Robin P. McHaelen, MSW
Fri, October 16, 2026
9 am – 12 pm
Virtual
3 CECs
This program provides 3 hours of content on cultural competency.
LGBTQ+ people —transgender and non-binary people in particular — are navigating an increasingly hostile policy environment. Since early 2025, a series of federal executive orders, agency guidance changes, and enforcement actions have targeted gender-affirming care access, military service, federal identity documents, and civil rights protections for transgender people, while dozens of states have independently enacted restrictions on healthcare, school participation, and legal recognition. For LGBTQ+ individuals, their families, and the clinicians, educators, and caregivers who support them, this is a period of significant and compounding stress.
This 3-hour webinar equips participants with two complementary, evidence-based frameworks for understanding and responding to this moment. Ilan Meyer’s Minority Stress Model provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how stigma, discrimination, and anticipated rejection translate into measurable mental health disparities for sexual and gender minorities — and how distal stressors (like policy and legislation) interact with proximal, internalized stress processes. Caitlyn Ryan’s Family Acceptance Project (FAP) framework offers a practical, research-based model for helping social workers and clinicians move family and caregiver behavior along the acceptance-rejection continuum, even when starting from a place of ambivalence or discomfort.
Building on these frameworks, the seminar devotes focused attention to the current federal and state policy landscape affecting transgender and non-binary people specifically — including restrictions on gender-affirming care, military service, federal documentation, and Title IX protections, alongside the record volume of state-level legislation — and translates this landscape into practical clinical and caregiving guidance. Participants will leave with concrete language, screening considerations, and support strategies for working with LGBTQ+ clients and their families during a period of acute, ongoing systemic stress.
This webinar is designed for mental health clinicians, social workers, school counselors, healthcare providers, case managers, and other professionals who work with LGBTQ+ individuals and families. It is grounded in current, evolving policy conditions; because this is a fast-moving area, participants are encouraged to treat the specific legal/policy examples as illustrative of a broader pattern rather than a final or exhaustive accounting.
By the end of this seminar, participants will be able to:
- Explain the core components of Meyer’s Minority Sexual/Gender Minority Stress Model.
- Identify how current federal and state policy actions function as distal minority stressors, describe their documented associations with anxiety, depression, and other mental health outcomes and identify potential interventions
- Describe the Family Acceptance Project’s continuum of caregiver behaviors, using an intersectional lens to distinguish specific accepting and rejecting behaviors and their impact on outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth and adults.
- Apply FAP-informed communication strategies to help ambivalent, uncertain, or struggling caregivers move toward more accepting behaviors, even when they hold personal, cultural, or religious reservations.
- Assess for signs of minority stress, hypervigilance, and policy-related anticipatory anxiety in LGBTQ+ clients, with particular attention to the compounded burden on transgender and non-binary clients navigating an active and changing legal landscape.
- Recognize the importance of remaining current on the fast-changing federal and state policy landscape and identify reliable sources (e.g., legal advocacy organizations, medical associations, state-specific trackers) for ongoing monitoring beyond the seminar.