The following is research from The Pride Study published August 24, 2023.

What Did We Do?

We looked at reports that rated a state or area on their environment for LGBTQIA+ people, which we used to represent their local society’s attitudes. We then looked to see if those attitudes were related to any negative healthcare experiences of transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people that were reported in The PRIDE Study 2019 Annual Questionnaire.

What Was New, Innovative, or Notable? 

This study was among the first to test how existing research measures may reflect society’s attitudes about transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people and how they are related to experiences in healthcare.

What Did We Learn? 

We did not find a relationship between these existing research measures of society’s attitudes about transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive people and negative healthcare experiences. However, we found that 18% of transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people reported a negative experience in healthcare during the past year and 12.5% had a negative experience in mental healthcare. This is important because mental healthcare experiences are not usually looked at separately from the rest of healthcare experiences.

What Does This Mean for Our Communities? 

Transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people had negative experiences in both mental healthcare settings and in general healthcare settings. However, society’s attitudes, as measured in our study, were not related to these experiences.

What’s Next? 

Society’s attitudes about transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive people are not well measured in research. Understanding how the community experiences those attitudes is important. Until this improves, other factors that may affect experiences in healthcare should be looked at to improve the experiences of transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people.

Action Steps

See http://www.pridestudy.org/study for more information and to share this study with your friends and family.

If you are interested in conducting research related to LGBTQIA+ health, please learn more about collaborating with The PRIDE Study at http://pridestudy.org/collaborate.

Citation

Clark KD, Lunn MR, Bosse JD, Sevelius JM, Dawson-Rose C, Weiss SJ, Lubensky ME, Obedin-Maliver J, & Flentje A. Societal stigma and mistreatment in healthcare among gender minority people: a cross-sectional study. Int J Equity Health. 2023 Aug, 24; 22(1):162. doi: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-023-01975-7