Changing beliefs about gender: the relation between contact with gender nonconforming individuals and gender essentialism

ABSTRACT

Increasing numbers of individuals are openly identifying outside of the gender binary, which may have broader effects on how people view gender. Little research has examined how contact with gender nonconforming (GNC) individuals may influence others’ conceptualisations of gender. Through seven studies with 2,547 participants, we found that contact with GNC individuals corresponded to reduced gender essentialism. In two correlational studies, we found that contact with GNC people predicted reduced gender essentialism even when controlling for sexism and contact with women. In a series of four experimental studies, we found some evidence that imagining contact with a GNC person resulted in significantly less gender essentialism than imagining contact with a woman, though this was not consistent across studies using other types of control conditions. In a final study, we found that media contact with either a trans man or a genderfluid person reduced gender essentialism compared to contact with a cisgender man, demonstrating that contact effects generalised across exposure to different types of gender identities. This work suggests that a person’s conceptualisation of gender may be changed through contact with GNC people.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender essentialism
• intergroup contact
• gender nonconforming identities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data is available by contacting the first author.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2023.2181706.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2023.2181706

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation GRFP (Grant No. 1256260 DGE) awarded to the first author. Findings expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.