Kelsey Reeder

I am a Clinical Social Worker who has worked in therapeutic foster care, school social work, and community mental health. With post-graduate training from the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, I maintain a therapy and supervision practice focused on relationship challenges, family conflict, and the expansiveness of queer and trans experience. I am a member of the GALAP Network and has been writing free Gender-Affirming Surgery letters for trans people pursuing surgery since 2017. This practice inspired me to pursue assessment and letter-writing for queer and trans families looking to have children through gamete donors or surrogacy, which I have been engaging with ASRM since 2024. In addition to clinical therapy work, I am an Advanced Practice PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow and at Columbia University School of Social Work, and a Senior Teaching Consultant at Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. I also spent six years providing clinical supervision to lifeline counselors supporting LGBTQ+ youth experiencing crisis or suicidality and is an activist for care worker rights, healing, and community. My research aims to subvert social work education and practice through lenses of queer irreverence and mess. I explores conceptualizations of care that contribute to or disrupt collective queer and trans liberation (community-based vs. institutional care) and how social work is taught and carried out in ways that position social workers as sites of social control within their own communities. My research looks at how this dynamic impacts the personhoods of the clinician and client, interrupts collective liberation by enforcing unidirectional healing, and stems from settler colonialism and white supremacy.