Soul Soil Research Institute
The mission of Soul Soil Research Institute is to conduct insightful community-based research that meaningfully contributes to more just and affirming healthcare and policies for trans*, queer, and LGBIA populations, with an emphasis on supporting the well-being, resilience, and thriving of trans*/NB and gender-expansive individuals. Soul Soil Research Institute is a subsidiary of Soul Soil Collective Farm, a 501c3 nonprofit organization, and is aligned with the values of Soul Soil Collective Farm.
Gender-affirming care literature review
Transgender and nonbinary (TNB) people in the United States continue to face legal discrimination, medical invalidation, and barriers to medical care that affirms their gender identity. Many TNB people experience gender dysphoria, and desire medical interventions to help their physical embodied experience more closely align with their gender identity. Gender-affirming care for medical interventions in the U.S. has become more accessible over the past decade but is still difficult to access for a variety of reasons. In addition to many geographical regions lacking enough trained providers and surgeons to serve the region’s population of TNB residents, TNB people face financial, practical, and legal barriers to accessing gender-affirming medical care.
In September 2023, Soul Soil Research Institute received a generous grant from Reprocare to conduct a literature review to better understand current financial and practical barriers to gender-affirming medical care, to map out the extent to which existing community support reduces those barriers as well as the remaining unmet need, and to identify best strategies for increasing access to financial and practical support nationwide. Our review of recent literature revealed useful information regarding desire for gender-affirming surgery among the TNB population, the limited availability of healthcare insurance coverage for gender-affirming medical care (GAMC), and some information regarding the financial barriers faced by TNB people seeking care. Kris would be happy to share notes from their lit review with any other researchers engaged in this field.
We would love to support research that helps get trans folks any financial and practical support they need to access to gender-affirming care!
Community resilience among communities targeted by state-sanctioned violence
Kris is engaged in scholarship on building and maintaining community resilienceamong communities targeted by state-sanctioned violence — here’s a toolkit on strategies for building community resilience. Kris is available to consult with community members on strategies for building our resilience as a cornerstone of work to generate a society free from reliance on destructive forces.
Understanding causes of male violence
Kris is also passionate about research that can inform interpersonal violence prevention efforts and support survivors of intimate partner violence and transfeminine survivors of hate violence. They study men and masculinities seeking to better understand causes of male violence and how to prevent it. Kris's research suggests that the shame some men experience over failures in masculinity can be a major player in male aggression. The Masculinity and Shame Questionnaire (MASQ) is an assessment of shame-related responses to threats to masculinity; it can be a useful to pair this tool with a general shame assessment such as the Test of Self Conscious Affect (TOSCA) to parse out the ways men tend to respond to personal shortcomings. Feel free to email Kris for more information on these assessments!
Kris's dissertation experimental studies found that indeed, shame specific to masculinity played a significant role in men's decision to engage in hurtful behavior to other anonymous men after experiencing threat to masculinity. Most notably, men who first participated in a self-affirmation exercise focusing on their personal values were significantly less likely to report threatened-masculinity shame-related responses or engage in hurtful behavior in the experiment. In other words, when participants first thought about what mattered most to them, they cared much less whether someone else deemed their personality more masculine than feminine. Kris looks forward to securing funding to build on this research and inform violence prevention interventions with men.