Testing Contact Theory and Attitudes on Transgender Rights

Tadlock, Barry L.; Flores, Andrew R.; Haider‐Markel, Donald P.; Lewis, Daniel C.; Miller, Patrick; Taylor, Jami K.

doi:10.1093/poq/nfx021

Cited by 55 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This effect may extend to contact with transgender people (Tadlock et al, 2017). Further, Flores 2015found that contact with gays and lesbians induces a secondary contact effect on attitudes toward transgender rights (see also Tadlock et al, 2017).…”

Section: Public Opinion Toward Transgender Peoplementioning

confidence: 98%

Public Attitudes on Transgender Military Service: The Role of Gender

Lewis

Tadlock

Flores

et al. 2019

Armed Forces & Society

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Policy regarding the inclusion of transgender soldiers in the U.S. Military has shifted back and forth in recent years, with public opinion likely a significant factor shaping the eventual policy outcome. As such, this study examines the factors that shape public attitudes toward military service by transgender people. In particular, we examine the influence of sex, social gender roles, and attitudes toward gender in shaping transgender military service attitudes. Further, we hypothesize that personal experiences with the military and with transgender people, along with values, personality predispositions, and religion, are likely to influence individual attitudes. We test these hypotheses using data from a unique October 2015 national survey of American adults. The results suggest that personal experiences, attitudes toward gender roles, and religion have substantial but sometimes conditional effects on attitudes toward military service by transgender people.

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Section: Public Opinion Toward Transgender Peoplementioning

confidence: 98%

Public Attitudes on Transgender Military Service: The Role of Gender

Lewis

Tadlock

Flores

et al. 2019

Armed Forces & Society

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“…Especially critical for transgender persons, parasocial interaction effects tend to be stronger when direct contact with the group being portrayed in media is minimal (Armstrong & Neuendorf, 1992; Fujioka, 1999; Tan et al, 1997). Less than 1% of Americans identify as transgender, and few Americans report knowing a transgender person (Tadlock et al, 2017). For example, Tadlock et al (2017) find that only 15% of Americans know a transgender person in any capacity—far fewer than the number that knows a gay or lesbian person.…”

Section: Effects Of Parasocial Contactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Less than 1% of Americans identify as transgender, and few Americans report knowing a transgender person (Tadlock et al, 2017). For example, Tadlock et al (2017) find that only 15% of Americans know a transgender person in any capacity—far fewer than the number that knows a gay or lesbian person. Importantly, past research does not find that knowing a transgender person is a consistent predictor of attitudes toward that group.…”

Section: Effects Of Parasocial Contactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Her revelation coincided with rising attention to transgender rights, including several local referendums that year on nondiscrimination ordinances that received substantial national media coverage (Taylor et al, 2018). By coming out in that environment, coupled with the fact that relatively few Americans report knowing a transgender person (Tadlock et al, 2017), Jenner was positioned to be a familiar face representing a group whose rights were increasingly salient but with whom most Americans have limited personal experience.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Politics of Being “Cait”: Caitlyn Jenner, Transphobia, and Parasocial Contact Effects on Transgender-Related Political Attitudes

Miller

Flores

Haider‐Markel

et al. 2020

American Politics Research

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Celebrities saturate American culture and often become relevant in politics, yet political science has largely left unstudied how celebrities affect mass political behavior. We focus on the 2015 story of Caitlyn Jenner revealing her transgender identity. Using an original nationally representative survey from that summer, we examine whether following the Jenner story and evaluations of its social significance affected attitudes toward transgender rights policies. Specifically, we examine how age and transphobia interacted with engagement with the Jenner story to shape attitudes toward transgender rights. We find, counterintuitively, that older respondents who were more transphobic were less likely to see her story as representing negative social trends if they followed it in the media. Furthermore, more transphobic older respondents were more likely to support pro-transgender policies if they viewed Jenner’s story less negatively. We then discuss the implications of our findings for research on celebrity effects on politics and transgender rights.

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“…To analyze the unique effect of gender essentialist beliefs on the descriptive content of transgender stereotypes, we controlled for several individual differences known to predict attitudes towards transgender groups: group familiarity (for results, see Supplementary Analyses), need for closure, gender, and sexual orientation (Gerhardstein & Anderson, 2010;Tebbe & Moradi, 2012;Whyman, 2019;Worthen, 2016). We also controlled for political ideology, which correlated with GEB (r(118) = -0.35, p < 0.001; for results, see Supplementary Analyses; Norton & Herek, 2013;Prusaczyk & Hodson, 2019;Stern & Rule, 2018;Tadlock et al, 2017). In Studies 1-3, familiarity is controlled for as a level-1 fixed effect, while need for closure, gender, sexual orientation, and ideology are controlled for as level-2 fixed effects and as cross-level interactions between the individual difference and the gender group effects.…”

Section: Gender Essentialist Beliefsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender Essentialism and the Mental Representation of Transgender Women and Men: A Multimethod Investigation of Stereotype Content

Gallagher¹,

Bodenhausen²

2020

Preprint

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Social category systems – such as nationality, class, and gender – are constantly shifting. How are emergent social groups, which had previously not been societally recognized, mentally represented alongside more established groups? The growing visibility of transgender women and men in the US is an opportunity to observe this sort of cultural shift. Across three diverse methods of stereotype measurement, we assessed characteristics associated with transgender women and men and compared them to the stereotypes of their more traditional (cisgender) counterparts. In our final study, we directly assessed how people mentally position transgender groups relative to culturally well-established cisgender groups. Across these four studies, we show that mental representations of emergent gender groups are highly idiosyncratic, such that some participants extended same-gender-identity stereotypes to transgender groups (e.g., stereotyping transgender women as feminine), while others extended same-sex-assigned-at-birth stereotypes to transgender groups (e.g., stereotyping transgender women as masculine). Moreover, these differences were substantially explained by endorsement of gender essentialist beliefs.

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Testing Contact Theory and Attitudes on Transgender Rights

Cited by 55 publications

References 15 publications

Public Attitudes on Transgender Military Service: The Role of Gender

Public Attitudes on Transgender Military Service: The Role of Gender

The Politics of Being “Cait”: Caitlyn Jenner, Transphobia, and Parasocial Contact Effects on Transgender-Related Political Attitudes

Gender Essentialism and the Mental Representation of Transgender Women and Men: A Multimethod Investigation of Stereotype Content

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