Aging can be hard for those in the trans community

Jess T. Dugan, a photographer, and Vanessa Fabbre, a social worker and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, discovered their work had more in common than they realized. Dugan’s work focused on identity, gender and sexuality, specifically within the transgender community; Fabbre had been researching aging.

Fabbre discovered early on that traditional assumptions about gerontology, not unlike those about gender, ignore some groups of people, such as members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community, excluding them from research. She began to explore the experience of aging for trans people, and for trans women who had transitioned later in life.