See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add Brown School News on Google (opens in a new tab)Hilary Thibodeau, a social work doctoral student at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, is the lead and corresponding author of a newly published study examining how transgender older adults describe experiences of housing precarity and injustice.
The study, “Intersectionality and the No-Finding Finding in Transgender Older Adults’ Narratives of Housing Precarity,” was published online July 9, 2026, in Housing, Theory and Society. Thibodeau is a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) T32 predoctoral fellow whose research explores the intersections of housing, harm reduction, and health equity.
Thibodeau co-authored the study with Vanessa D. Fabbre, an associate professor at the Brown School. Using an intersectional framework, they analyzed narratives from transgender older adults to understand how lifelong experiences of housing instability, discrimination, and marginalization shape the meaning of home.
The study identified what the authors describe as a “no-finding finding” — an unexpected pattern in which participants often de-emphasized their experiences of housing-related challenges and trauma in relation to multiple hardships, their need for identity development, and pride in their own survival.
Fabbre said the study highlights the usefulness of interpreting older adults’ narratives from an intersectional perspective, which in this case provides insights for improving the well-roundedness of housing interventions and support for transgender people.
Before beginning her doctoral studies at the Brown School, Thibodeau earned a Master of Social Work from the University of Maine and spent more than a decade working in human services, including direct practice with children and families and policy research.