What About Me? Understanding the Relationship Between Gender Identity and Social Anxiety

Anxiety impacts a substantial portion of the United States population. Those suffering from anxiety disorders, though, might very well be minority groups who have been left out of anxiety and trauma research all together. Leaving minority groups out of the conversation of mental health assumes mental illness affects every population and every individual to the same extent, which can prevent those in need from getting proper, targeted treatment. Through analysis of transgender and gender-diverse individuals’ accounts of their experiences with social anxiety, this study began to develop a scale specifically aligned with these experiences and whether it is unique to these demographic groups compared with already established social anxiety scales in the field of psychology. Further, this study has examined whether body dysmorphia symptoms have any correlation with social anxiety symptoms in either gender-diverse or cisgender populations