About Me

Ida Hammer (she/her) is a life-long activist for compassion-minded transformative social change. She is known for her work in the field of intersectional transfeminism, including her direct organizing work in support of transgender rights and healthcare, and her advocacy in opposition to gendered and sexualized violence against transgender woman. In recent years, Ida has built a psychotherapy practice helping people struggling with anxiety, depression, shame, life transitions, and gender dysphoria.

Ida has a degree in Journalism and has worked as a staff writer for a national advocacy organization, and a contributor to a community newspaper and radio program. Her writing has appeared in major newspapers throughout the United States. She also has been an active blogger with an intersectional approach focused on compassion and social transformation.

Ida started the Trans Women’s Anti-Violence Project to address the intersections of races, class, and gender and the ways systemic oppression precipitates the gross and wholesale violence experienced by transgender women, particularly BIPOC trans women. The Trans Women’s Anti-Violence Project tracked and aggregated news stories on violence against transgender women, helping to show patterns in violence and revealing the ways media and law enforcement are often complicit in the violence against transgender women.

Ida has been honored for her work as one of the inaugural Trans 100, recipient of the Barbara Gittings Award in 2014, and had her work profiled in a chapter by author and filmmaker Tourmaline in the anthology Queering Sexual Violence (edited by Jennifer Patterson).

Ida has worked with a number of transgender civil rights and health organizations, including the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, the Transgender Education and Legal Defense Fund (now Advocates for Transgender Equality), the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference, and Transcend Legal. She has been a regular speaker and workshop facilitator on transgender issues concerning civil rights, anti-violence, and healthcare.

Ida won a landmark lawsuit when her insurance excluded access to transgender healthcare, which helped to open access to gender affirming healthcare procedures for other transgender and nonbinary patients.

She worked as a clinical social worker for Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery and UCSF Health’s Gender Affirming Health Program, facilitating access to transgender healthcare for hundreds of transgender patients. Now in private practice, Ida continues to provide psychotherapy and letters of support to transgender and gender nonbinary (TGNB).

Ida is often involved in work to mobilize and organizer communities and activists. This has included collaborating in the organization of events, conferences, marches, protests and demonstrations, occupations, mutual aid groups and actions, memorials, projects, and ongoing activist and advocacy groups. She continues to be a sought-after speaker, trainer, and facilitator of workshops and courses.

Ida anti-oppressive community work led her to pursuing a Master of Social Work from Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College - CUNY. While working on her degree she worked as a Research Therapist helping to develop interventions for people at risk of HIV, including transgender women, gay men, and substance users. Following her degree, she worked for an anti-violence organization as a Counselor Advocate supporting those targeted by New York City’s notorious vice squad and Human Trafficking Courts before moving on work as the Clinical Social Worker during the startup of Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery.

Since 2021, Ida Hammer has been working in private practice as a psychotherapist specializing in Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). She has received post-graduate education at the University of Derby in England under CFT’s founder Professor Paul Gilbert, from whom she received supervision. More than a model of therapy, CFT is an understanding of interactions of biological, psychological, and sociological processes of human suffering and the development of ways to skillfully prevent and alleviate that suffering in ourselves and others.