When intergroup contact is uncommon and bias is strong: the case of anti-transgender bias

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the centrality of ‘coming out’ in the gay rights movement, transgender people may be less likely to disclose their transgender status due to the severity of anti-transgender stigma, structural factors and differences in how transgender status and sexual identity are expressed. As a consequence, intergroup contact with transgender people may be less common than gay contact, which may limit its effectiveness. In Study 1 (N = 174), transgender contact was much less frequent than gay contact, and transgender contact frequency was not associated with anti-transgender bias, although more positive transgender contact was associated with lower anti-transgender bias, and gay contact frequency was also independently associated with lower anti-transgender bias. In Study 2 (N = 277), greater transgender ‘media contact’ was associated with increased empathy for transgender people and decreased anti-transgender bias. In addition, several participants left unsolicited anti-transgender comments at the end of the study, and these participants tended to have less transgender contact and were higher in right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. Our results suggest that increasing contact with the LGBT community and increasing media representations of transgender people may decrease anti-transgender bias. Future directions building on these results are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• prejudice
• intergroup contact
• right-wing authoritarianism
• social dominance orientation
• intergroup emotions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Scales with six or more items were modelled using three to five parcels, which were created by averaging items with similar skewness and kurtosis values.

2. An additional four non-cisgender and 24 non-heterosexual participants were excluded from the analyses.

3. Five items representing a second ‘gender bashing’ factor had extreme skewness and kurtosis. Almost all participants scored at the low end of the scale (M = 1.14 on a 1–7 scale), 82% of participants responded ‘strongly disagree’ to all five items, and the maximum observed score (4) reflected the midpoint of the scale. Therefore, the second factor is not included in the analyses.

4. Due to the skewed distribution of the transgender contact frequency variable, we also ran analyses with a Log10-transformed transgender contact frequency variable, in both Study 1 and Study 2. The results were nearly identical regardless of which version of the variable was used.

5. Four non-cisgender and 30 non-heterosexual participants were excluded from the analyses.

6. As in Study 1, we also examined whether transgender contact frequency, quality and media contact were associated with anti-transgender bias and intergroup emotions when simultaneously accounting for RWA and SDO. The same results that were significant at a bivariate level were also significant when controlling for RWA and SDO, except that transgender contact frequency was not associated with transphobia at a bivariate level (p = .21), whereas transgender contact frequency was marginally associated with lower transphobia when RWA and SDO were included as predictors (β = .08, p = .053).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation: [Grant Number SPRF-FR 1714446].

Notes on contributors

Mark Romeo Hoffarth

Mark Romeo Hoffarth completed his PhD in Personality and Social Psychology at Brock University. He is currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar in the Social Justice Lab at New York University. He conducts research related to political psychology, intergroup relations, LGBT issues, and human sexuality.

Gordon Hodson

Gordon Hodson is a Professor of Psychology at Brock University. His research interests include stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, with a focus on ideology, intergroup contact/friendship, and dehumanization. He co-edited Advances in Intergroup Contact (Hodson & Hewstone, 2013), and is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP).