” that was unnatural or unhealthy for the slave. This ostensibly justified the need to systematically punish, capture, and hold indefinitely, Black people under the guise of helping or healing what was deemed unnatural ways of being (Perzichilli, 2020). In addition, being lesbian or gay was in the DSM as a disorder up until 1980, and gender diversity and neurodiversity are still listed in the DSM today and used as gatekeeping mechanisms (Johnson, 2019).

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, in her book, Ezili's Mirrors (2018), quotes Recovery Connection saying, “without specific gay-friendly treatment components, an LGBT person is at increased risk of leaving treatment without addressing the underlying issues relating to substance abuse and addiction” (p. 145). She goes on to say, using Whitney Houston as an example, that “Whitney may have gone in and out of rehab like any diva…but she also went in and out of rehab like any Black queer, unable to find a recovery program…that could teach her how to breathe in the particular, black Atlantic waters that were her home” (p. 145). This quote highlights the importance of using Black trans theories to explain Black trans experience in all of its complexity and nuance. While Tinsley was specifically talking about substance use recovery, it is rational to assume that the same is true with any social problem including loneliness. By continuing to center the white cishetero subject and exclude the Black trans subject, we recreate over and over again, interventions that cannot adequately serve Black trans people.

Conclusion and Implications for Social Work

In this article, I explored how structural isolation systematically and violently erases anyone that does not conform to normative expectations of racialized gender, resulting in social and economic deprivation that creates conditions for loneliness. I used structural isolation to articulate how the social forces of anti-Blackness, cisheterosexism, and neoliberalism work together to manifest a unique Black trans experience of loneliness. Additionally, I used the term violent erasure to emphasize the power of racialized anti-trans antagonism to erase and devalue the existence of Black trans people through manifold structural and institutional mechanisms. Anti-Black racism, cisheterosexism, and neoliberalism expressed at the institutional, societal, and community levels work to erase the existence of Black trans people through strict regulation of racialized cisheteronormative expectations. Social work, as constituent practitioners, researchers, and educators of social welfare find ourselves in a position to advocate with or be complicit in upholding racist and cisheterosexist narratives.

Centering Black trans experiences in loneliness research helps social work scholars to more comprehensively inform social work students and practitioners on the myriad ways in which loneliness can manifest, including discrimination and oppression. Furthermore, similarly marginalized groups who face systemic barriers to connection and belonging may also benefit from a nuanced understanding of how structural forces work together to uphold racist, sexist, classist, and ableist notions in our society. Rather than forgoing mental healthcare and support, Black trans people would benefit from a social worker who can articulate a nuanced analysis of power and privilege, and one who acknowledges systemic harm and how that impacts one's relationships with self and others. In social work classrooms, sharing research and uplifting the experiences of Black trans people may help to counter narratives of erasure and isolation and create a pathway through which recognition and belongingness can occur (Gruzina, 2011).

Social workers must engage with the Black trans community specifically to understand the living experience and nuance of Black trans lives. This requires a paradigm shift in how American social welfare policy researchers, educators, and advocates disavow harmful narratives and adopt an epistemological view that knowledge from the Black trans community is an important point of intervention in the unlearning of harmful assumptions and stereotypes based on heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. This means stepping back and making space for the Black trans-led efforts to create a future in their image. In this way, knowledge production becomes a tool for social workers to move beyond cultural competence and engage with scholarship that challenges what is known about the human experience. Social work researchers, advocates, and educators must responsibly bring forward the Black trans experience to broaden the profession's understanding of the structural harm that may impact an individual's sense of belonging.

Future research on loneliness and social isolation should specifically center Black trans people to better understand the factors that contribute to loneliness among this population as well as the impact loneliness has on their health and wellbeing. This shift will necessarily require researchers to broaden demographic categories to include gender-expansive identifiers. Additionally, more qualitative studies are needed to explore how Black trans people understand and recognize loneliness and how it manifests in their lives. Also, a systematic review of the isolation and loneliness literature among Black trans people is needed to determine what, if any, research adequately includes the population. While not the focus of this essay, COVID-19 and police brutality are recent examples of how institutional events, circumstances, and practices play a role in the exclusion and violent erasure of Black trans people. Using a queer of color theoretical approach, future research could explore the impact of recent events on Black trans people's feelings of isolation and loneliness and its impact on their overall wellbeing.

While this paper presents a meaningful contribution to isolation and loneliness literature and brings queer of color theory into conversation with social work studies, I must address the limitations in this paper. First, I did not conduct a systematic review of the literature on loneliness and social isolation; therefore I may have missed important articles that included Black trans people. Second, I must acknowledge my growth and understanding of queer of color critique. This conceptualization is a work in process. This paper reflects a singular point in time and I acknowledge that my current understanding will grow in the coming years. Additionally, my position as a Black trans man and scholar is one point of view among many. Many scholars and community members are doing the work of thinking about and more importantly, creating, spaces of belonging for Black trans people. At present, I bring this theory into conversation with social work to demonstrate the epistemological and ontological limitations on the topic of loneliness and isolation. Black trans peoples’ experience with isolation and loneliness may in some ways be universal and in other ways be different from others who do not face such extreme and confounding oppression. Furthermore, a critical analysis of how oppressive systems work together to structurally isolate Black trans people is a necessary and important step in uncovering potential points of intervention to mitigate loneliness.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Drs. Natasha Mendoza, Karin Wachter, Marlon Bailey, Bec Sokha Keo, and David Androff for encouraging me to submit this paper and for their guidance and support throughout this process. Thank you to my colleague and friend Isaac Akapnitis for copy edits and encouragement.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

G. Trey Jenkins

Author Biography

G. Trey Jenkins, MSW is a Doctoral Candidate at Arizona State University's School of Social Work, Research Analyst at the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center (SIRC). He holds a Master of Social Work from Arizona State University and Bachelor of University Studies from the University of New Mexico. His research interests are the mental health and wellbeing of Black transgender people. Specifically, he is interested in how structural oppression and discrimination play a role in loneliness and isolation. In his role at the SIRC, he leads and supports community-based projects and initiatives. He coordinates and supports a variety of research activities including project management, data interpretation, analysis, and report writing. He also assists in the design and implementation of data collection protocols, conducts literature reviews, and contributes to proposal writing. He is experienced in qualitative and quantitative methods and reporting. He currently serves as a Watts College IDEA Senior Scholar, working to advance anti-racist and anti-oppressive higher education policies and practices. He also serves in the community as the emeritus Chair for the Queer Resource Collective. Under the Direction of Dr. Madeline Adelman, he was one of two project directors for TNB Stories Project, a digital storytelling and advocacy project centering the experiences of transgender and nonbinary youth in sports and PE. He formerly served as a board Vice President for Recovery Empowerment Network. He also previously served as a member of the Arizona PAIMI Council for Arizona Center for Disability Law, was a former intern and board member for GLSEN Phoenix, and was a 2019 Arizona Leading for Change Fellow. He has many established community relationships and values the trust he's built working with historically excluded groups.

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(Un)Belonging: The Production of Black Trans Loneliness

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Background

Loneliness and Social Isolation

Structural Isolation

Positionality

Method

Theoretical Framework: Queer of Color Critique and Structural Isolation

Critiquing Theories of Loneliness

Findings From the Literature

Anti-Black Racism

Cisheterosexim

Neoliberalism

Discussion

Anti-Black Racism, Cisheterosexism, and Neoliberalism

Queer of Color Critique as a Social Work Framework

Conclusion and Implications for Social Work

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Author Biography

References