Thoreson's work focuses on LGBT children’s rights and LGBT rights in the United States, with a particular focus on transgender equality, access to housing and intimate partner violence services, and discriminatory exemptions in counseling, adoption and foster care, and public accommodations. He is the author of Transnational LGBT Activism: Working for Sexual Rights Worldwide, published in 2014 by the University of Minnesota Press. Thoreson earned a JD from Yale Law School in 2014, a D.Phil. in Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2012, and an A.B. in Government and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Harvard College in 2007.