Race, class, and gender identity: implications for transgender people’s police help seeking

ABSTRACT

This study examines various demographic, social, and economic factors related to transgender people’ reluctance to seek police help and appraises the intersectionality among these different factors. The results reveal differences in the degree of reluctance across gender groups, socioeconomic statuses, and racial groups, which suggest that the intersection of multiple minority statuses will increase transgender people’s reluctance to seek help from police. The findings also reveal that transgender people’ past interaction with police is negatively associated with their reluctance to seek police intervention. This study concludes with suggestions that seek to transform law enforcement culture by means of police training and community outreach activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• police reporting
• victimization
• race
• class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Treating ordinal variables as if they conform to interval scales assumes equidistance between categories and can result in biased estimates. Nevertheless, this way of operationalization enables easy interpretation of the coefficients in multivariate analyses and better data manipulation (Labovitz, 1970; Lalla, 2017). Studies also suggest that the bias from equidistance assumption tends to diminish as the number of categories increases, such that the results are unbiased when the number of categories reaches four (Rhemtulla et al., 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Young-Joo Lee

Young-joo Lee is a professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida. Her research work centers on nonprofit management, volunteerism, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Luis Santiago

Luis Santiago is an associate professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida. Prior to joining UCF, He served as professor at the University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Planning. He holds a doctoral degree in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University.