'Managed Hearts’ in Helper-Education: Gender Non-Binary Helper-Educators’ Experiences of Emotional Labor

The unique experiences of people who identify with a gender beyond the binary paradigm dominant in the Global West are not well understood. The literature provides little insight into the experiences and perspectives of these individuals in a variety of contexts, including in their workplaces. As various social movements collide, they bring amplified attention to the mental health of marginalized communities and to workers, as well as the dynamics of modern work environments, and the specific needs of certain individuals doing certain types of work. The current study explored the experiences of gender non-binary individuals (GNI) working as helper-educators engaged in the training of helping professionals within higher education employment settings. A phenomenological approach utilizing Moustakas’s Modified Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen Method of Qualitative Data Analysis (1994) was used to examine the experiences of respondents using the lens of Emotional Labor Theory, a sociological framework that attempts to understand the experience and impact of emotional regulation and performance as a requirement of one’s employment (2012). This inquiry revealed a community of scholars for whom authenticity is a core value, who perform significant amounts of emotional labor in their work settings, much of it invisible, and who engage with the hegemony of higher education at the intersection of personal identities that are not well understood. These disclosures led not only to a deepened understanding of these experiences but yielded suggested actions higher education settings can take to address these conditions.