Strategies for Child Welfare Professionals Working with Transgender and Gender Expansive Youth

Long overdue, Mallon's book is powerfully honest, informative and practical-offering readers that chance to take a deep and enlightening journey into the lives and experiences of trans and gender expansive youth. A must read for people who work with youth in any capacity! -- June Paul, Assistant Professor, Social Work Department, Skidmore College This book is not just for child welfare professionals serving the transgender/gender expansive youth population, but for anyone providing caring to children and youth. Giving us the gift of an invaluable gender GPS, Gerald Mallon guides us through the imperatives for ensuring the gender health of young people of all genders in all communities and all living situations. A must on everyone's book shelf. -- Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D. Director of Mental Health, UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center, Author of Gender Born, Gender Made and The Gender Creative Child This book, like its author, is innovative, clear, and honest. Gary Mallon has written a comprehensive practical guide for child welfare professionals who want to improve their skills working with transgender and gender-expansive youth and their families. In this book, Gary Mallon combines state-of-the-art knowledge with case examples gathered over his 45 years of experience in the field of child welfare. Written with an accessible style and a positive tone, this book offers lots of strategies and concrete actions that youth workers can take to improve their support to transgender and gender-expansive youth and their families. -- Monica Lopez Lopez, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Groningen, the Netherlands Not only a practical guide for youth, community and social workers, this book also offers a dive into the complexities of trans and gender-expansive young people's experiences. Packed with stories from T/GE youth, this volume offers advice and resources for the fields of psychology, social welfare, health and education. -- Dr Stephen Hicks, Senior Lecturer in Social Work, University of Manchester (UK) Mallon's book unpacks the complexities of working with transgender and gender-expansive youth and their families. Using the voices of T/GE youth themselves, the reader is grounded in an understanding of the difficulties of discrimination and social transitions, yet the book reminds us of the normal everyday lives of T/GE and all youth - their development, loves, relationships. -- Stephen T. Russell, Director, School of Human Ecology, UT Austin Gary Mallon has devoted his career to ensure that social work professionals and child welfare services have the knowledge and skills they need to work effectively with LGBT+ young people. This publication specifically addresses the needs of transgender and gender expansive young people and their families. Professor Mallon's expertise on this topic is without question; the strength of this publication is that it is written with young people firmly at the centre, with quotes from young people included throughout the text. It addresses all areas of practice, including: language usage; transition issues; discrimination; education;, relationships; and child welfare programmes, including homelessness. It is an absolute 'must have' for any organisation that works with young people. -- Professor Christine Cocker, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom