Sexual and Gender Minority Health Disparities as a Social Issue: How Stigma and Intergroup Relations Can Explain and Reduce Health Disparities

Abstract

Sexual and gender minorities experience disparities in mental and physical health often attributed to structural discrimination through policies that do not promote equal rights and interpersonal–intrapersonal processes. Social issues research on stigma and intergroup relations can explicate the intervening processes that explain health. In this introduction to the special issue entitled Translating Stigma and Intergroup Relations Research to Explain and Reduce Sexual and Gender Minority Health Disparities, we call social issues researchers to focus their work on sexual and gender minority stigma and intergroup relations processes in order to understand and ultimately reduce health disparities.

Proximal Minority Stress, Psychosocial Resources, and Health in Sexual Minorities

“…Gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals (i.e., sexual minorities) experience worse mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety, substance use) and physical health outcomes and behaviors (e.g., asthma, obesity, smoking, some cancers) than heterosexuals (Williams & Mann, ). A contributor to sexual minority health is minority stress (Meyer, ), or stigma and resulting processes due to minority sexual identity.…”

Evolutionary Psychology and LGBTQ+ Issues: A Qualitative Study of Queer Women’s Perspectives on Research Results

“…LGBTQ+ people, creates chronic stress that has important implications for mental and physical health (Frost, 2017;Nadal et al, 2011;Williams & Mann, 2017;Burgess, Lee, Tran & van Ryn, 2007;Kelleher, 2009;Lehavot, & Simoni, 2011). Therefore, when popular scientific articles display subtle homophobia, this can contribute to social and health disparities of LGBTQ+ populations.…”

The Benefits and Challenges of Health Disparities and Social Stress Frameworks for Research on Sexual and Gender Minority Health

“…Approaching the study of sexual and gender minority health from a disparities framework has numerous benefits, including the advancement of social scientific theories and their application within the health sciences. In particular, the development of minority stress theory (DiPlacido, ; Meyer, , ; Meyer & Frost, ; Williams & Mann, ) has proven especially useful for integrating concepts from social epidemiology and social psychology in attempts to provide an explanation for the existence of health disparities facing sexual minority populations. The minority stress framework originally articulated five stressors contributing to the added stress burden of sexual minority individuals relative to their heterosexual peers: acute stressful life events caused by prejudice (e.g., bias‐motivated assault, being fired from a job); chronic everyday forms of discrimination (e.g., receiving poorer services in stores, social avoidance); expectations of rejection; managing the visibility of one's sexual minority identity (stigma concealment); and self‐stigmatization or internalized homophobia (Meyer, ).…”

“…Disparities have been consistently documented between heterosexual and sexual minority populations (i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and other individuals who do not identify as heterosexual), as well as between cisgender and gender minority (i.e., transgender and genderqueer individuals), across multiple domains of health (for a review, see Williams & Mann, ). These persistent differences in health are theorized to be caused by the devalued and disadvantaged statuses surrounding sexual and gender minority populations that stem from a prevailing culture of stigma (Bockting et al., ; Hatzenbuehler et al., ; Herek, ; Meyer, ; Williams & Mann, ).…”