Project Stages

Whole Selves is a long-term research project with the goals of understanding, promoting, and celebrating supportive romantic relationships among trans/nonbinary young adults. Click on each stage to read about what we’ve accomplished and what’s next for the project.

  • In 2018, we interviewed 30 trans/nonbinary young adults about their experiences with romantic relationships. Based on these interviews, we proposed the “Identity Needs in Relationships Framework,” a new way of understanding how trans/nonbinary young adults build supportive romantic relationships in the context of interpersonal and structural marginalization (e.g., cisgenderism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism).

    This work was part of the B*SHARP Project, a broader mixed-methods research project with trans/nonbinary young adults led by Dr. Allegra Gordon (Boston University School of Public Health) and funded by the Boston Children’s Hospital Aerosmith Endowment Fund.

  • From our in-depth interview participants, we learned that support related to one’s identities—including one’s trans/nonbinary identity—can be an important part of a healthy romantic relationship. Accordingly, we wanted to explore how this type of support might affect young adults’ health and wellbeing. However, because there hasn’t been much research on trans/nonbinary people’s romantic relationship experiences, there wasn’t an existing tool we could use to measure this support quantitatively.

    To overcome this roadblock, we’ve been working to develop the Identity Needs in Relationships Scale, a series of questions that assess what kinds of identity-related support a trans/nonbinary person is receiving from a romantic partner. This multi-step measure development process started with brainstorming questions based on interviewees’ experiences. We tested and revised those questions in “cognitive interviews” where 6 trans/nonbinary young adults answered the questions and told us what they found to be irrelevant, confusing, or missing as well as what they found resonant and thought-provoking. We incorporated their valuable feedback, then pilot-tested the revised questions in a survey with 300 trans/nonbinary people of all ages. Based on their responses, we are now finalizing the scale and analyzing its psychometric reliability and validity—in other words, whether it’s an accurate scientific tool for measuring trans/nonbinary identity-related support in a romantic relationship.

    Our pilot measure development research was made possible by a seed grant from the Yale University Women Faculty Forum.

  • The third phase of the project is a groundbreaking study of trans/nonbinary people’s romantic relationship experiences relate to their health and wellbeing over time. In this study, 300 trans/nonbinary young adults are completing nine weekly surveys asking about their romantic relationship experiences, their experience with cisgenderism and other forms of marginalization, their mental health, and their use of substances like cannabis and alcohol. The final participants will finish the study in May 2024.

    This study represents a major step forward in research on trans/nonbinary people’s romantic relationships. While a few previous studies have captured negative romantic relationship experiences related to being trans/nonbinary, this study will be among the first to quantitatively assess romantic partners’ support related to being trans/nonbinary. Furthermore, most previous studies on this topic have been cross-sectional, meaning that they surveyed participants only once. Cross-sectional studies can be valuable, but they can’t show whether some experiences happened before others, making it hard to tell whether one experience actually caused another. By asking participants about their experiences every week for nine weeks, we can paint a much clearer picture of how romantic relationships may affect trans/nonbinary young adults’ health and wellbeing.

    This work is funded by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (K99AA030601; PI: Murchison).

  • Based on what we learn from the weekly diary survey, we’ll develop an interactive online resource that trans/nonbinary young adults can use to reflect on their romantic relationship values, priorities, and experiences. We’ll create this resource through a “user-centered design” process with trans/nonbinary community stakeholders. We expect to begin this stage of the project in 2024-5.

Tools

Based on the input of more than 600 trans/nonbinary young adults, we’ve developed a questionnaire measuring five dimensions of transgender/nonbinary identity support in romantic relationships: the Transgender/Nonbinary Identity Support from Partners Scale, or TISPS. Our paper describing the TISPS is available as a preprint* on PsyArXiv, and you can access it for free here. You can download a copy of the TISPS questionnaire here.

*A preprint is a draft of a research article that is released prior to scientific peer review (which can be a slow process). You are welcome to use and cite the preprint, keeping in mind that that we may revise it later on.

Publications

The Whole Selves Project grew out of an earlier mixed-methods research project led by Dr. Allegra Gordon (Boston University) and Dr. Madina Agénor (Brown University), which addressed the intersection of body image, sexual health, and romantic relationships for trans/nonbinary young adults.

As part of that project, we published two papers that laid the groundwork for the Whole Selves Project.

In the first paper, we used in-depth interviews to develop a conceptual framework for understanding how trans/nonbinary young adults navigate romantic relationships in the context of prejudice and structural disadvantage:

Murchison, G. R., Eiduson, R., Agénor, M., & Gordon, A. R. (2022). Tradeoffs, constraints, and strategies in transgender and nonbinary young adults’ romantic relationships: The identity needs in relationships framework. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 40(7), 2149-2180. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221142183

You can access that paper for free here, and you can also check out a research brief explaining some key findings.

In the second paper, we used quantitative survey data to evaluate two potential ways that cisgenderism may put transgender/nonbinary young adults at greater risk of controlling romantic relationships (i.e., when their partners have excessive control over decisions that should be shared or made independently, like who they spend time with). We found that economic disenfranchisement, particularly housing instability, may play an important role in this process:

Murchison, G. R., Eiduson, R., Austin, S. B., Reisner, S. L., Agénor, M., Chen, J. T., & Gordon, A. R. Controlling partner dynamics in transgender/nonbinary young adults’ romantic relationships: Exploring the roles of cissexism-related beliefs and material-need insecurity. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000730

This paper will be publicly available online in May 2025. Until then, if you do not have library access to the journal, please contact Gabe Murchison (grmurch@bu.edu) for a free copy.

Extending the work:
Platonic relationships

Beyond romantic relationships, other types of close relationships may be important sources of support for trans/nonbinary people. In fact, plenty of people aren’t interested in romantic relationships or find that other types of relationships are more important to them.

Building on what we’ve learned about romantic relationships, we’re now developing a measure of trans/nonbinary identity-related support in platonic relationships. We’ll use this new tool use to explore trans/nonbinary young adults’ experiences of support in two types of platonic relationships: queerplatonic relationships (committed intimate relationships that aren’t romantic or sexual) and friendships.