Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Anxiety about anti-trans laws tracked distress more closely than discrimination in 346 adults
Virginia Commonwealth University researchers surveyed 346 transgender and gender-diverse adults in early 2024 and found legislative anxiety the strongest correlate of psychological distress in their model, including for people living under protective state laws.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Virginia Commonwealth University researchers report in American Psychologist that anxiety about anti-transgender legislation predicted psychological distress above every other term in their model, including participants' own experiences of discrimination.
- The evidence is a survey of 346 transgender and gender-diverse US adults collected in early 2024, covering legislation anxiety, discrimination, social support and community connection.
- Participants reported psychological distress from anti-transgender laws even when they lived in states whose own legislation is friendly toward transgender and gender-diverse people.
- More than 2,000 laws discriminating directly or indirectly against transgender and gender-diverse people have been proposed at state and federal level since 2020, many limiting health care, facilities and sports access.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint The survey caught anxiety and distress in the same early-2024 window, so it cannot settle which drives which, and any programme sold on the causal reading is standing on a correlation.
- capability Because chosen community support scored as strongly as family support, a clinician working with someone estranged from their family can build a support plan out of friendships without treating it as second best.
- decision A state that has passed protective legislation and wants to know whether it is working needs an endpoint other than residents' self-reported distress, because this sample reported distress inside protective states too.
The strongest predictor in this model and the outcome it predicts are both self-report scales, answered by the same 346 people in the same survey [2]. Anxiety about legislation and psychological distress overlap as constructs, so part of the strong relationship the team reports is two related questionnaires moving together [4].
The data come from a single collection window in early 2024 [2], which means the design cannot order the two in time. Someone already in distress may follow legislative news more closely and score higher on anxiety about it. The researchers report a moderate relationship between news anxiety and news exposure [4], and that relationship works as well read backwards as forwards.
The state-by-state claim is the part the design supports least well. Participants described fear for their safety and well-being regardless of whether they lived in a state with anti-transgender legislation [11], and Wall attributed that to a perception of national threat [13]. "You would think that if an individual lived in a state that had laws that were preventing discrimination, that they might have lower levels of psychological distress," Wall said [12].
Spread 346 people evenly across 50 states and the District of Columbia and you get fewer than seven per jurisdiction [16]. Recruitment was certainly not even, and the published release does not report effect sizes, the distress instrument, or how participants were distributed across states [17]. A study built to test whether protective state law buffers distress would sample by policy climate and report those cells. This one reports what people said about living under both kinds of law [6][11], and that testimony is not the same thing as a measured comparison between policy climates.
The support result is the one I would build on. Family support and community support had equally strong relationships with psychological distress [9], and participants lower on community connectedness and family support reported more of it [8]. Both predictors were measured the same way in the same sample, and a within-sample comparison of two similarly measured predictors is the kind of question a cross-sectional survey answers well. "It's not enough to look at trans people through a deficit lens," Wall said [10].
On the open-ended responses, Wall said: "In a lot of ways, our participants who were talking about fear and expressing fear were viewing a lot of the anti-trans legislation as an existential threat" [14]. Some participants wrote that they had left or intended to leave their home state for one with transgender-friendly laws, and others said they feared visiting relatives in states with anti-transgender laws [15].
What to watch
- Whether the American Psychologist paper itself reports a formal statistical test of state policy climate as a moderator.
- A longitudinal cohort of the same participants tracked across a state legislative session.
- Whether other samples reproduce the equal weighting of family-of-origin and community support.