Brooke Olson first felt “different” from the other kids around six years old. But it wasn’t until she was 38 that she began her transition. “Growing up, I was not exposed to the trans experience or the LGBTQ2S+ community in any positive way, so I suppressed those feelings for most of my life,” she says.
To help her navigate the experience, she started working with Renée Randazzo, a therapist who worked specifically with trans individuals. After a period of working together, Randazzo told her that she was switching to a life-coaching model, and Olson agreed to remain her client. “Renée’s thoughts, opinions and guidance have all become a very important part of my life, not only for my journey as a trans person but for all important parts of my life,” she says.
The life coach industry is booming. According to the International Coaching Federation, the U.S. coaching industry reached a value of almost US $7.31 billion in 2025, and is on track to hit US $10.1 billion by 2032. The Federation claims there are around 122,974 certified life coaches globally, and that number is set to rise. In 2024, life coaching was one of the fastest-growing careers in the world.
Life coaches offer support in all areas of life, from confidence to careers, personal finance and even spiritual growth. But over the last couple of years, one type of life coaching has ballooned: queer identity or “coming out” life coaching.
These coaches claim to help their clients through various stages of understanding their queerness, from figuring out labels to coming out to friends and family, finding community, and dating. These coaches are often queer themselves, and draw on their own experiences when working with their clients.
Brooks only wanted to be identified by his first name, but uses the handle “Hot Trans Life Coach” across his online platforms, where he shares wisdom as a life coach to his 4,606 Instagram followers. “Life coaching really appealed to me because it’s a very actionable and forward-focused and practical form of emotional support for people,” he says. “I am really interested in not just giving people emotional mindset support but focusing on helping them implement those changes into the actual choices they’re making in their life.”
“I’m really passionate personally about helping queer people and trans people self-actualize. We’re moving into a time when there is a greater narrative about how important it is for queer people not just to live but to thrive.”
According to Google Trends, interest in this type of life coaching has spiked in 2025 and 2026. The search term “gay life coach” has seen the biggest spike, followed by “LGBT life coach” and then “trans life coach.” There are 795.5K posts tagged “queer life coach” on TikTok.
So why are so many more people seeking out LGBTQ2S+-focused life coaches?
“Structurally, accessing affirmative and LGBTQ+-informed (GSRD) therapy is very difficult to do on the NHS [National Health Service], and so this has people turning elsewhere for support,” says a spokesperson for Pink Therapy, a directory of LGBTQ+-affirming therapists in the U.K.
Pink Therapy also notes that the strict regulations that govern how therapists promote themselves can give life coaches an upper hand on social media. “We have an understandable desire towards fast fixes, something many coaches promise, because when you’re feeling vulnerable, somebody offering you certainty and rules and steps to follow can be really appealing,” the spokesperson adds.
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Questioning your sexuality or gender identity can be a vulnerable act, and access to community spaces, helplines or other volunteer-based services that may have previously been able to offer more immediate support is shrinking. In the U.S., charities offering support services have seen support and donations slashed in the face of Trump’s attacks on DEI, and growing backlash to LGBTQ2S+ rights globally.
“My experience coming out, though predominantly positive, showed me that this road would be difficult without someone with knowledge and experience regarding the LGBTQ2S+ community to walk next to me on this journey,” says Olson. “Renée has always offered me a safe place to voice my thoughts, feelings, fears, insecurities, wins, losses and future plans.”
Queer venues, where questioning people might be able to meet and chat with queer people or find a supportive community, have also been dwindling. Over half of London, U.K.’s LGBTQ+ venues have closed since 2026. Canada and America have seen similar trends. With fewer free or cheap options for finding supportive community, people looking for a mentor to help them understand queerness and where they might fit into it may feel the need to pay for that guidance.
Alice, who asked to use a pseudonym, is part of an online community for later-in-life queer women. Seeing the same questions come up again and again, and people wishing they could ask an established lesbian questions about culture, Alice decided to invite a queer life coach to a virtual meeting for the group—she knew friends who’d previously worked with life coaches, and thought it might help the attendees find some answers. “When I first realised [my queerness] for myself, I had some acquaintances who were willing to meet up over pizza and talk about their lives, and I learned a lot, and I wanted others to have that experience,” she says.
Alice says they were ultimately frustrated with how the meeting went. “I wanted to do the event because I kept seeing similar questions that late bloomers had,” they explain. “The main life coach was less substance and more ‘rah-rah’ than was helpful, and another joined in who was a late bloomer herself, which I was okay with, knowing it was an open group, but she ended up being pretty obnoxious.”
“Late bloomer lesbian” is one of the more popular subgenres of queer identity. Life coaches often offer help specifically for people who come to understand their identities later in life, or after a divorce. That’s what Jess, who asked to only be identified by their first name, was looking for when they began working with a life coach for the first time after their divorce. “[The coach] started as my therapist, but it was very informal; one in-person session, and then just phone calls. Once I was out of the worst of the divorce processing, she pivoted to life coach[ing] and asked who I want to be now.”
Jess says that working with their former therapist in her capacity as a life coach, they explored “everything,” from family and relationships to intimacy, personal values and beliefs. “I got a safe space to think out loud about what makes me tick. We just never really got to gender identity or sexual orientation.”
Searching for identity coaches reveals a number of people who previously worked as therapists, counsellors or psychologists before moving into life coaching.
But unlike registered psychologists and therapists, life coaches don’t have licences to be revoked and can’t be barred from working in the field. While there are regional and international regulating bodies for coaches more broadly, accreditation by these organizations is voluntary. Anyone can call themselves a life coach, and there is no way to make formal complaints about them.
“Because of the absence of regulation around coaching, clients are well advised to carefully consider each provider’s credentials and experience, as well as interview them in a free consultation to get a sense of what they bring to the table,” says Randazzo, who worked as a licensed gender-affirming therapist in Texas for eight years before shifting to a coaching model in 2024.
“As much as I valued the opportunity to support people in their gender journeys by providing letters of support for medical transition steps and accepting health insurance for my services, I never felt aligned with the medical model of pathologizing transgender people for their identities and experiences,” she explains.
While therapy may have more official safeguards, psychology and psychiatry haven’t always been accepting or kind to queer people, our identities or experiences. It wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But, since 1975, the APA has called on mental health professionals to lead the way in “removing the stigma of mental illness that has long been associated” with being queer.
“One of the benefits is that I have a lot more freedom to work with my clients in the way that I know is going to support them best, and that doesn’t get to be determined by an outside system that is not always working for the greatest benefit of queer and trans people,” says Brooks. Not wanting to feel pathologized was also a motivating factor in why Jess chose to keep working with a life coach, saying that they felt like therapists were “often looking for a diagnosis or to heal a specific thing,” while they wanted more direction.
But they have since stopped working with a life coach because they felt frustrated with their previous coaches’ lack of understanding of non-binary experiences. “Of course, lots of people can be a little helpful, but I want to feel seen and understood and not have to explain over and over how something feels and have to either educate or defend that feeling.
“That experience is what I’ve been chasing—someone who can hold space for my questions and thoughts, bring their experience and research to bear, ask thoughtful questions and reflect back to me what I’m saying in different words,” says Jess.
While a spokesperson for Pink Therapy notes that most therapists are not given LGBTQIA+-specific training, they say that those who do are equipped to support clients through a range of issues relating to sexuality and identity, in a way that doesn’t over-rely on formulaic tools or methods. “Because everybody is different, it’s less about techniques and more about building a space and therapeutic framework where people feel safe to be vulnerable so that conversation, exploration and analysis can begin the process of change,” the spokesperson explains.
“Importantly, while lived experience is helpful for empathy, it isn’t enough to support others as you’re essentially basing all support on a sample size of one: the therapist’s or coach’s lived experience.”
With free or affordable support harder to come by, it’s little wonder that people are seeking out alternative means. Whether it’s working with a therapist, life coach or even finding a support group, it’s important to do research and think about what you’re hoping to get from the experience.
“In general, vetting people before you start paying them or trusting them with your story is wise,” says Jess. “Success isn’t the goal here. Satisfaction, contentment, self-awareness, confidence, autonomy, expression, joy. Those are the goals. And in general, you can’t buy those things.”
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