Defending Gender: Transprejudice as Gender System Maintenance

Linas Mitchell, Loyola University Chicago

Transgender people face high levels of prejudice and policy discrimination, and transgender issues are highly politicized along liberal-conservative lines. I applied a system justification framework (Jost, 2019) to explore if people engaged in transprejudice (such as denying transgender identities) as a way to maintain the status-quo of gender in the face of potential threat. I predicted that seeing transgender people as a greater threat to established gender systems (e.g., essentialist binary gender) would lead to more transprejudice and discriminatory policy attitudes, and that this effect would be stronger for those more supportive of existing systems (i.e., conservatives).

I randomly assigned 400 MTurk participants to read one of three fictitious articles manipulating the perception of gender threat posed by transgender people. The low-threat article described transgender people as assimilating into existing gender systems, pulling on ideas that gender identity is innate and unchangeable, and that transgender people make individual changes to bring their life in line with their gender identity. The high-threat article reversed these ideas, positioning transgender people as a major threat to gender systems by describing gender identity as socially constructed and malleable, and transgender people as aiming to change the way that gender functions in society overall by minimizing differences between men and women. Finally, the control article did not mention transgender people at all, instead discussing the Golden Gate Bridge. After reading the article, participants answered questions about their perception of transgender people (e.g., Kanamori et al., 2017) and their attitudes toward transgender-relevant policies (Miller et al., 2017).

Article type did not directly affect transprejudice or policy attitudes. However, the low-threat condition created less threatening perceptions of transgender people, and this explained downstream effects on prejudice and policy attitudes. That is, participants who read the low-threat article (compared to the high-threat or control articles) tended to perceive transgender people as less of a threat to the distinction between men and women. This lower threat predicted more positive transgender attitudes, which then predicted more supportive policy attitudes. Overall, framing transgender people as non-threatening to gender led to lower transprejudice and more supportive policy attitudes indirectly to the extent that participants actually believed that transgender people did not threaten gender. Participants also differed in this process, with the most conservative participants most sensitive to the effects of threat, and the most liberal participants unaffected by threat.

These results support a system justification interpretation of transprejudice, with negative transgender attitudes serving to defend against potential gender threats, and those most supportive of the system reacting more to this threat. Reducing threat perceptions may encourage more positive transgender attitudes among conservatives—however, this also runs the risk of leaving the systemic injustices of gender unchallenged. Alternatively, we could focus on motivating empathy for transgender people, or raising awareness of the personal costs of gender, to overpower system justification motives. 

Jost, J. T. (2019). A quarter century of system justification theory: Questions, answers, criticisms, and societal applications. British Journal of Social Psychology, 58, 263-314. DOI:10.1111/bjso.12297

Kanamori, Y., Cornelius-White, J. H., Pegors, T. K., Daniel, T., & Hulgus, J. (2017). Develop-ment and validation of the transgender attitudes and beliefs scale. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46(5), 1503-1515. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0840-1

Miller, P. R., Flores, A. R., Haider-Markel, D. P., Lewis, D. C., Tadlock, B. L., & Taylor, J. K. (2017). Transgender politics as body politics: Effects of disgust sensitivity and authoritarianism on transgender rights attitudes. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 5(1), 4-24.