The Association Between Prejudice Toward and Essentialist Beliefs About Transgender People

Abstract

Previous research often suggests that people who endorse more essentialist beliefs about social groups are also likely to show increased prejudice towards members of these social groups, and there is even some evidence to suggest that essentialism may lead to prejudice and stereotyping. However, there are several notable exceptions to this pattern in that, for certain social groups (e.g., gay men and lesbians), higher essentialism is actually related to lower prejudice. The current studies further explored the relationship between essentialism and prejudice by examining a novel type of essentialism—transgender essentialism (i.e., essentializing transgender identity), and its relationship to prejudice towards transgender people. Study 1 (N = 248) tested the viability of transgender essentialism as a construct and examined the association between transgender essentialism and transprejudice, while Studies 2a (N = 315), 2b (N = 343), 3a (N = 310), and 3b (N = 204) tested two casual pathways to explain this relationship. The results consistently showed that the more that people endorse transgender essentialist beliefs, the warmer their feelings towards trans people (relative to cis people) were, echoing past research showing a similar relationship between essentialism and prejudice towards sexual minorities. However, the manipulations of both essentialism (Studies 2a and 2b) and prejudice (Studies 3a and 3b) were largely unsuccessful at changing the desired construct, meaning we were unable to provide direct causal tests. The one exception was a successful manipulation of the universality of trans experiences, but even here this resulted in no change in prejudice. The primary contribution of this work is in robustly demonstrating that greater transgender essentialism is associated with transprejudice.

A (TRANS)formative approach to gender‐inclusive science education

“…The theme of affirming diversity speaks directly to the recent calls from professional, science education organizations that have demanded education professionals transcend antiquated notions of sex, gender identity, and gender expression and to ensure that outdated and refuted concepts, pedagogies, and instructional practices do not perpetuate harmful stereotypes or misconceptions (NABT, 2021). Though heavily criticized as being scientifically inaccurate (Smiler & Gelman, 2008), essentialist thinking continues to persist in everyday reasoning and perpetuates intolerant attitudes, prejudices, and biases about race, gender, sexual orientation, illness, and ability (Gericke et al, 2017; Glazier et al, 2021; Heine et al, 2019). Those who perceive others through the lens of essentialism are more likely to endorse social hierarchies (Mandalaywala et al, 2018) and be accepting of discriminatory practices (Skewes et al, 2018) and are less likely to support the rights of those with marginalized identities (Tee & Hegarty, 2006) or invest in efforts that promote social change (Wilton et al, 2019).…”

Gender essentialism predicts prejudice against gender nonconformity in two cultural contexts

“…For example, it may be that a more expansive measure of gender identity essentialism that assesses other components would lead to different relations with prejudice against gender-nonconforming targets. Past work using a more nuanced measure of transgender essentialism (a measure related to the concept of gender identity essentialism), was found to be related to essentialism in adults (Glazier et al, 2021).…”

“…Children from both cultural contexts endorsed gender‐identity essentialism at rates above the midpoint of the scale, mostly endorsing that the gender a child feels they are at 6 years old was the gender they felt at birth. In future research it will be important to examine how beliefs about gender‐identity essentialism may develop over time, particularly given that in adult samples, gender‐identity essentialism corresponds to less prejudice against transgender individuals (Glazier et al., 2021). Additionally, examination of means for gender identity essentialism in gender‐conforming and gender‐nonconforming targets (Table 4) suggests a distinction in how children might reason about these two types of cases.…”

“…The two tasks also differed in that the gender essentialism measure asked participants to reason about girls and boys as categories , whereas the gender identity essentialism task focused on children's inferences about specific individuals . Whether categorical beliefs about gender identity would predict lower levels of prejudice in children, as they do for adults (Glazier et al., 2021), remains an open question. And more broadly, an important unresolved issue that remains is whether children's beliefs about individuals are consistent with their beliefs concerning the more abstract categories to which they belong.…”

“…The relation between gender essentialism and prejudice may differ from that between gender‐identity essentialism and prejudice. Indeed, one paper with adult participants found that essentialism of transgender identities corresponded to lower levels of transgender prejudice (Glazier et al., 2021)—in contrast to prior research with adults, reviewed earlier, that gender essentialism relating to gender broadly corresponds to higher levels of transgender prejudice (Ching et al., 2020; Ching & Xu, 2018; Wilton et al., 2019).…”