I started gender therapy a few weeks ago. And in our very first session, one of the books my therapist recommended was The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook by Anneliese A. Singh.
If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you already know how much I care about digging into my thoughts—figuring out where they come from, why they’ve stuck around, and what I can actually do with them. That’s why I was immediately interested when I realized this wasn’t just a book to read—it was something I could actively work through. And more than that, it was written specifically for queer and trans people.
What This Workbook Offers for Transgender Resilience
The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook isn’t a surface-level overview or some vague self-help guide. It’s structured around real psychological tools for building confidence and clarity, with a focus on how identity, oppression, and lived experience shape your ability to cope, grow, and feel whole.
It starts with foundational questions about gender and sexual orientation—but expands from there. Each chapter includes writing prompts, reflection exercises, and short teaching sections that encourage you to look at:
- How your various identities intersect and affect your day-to-day life
- The messages you’ve internalized (about gender, queerness, body image, worthiness, etc.)
- The ways you’ve already been resilient—even if it didn’t feel that way at the time
- What support looks like, and how to actually build it
- What it means to grow beyond survival and give something back
It centers transgender resilience by naming the specific stressors we face, while also helping you see the ways you already have power, especially in your relationships, your community, and the way you see yourself.
What Helped Me Most—and Where I Struggled
Personally, the early sections didn’t feel especially new. I’ve already spent a lot of time processing my gender identity and sexuality. I may not have a perfect label for everything, but I’m not in a place of confusion or uncertainty about how I feel.
Still, even those early chapters helped me frame things differently—especially around how other parts of my identity show up. And once I got deeper into the book, it started offering prompts that I hadn’t really asked myself yet.
The later chapters—on body affirmation, relationship patterns, support networks, and giving back—were the most useful for me. Some of it aligned really closely with what I’m already exploring here on the blog. But other parts pushed me to consider questions I’ve mostly avoided. Things like how I define community, or whether I even believe I deserve support. That’s where the workbook started to feel less like a tool. Instead, it shows me parts of myself I hadn’t fully realized were still struggling.
Where the Book Didn’t Quite Hit for Me
If I had one critique of The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook, it would be this: it doesn’t offer much clarity for people still trying to figure out which labels apply to them.
It does encourage you to explore what resonates. And it gives space for ambiguity, which is valuable. But if you’re hoping to narrow things down—to land on something specific or feel more certain about your identity—it probably won’t get you there.
To be fair, that’s not the book’s focus. This is about resilience, not precision. It’s about strengthening your sense of self, even if that self doesn’t have a name yet. But personally, I wish it had gone a little deeper into how to hold that uncertainty without feeling lost.
Why I’m Using This Workbook as Blog Inspiration
One of the most unexpected things about working through this book is how much it mirrors the emotional path I’ve already been on with this blog. Not just the gender stuff, but the deeper work—processing shame, naming internalized beliefs, and trying to grow into someone I can actually live as.
Some of the topics in the workbook I’ve already written about here. But a lot of them? I haven’t touched. Not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t know how to approach them.
That’s changing now. I’ll be writing more about the themes from this book—body image, support systems, community, giving back. Not in a structured “chapter one says…” kind of way. More like: here’s the part that shook something loose in me, and here’s where that took me.
And especially the inspiration and giving back sections are really reframing my mindset surrounding this blog and why I’m doing it.
Who This Workbook Might Help (Especially for Transgender Resilience)
This workbook is especially helpful if you:
- Are in therapy and want something structured to reflect on between sessions
- Feel like gender has taken over your entire identity, and you want to reconnect with other parts of yourself
- Are stuck mentally, emotionally, or socially and need a way to get moving again
- Struggle with confidence, visibility, or expressing your gender in real life
- Want to stop spiraling and start building something more stable
It’s also incredibly affirming if you’re trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, or questioning—and you’re trying to work through things that don’t always have simple answers.
The whole book centers transgender resilience in a way that feels informed, intentional, and honest about how hard this work can be. It doesn’t pretend to fix everything. But it does give you tools that actually help.
Final Thoughts
The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook isn’t a magic fix. It’s not going to hand you answers or make everything feel okay overnight. But it is a really solid tool if you’re ready to look inward—and not just at your gender, but at the entire messy, layered person you actually are.
I’ve worked through the whole thing at this point, and it ended up being a really helpful supplement to gender therapy. It gave me structure for the kinds of questions I was already asking—and pushed me into a few I hadn’t thought to ask yet. Even the parts that didn’t feel directly relevant still helped me clarify what I had already processed.
If you’re navigating identity, therapy, or just feeling stuck, I think it’s worth reading. Especially if you’ve been questioning whether growth is still possible. It helped remind me that it is.
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