He remarked that he spent much of his early life in a state of "quasi-shame" and in "a stealth existence" due to being gay.
Hendricks attended Michigan State University as a pre-med student before switching from medicine to a degree in social psychology.
[2][non-primary source needed] His dissertation, published in 1993, is titled "The occurrence of suicidal ideation over the course of HIV infection in gay men: A cross-sectional study".
[1] He is a clinician and researcher and has investigated depression, suicide, substance abuse, compulsive behaviors, HIV, and gender diversity issues at the National Cancer Institute, Georgetown University Medical Center, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
He is the lead author, with co-author Rylan Testa on the seminal paper that applied Ilan Meyer's minority stress model to transgender people,[1] published in 2012.