The Anxiety Factor: Moral Traditionalism, Interpersonal Contact Diversity and Support for Transgender Candidates and Rights

ABSTRACT

Given the prejudice against transgender people and the setbacks faced by transgender political candidates, an online survey was conducted (among a convenience sample of American adults recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk) to investigate what influence public support for transgender candidates and rights and how to increase such support. The study found that moral traditionalism was negatively associated with support for transgender candidates and rights. The diversity of interpersonal contact with transgender individuals not only was positively related to the support but undermined the negative relationships between moral traditionalism and the support. More importantly, the study showed that anxiety toward transgender people mediated all the relationships observed here. These findings not only indicate how and why moral traditionalism and interpersonal contact diversity may affect public opinion toward transgender candidates and rights but also suggest ways to increase public support for transgender candidates and rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral traditionalism
• interpersonal contact diversity
• transgender candidates
• transgender rights
• the intergroup contact hypothesis
• anxiety
• public opinion

Disclosure statement

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