Effects of transgender identity labels on perceptions of gender minorities

ABSTRACT

Gender minorities disproportionately experience stigma and violence after coming out. This study was conducted to examine how individuals perceive characters identified with various gender identity labels (transgender man, transgender woman, genderfluid, non-binary, cisgender man, cisgender woman), to better understand the effects of these labels on people’s perceptions. Student participants (N = 498) were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions and read six vignettes briefly describing characters with the aforementioned identities. Conditions included explicit labels (e.g. ‘Mike is a transgender man’), implicit labels (e.g. ‘Mike was assigned female at birth, but now identifies as a man’), and no gender labels. Participants then rated each character on 19 different traits/attributes (e.g. ‘likable’, ‘perverted’, ‘masculine’). All characters were rated more positively when described with an explicit or implicit gender identity label in comparison to the no label control condition. The manipulation of gender labels had little influence on ratings of negative traits. These positive and encouraging results may be partially attributed to the sample which predominantly comprised young, liberal, women and may be indicative of a welcoming university environment for gender minorities. Future studies could further explore this topic by expanding the scope to the larger national population.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• transphobia
• stigma
• LGBT

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

All authors are listed, and all contributed substantially to the manuscript. The data reported in this manuscript have not been published and are not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The data that support the findings of this study are available at https://osf.io/2kf8z.

open-scholarship open-data open-materials

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/2kf8z and https://osf.io/2kf8z.

Additional information

Funding

There is no funding to report for this study.