Abstract
Transphobia severely impacts the lives of transgender (or trans) people, sometimes in gender-specific ways; as such, research on transphobia and its predictors is crucial to understanding and preventing it. In this preregistered study, we tested associations between transphobic attitudes (operationalized as feelings about trans people) and predictors in 567 cisgender participants, attending to gender/sex of targets (trans women; trans men) and participants (cisgender women; cisgender men). Results supported most hypotheses: Higher levels of transphobia were associated with stronger beliefs in precarious manhood, naturalized womanhood, valuing patriarchy, and pedestal womanhood. As predicted, beliefs about trans people “co-opting” or “opting out” of specific gender/sexes mediated some of these associations. Moreover, these two beliefs were the strongest predictors among the variables we tested in the exploratory multiple regression analysis. Other than precarious manhood, which predicted transphobia for cisgender men participants only, results largely did not support gendered pathways for the predictors we studied. We discuss the potential of these predictors, some of which are new to psychological research, for understanding, preventing, and mitigating transphobia. We also highlight how these predictors are central to a host of restrictive gender ideologies that are foundational for feminist, gender, and/or sexual minority work and activism, pointing to the potential for coalitional social justice work and policy, and emphasizing the joint nature of feminist and trans efforts toward social change. This, along with the cross-gender/sex nature of our findings, suggests that addressing gender-specific as well as generalized transphobia may support gender/sex and sexual rights more broadly. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)