Transgender Exclusion and Sex-Gender Threat

• In Event: The Political Psychology of LGBT+ Politics

Abstract

Narratives involving racialized threats of sexual violence—in which a dominant-group woman faces harm by a man outside the dominant group—have long been a staple of American political communication. These threat narratives sow division by mobilizing racial resentment and protective ideas about femininity in multiple policy areas, including immigration Smilan-Goldstein 2023a) and policing (Smilan-Goldstein 2023b). This paper investigates how narratives of threat—including perceived threats to the social category of “woman”—influence understandings of transgender participation in public life.

Narratives of sex and gender threat have been used in current debates over transgender rights. Trans-exclusionary rhetoric positions transgender women as a threat to cisgender women by relying on “gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned (white) women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection (by men, from men)” (Pearce, Erikainen, and Vincent 2020, 680). Rhetoric of cisgender women and girls’ vulnerability has been effectively marshaled in support of anti-trans bathroom bills in state legislatures, effectively excluding trans individuals from public spaces (Murib 2020). Such arguments falsely represent transgender women, in particular, as a sexual threat to cisgender women and a gender threat to the category of “woman.”

These sex and gender threats use benevolent sexism as a framework. Benevolent sexism refers to ideas of protective paternalism, complementary gender differentiation, and heterosexuality intimacy (Glick and Fiske 1996). These notions are relevant to sexual threats insofar as they invoke the idea of masculine protection for women who conform to traditional ideas of femininity. Benevolent sexism is relevant to gender threats as it presumes the importance of a complementary, binary gender.

In this paper, I will document rhetoric that links transgender rights to sex and gender threats against cisgender women. I will then use survey data to demonstrate that benevolent sexism drives antagonism toward transgender rights, particularly when the implicated group is transgender women or girls, compared to transgender men or boys.

To document uses of sex and gender threat in advocating against transgender rights, I will conduct a text analysis of news articles published between 2016 and 2023. A preliminary text analysis of U.S. newspapers reveals that transgender issues are increasingly discussed in terms of protecting cisgender women and girls, especially in the context of schools. Given this framing, I anticipate that individuals with higher levels of benevolent sexism view transgender rights issues through the frame of sex-gender threat.

Turning to survey data, I expect that an increase in a participant’s level of benevolent sexism is associated with a decrease in support for transgender rights, as measured by support or opposition for the legality of gender-affirming health care for minors. When question wording is specific to transgender girls and boys, though, I expect that benevolent sexism will be associated with opposition to transgender girls’ participation in K-12 girls’ sports, but not transgender boys’ participation in K-12 boys’ sports. Despite differences in the age group implicated (children compared to adults), I expect these results to replicate for feeling thermometer scores of transgender women and transgender men. I do not anticipate effects by respondent gender identity after controlling for benevolent sexism. Data collection using a YouGov sample (n=1,500) will begin in mid-January 2024.

This research project will expand our understanding of the underlying belief systems exploited by anti-transgender rhetoric, and how such messages are linked to a long legacy of sexual threat narratives.


References

Glick, Peter, and Susan T. Fiske. 1996. “The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating Hostile and Benevolent Sexism.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(3): 491–512.
Murib, Zein. 2020. “Administering Biology: How ‘Bathroom Bills’ Criminalize and Stigmatize Trans and Gender Nonconforming People in Public Space.” Administrative Theory & Praxis 42(2): 153–71.
Pearce, Ruth, Sonja Erikainen, and Ben Vincent. 2020. “TERF Wars: An Introduction.” The Sociological Review 68(4): 677–98.
Smilan-Goldstein, Rachel. 2023a. “Protecting Our (White) Daughters: U.S. Immigration and Benevolent Sexism.” Politics & Gender 1-22.
Smilan-Goldstein, Rachel. 2023b. “‘What About the Rapists?’ The Political Psychology of Women’s Policing Attitudes.” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 44(1): 20-39.

Author

• Rachel Smilan-Goldstein, Stanford University