Kelsey G Reeder, LCSW-R (she/they) is 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, she maintains a therapy and supervision practice focused on relationship challenges, family conflict, and the expansiveness of queer and trans experience. Kelsey is 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 her to pursue assessment and letter-writing for queer and trans families looking to have children through gamete donors or surrogacy, which she has been engaging since 2024.
In addition to clinical therapy work, Kelsey is an Advanced Practice PhD Candidate, Preceptor, and Writing Consultant at Columbia University School of Social Work, and a Teaching Consultant at Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Kelsey 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. Their research aims to subvert social work education and practice through lenses of queer irreverence and mess. She 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. Kelsey’s 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.