Intersectionality and the No-Finding Finding in Transgender Older Adults’ Narratives of Housing Precarity

The meaning of home for many transgender people is complicated by challenging experiences of housing precarity and injustice throughout their lives. This study applies intersectionality to understand the meaning of trans people’s narratives of housing precarity with the goal of developing actionable insight for the advancement of housing justice. We conducted a sequential structural, dialogic, and visual narrative analysis with biographical interviews and portraits of transgender older adults. Our analysis yielded an unexpected finding – what we call the “no-finding finding” – whereby the challenges and trauma that housing precarity often engenders were rarely described in such terms. We claim that in the context of intersectional oppression, the meaning of home and housing precarity are at times bracketed in narratives of such profound struggle that lived experiences may be thematically underemphasized. This finding has implications for both the assumptions underlying housing justice policy and the advancement of narrative methodology rooted in intersectionality.