Positive psychological experiences among transgender individuals: a systematic review and thematic synthesis

Background Research on transgender, nonbinary, and gender-diverse (TGD) communities has often been shaped by deficit-oriented frameworks that foreground stigma, discrimination, dysphoria, violence, health risk, and social exclusion. While this scholarship remains essential, it can also narrow sociological understandings of transgender life by centering vulnerability over affirmation and harm over joy.Aims This article reports a systematic evidence mapping and configurative thematic review of positive emotional practices in TGD communities, with a specific focus on queer joy. It aims to map the scope of this literature, synthesize its core themes, and offer a relational account of how queer joy is socially produced.Methods A total of 2,131 Scopus-indexed records were screened, producing a final evidence-mapping corpus of 828 studies. Of these, 258 core studies were selected for configurative thematic synthesis. Rather than treating queer joy as synonymous with any positive TGD experience, the review distinguishes queer joy understood as a relational, embodied, and political affective practice from the wider set of affirmative concepts (identity affirmation, gender euphoria, chosen family, community belonging, pride, mutual care, digital visibility) through which it is produced and expressed.Results The synthesis suggests that these affirmative concepts function, unevenly and to different degrees, as conditions or vehicles for affective resistance to cisnormative structures. Queer joy emerges not as a fixed state but as a non-linear, relationally constituted practice enacted across embodied, communal, and digital contexts.Discussion The article contributes to sociology and transgender health scholarship by mapping this literature, clarifying conceptual boundaries between queer joy and related affirmative constructs, and offering a relational account of joy’s social production. These findings support a shift toward strengths-based, affirmation-centred research agendas in TGD studies.