Gender Nonconformity and the Stereotype Content Model

An increase in transgender visibility over the last few years has highlighted a gap in the social psychology literature about attitudes and biases. There is a relatively large body of literature that examines people’s reactions to gender roles, but hardly any that examines people’s reactions to gendered traits. This study attempts to uncover the nature of the stereotypes and prejudice that are directed towards transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Transgender people face pervasive discrimination in education, employment, welfare programs, health care, etc. and as a result suffer severe outcomes, including high rates of poverty, homelessness, sexual and physical violence, murder, HIV infection, substance abuse, mental illness, and suicide. In order to combat discrimination and prejudice, it is important to understand how, why, and by whom the stereotypes that inform that prejudice are maintained. The primary purposes of this study were to lay a foundation for research about prejudice towards transgender and gender nonconforming people and to obtain insight about how transgender and gender-nonconforming people experience discrimination and navigate the world. To test this, participants rated a series of stereotypic and counterstereotypic face-voice pairs on categorical and continuous gender, warmth, and competence. Stereotypic and counterstereotypic stimuli pairings were then compared with each other and with baseline measures of warmth and competence for each face to determine whether stereotype incongruent gender cues elicited negative backlash. Analyses also assess the role of political orientation, race, gender, familiarity with trans people, and other background factors in moderating backlash effects