A systematic review of the relationship between religion and attitudes toward transgender and gender-variant people

Abstract

Background: Prejudice against transgender people is widespread, yet in spite of the prevalence of this negativity relatively little is known about the antecedents and predictors of these attitudes. One factor that is commonly related to prejudice is religion, and this is especially true for prejudice targets that are considered to be “value violating” (as is the case for transgender individuals).

Method: In this paper, we present the findings of our systematic search of the literature on this topic and present the synthesized evidence. Our search strategy was conducted across five databases and yielded 29 studies (across 28 articles).

Results: We found consistent evidence that self-identifying as with either being “religious” or as Christian (and to a lesser extent, being Muslim) was associated with increased transprejudice relative to being nonreligious (and to a lesser extent, being Jewish). Additionally, we found consistent evidence that certain forms of religiosity were also related to transprejudice – specifically religious fundamentalism, church attendance, and interpretations of the bible as literal (transprejudice was unrelated to religious education).

Conclusion: Although this young, but important field of research is growing, more empirical exploration is needed to fully understand that nuances of the religion-transprejudice relationship.

Keywords:

• Prejudice
• Religious affiliation
• Religiosity
• Sexual Prejudice
• Transphobia
• Transprejudice

Ethical approval

Formal consent is not required for this paper (i.e., no data collected).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 It is also worth noting that some transgender people identify outside the gender binary of ‘male’ and ‘female’, identifying as neither, both, or somewhere on a spectrum between the two, and may move fluidly between identities over time (Dean et al., 2000; Whittle, Turner, Al-Alami, Rundall, Thom, 2007).

2 Transprejudice is synonymous with Transphobia which refers to negative, prejudicial attitudes toward individuals whose gender identity does not align with their biological sex (Hill & Willoughby, 2005), although in line arguments that the suffix ‘phobia’ has clinical connotations (Anderson & Holland, 2015; Herek & McLemore, 2013) we prefer the former term.

3 It is worth noting that Ali and colleagues (2016) found a trend for higher levels of transprejudice as levels of religious guidance increased, however the sample sizes in this study was underpowered from a statistical perspective and as such, the reliability of these between-group findings needs ratifying.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by an Early Career Research Grant from the Freilich Foundation, and also by a student grant from the Faculty of Health Science at Australian Catholic University.