In recent years, both the United States and Canada have borne witness to rapid social progression and conservative backlash, especially regarding attitudes toward transgender individuals. In the U.S., legislators have passed 170 anti-trans bills, of which 125 are already active. In Canada, both Saskatchewan and New Brunswick have passed legislation preventing educators from using a child’s preferred name or pronouns without explicit consent from the child’s parents.
A recent study conducted by Eliane Roy, PhD student in McGill’s Psychology Department, and her team investigated the relationship between local anti-trans legislation in the US and anti-trans sentiment. More specifically, the paper compared participants’ biases towards transgender individuals and their local legislation affecting transgender individuals.
Roy measured individuals’ explicit and implicit attitudes towards transgender people, state-level legislation affecting transgender people, participants’ demographics (including race, gender identity, sexual orientation, sex assigned at birth, country of residence, and political orientation), individual-level conservatism, and state-level conservatism.
To measure implicit attitudes, researchers used the Implicit Association Test, which measures individuals’ reaction times when associating a label like “transgender” with a positive or negative valuation. The researchers used self-reporting metrics to measure participants’ explicit attitudes towards transgender people and individual levels of conservatism. They calculated state-level conservatism using the state’s total vote count towards the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, in the 2020 election.
The study found a strong correlation between anti-transgender legislation and individuals’ explicit and implicit prejudice against transgender people. This correlation held stable when controlling for demographic factors.
“Somehow, either the attitudes were shaped by the normative dictating nature of these policies, or the opposite, that people’s mindsets or associations really changed the policy and landscape. For me, that was really interesting,” Roy said in an interview with The Tribune.
While the study makes no causal claim as to whether individuals’ attitudes influenced state legislation or the reverse, it speculated that the relationship could be bidirectional.
Existing research has noted that implicit biases against other minorities have begun to move from more negative attitudes towards neutrality in recent years. Researchers have also pointed out that attitudes towards gay men and lesbian women became positive at a faster rate after the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. Roy is optimistic about the same trajectory being possible with public opinion towards transgender individuals.
“If there’s another way of enacting change by just saying, ‘Hey, as a society right now, we’re just not accepting this behaviour, and we’re not accepting you not respecting people’s rights,’ […] I think it would be helpful,” Roy said.
Ultimately, Roy’s research speaks to the importance of institutional policy and how closely entangled it is with individual attitudes. As members of the McGill community, it is our responsibility to question whether policy decisions at the university-level match our social convictions. In 2023 McGill hosted a talk by Robert Wintemute, a man whose work inspired the foundation of the LGB Alliance, an organization which lobbies against transgender civil rights. In an open letter amid the AGSEM strike of March 2024, transgender Teaching Assistants and allies criticized the AGSEM-McGill deal for dropping protections against misgendering and dead-naming as a part of their agreement. Roy believes that people’s minds have the capacity to shape or be shaped by an institution’s decisions.
“It’s important, when you’re looking at the documents that you receive from McGill, the emails you receive from McGill, or anything that’s put out by McGill, to pause yourself, read it, and then think, ‘Okay, is this representative of how I feel, how I think about these things?’ and if not, ‘Is there something that I can do myself to actually say, ‘You’re putting this out there, but I don’t believe that’s correct?’” Roy added.
Being both critical and aware of our individual biases and how they interact with wide-reaching policy allows us to actively work against the correlations Roy found, and take a critical approach to anti-transgender legislation. Injustice and hate have the power to permeate our socio-political landscapes unless we, as a community, challenge them.
