person walking on street holding trans rights sign
May 22, 2025 In Flourishing in the Margins, Power of Story By Rachel Gold

How Science Can Change Our Stories About Transphobia

Why are people transphobic? Are they born that way, or does it develop over time? Is it culturally transmitted? And if we understand how transphobia arises, can we come up with more effective ways to counteract it? Perhaps most importantly, does the scientific data change the stories we tell ourselves about the world we live in? 

(Note: as I was drafting this, The Conversation also came out with an article covering some of the same ground.)

If you’ve ever encountered transphobia (and who hasn’t?) then some of these results won’t surprise you, but bear with me because the science does point in some unexpected directions. In addition, understanding that people are transphobic for different reasons helps us see where to put our efforts to change minds—including where it’s safe enough to begin a conversation. Of course, this only applies if you want to be having those kinds of conversations. 

Digging into the science, we can see that millions of people in this country are not actively hating trans people all the time. A terrible thing about all the transphobia in the media is it can make us feel that the world is against us when it’s not. Some of the world is against us—but it may be a much smaller percentage than we think. This distinction may be of limited comfort when there are dangerous and damaging political moves happening, but I think it’s important for our long-term understanding of how to create and maintain a country that is safe for trans kids and adults. As an author and storyteller, I also see this as crucial in terms of the stories we tell ourselves about how safe our world is and what’s possible for the future. 

There are many definitions of transphobia, and better terms are being proposed, but for the sake of this article, transphobia includes negative attitudes toward transgender people as a class, including fear, anger, and even hatred. It can include a rejection or invalidation of trans identities, or refusal to acknowledge them–and often results in actions that work against the thriving of trans people as our authentic selves. 

Table of Contents

    Three Kinds of Transphobia

    “Even the most bigoted person is not a cartoon villain, being mean just for the sake of being mean. They are trying to make sense of the world and their place in it while maintaining that they are a good and reasonable person and their groups are too.”

    –from Good Reasonable People by Keith Payne, the best book I’ve read this year about current political divides in this country.

    I dug into the scientific literature (for links and references, see the end of this post) and found three main reasons that people are or can become transphobic:

    •  Cognitive factors: they may be people who have a strong need for closure and do not like ambiguity, which stems from a variety of causes ranging from personality factors to trauma.
    •  In-group love: they may have strong in-group bonding, and one of their identity groups is being anti-trans/anti-gay. 
    •  Power and dominance: they may be inclined toward authoritarianism & social dominance—for which there are also a number of causes, including personality factors and trauma.

    All three groups have biological and social underpinnings. Those are not separate factors because humans are social beings whose brains wire based on our social environments. Brains can re-write given different inputs, but some minds are going to be easier to change than others. 

    Cognitive factors 

    There are so many reasons people might have a strong need for closure (NFC in the scientific literature), including:

    • They may have a personality style with low openness to experience
    • They may have a more black-and-white thinking style because of past or current trauma
    • Neurodivergence can be a factor (often coupled with trauma)

    This is the first of the two groups that benefits from contact—and is also the group that it can be safest to have contact with, especially if they’re not strongly part of an identity group that’s anti-trans. For example, a relative who isn’t a die-hard member of the Republican Party, but expresses confusion and gets upset when exposed to new pronouns and terms about gender and sexuality. 

    Sometimes what the cognitive factors folks need is: a) friendly contact and b) simplified points. The contact doesn’t need to be in person and doesn’t need to be done by you. There’s so much social change work that can be done (see our post on character classes of social change) and if you want to do it, I highly recommend you start where you feel strongest. The good news here is that fiction also counts as friendly contact. My novel Being Emily is designed to gently educate people about trans experiences and how to be a good ally. (It’s also designed to have trans girls and women feel loved and to help all of us imagine better futures.)

    If we want to have a conversation with a transphobic person who seems to have high NFC, we can start by asking a lot of questions to find out what they already know and the context for this knowledge. When I’m in a change conversation with a high-NFC person, I also provide a lot of validation and support them in feeling safe enough to ask their questions. Please note that this can feel really hard if you need more support and resources, and it’s always an option to just point them to other sources of information. Even if you have the desire to engage in one of these conversations, if the other person isn’t putting in some effort to learn or if you’re expending too much effort, you can disengage at any point. There are so many resources available; for starters, check out The Trevor Project’s guide and information from Advocates for Trans Equality. 

    Questions to ask: 

    • What did you learn about gender when you were growing up?
    • What works for you about those gender roles? What do you like?
    • What’s something you learned about in the past that changed your thinking about a group of people? What helped facilitate that change?

    Validation/calming statements:

    • That does sound confusing! (or even: I get confused about that sometimes too.)
    • It’s okay to get things wrong. Trans folks mess up each other’s pronouns too. You can just apologize and move on.
    • I know this is all new to you, but I really appreciate it when you try.

    This group can benefit from being given resources to read and given information in small doses—plus being appreciated as they make small steps toward expanding how they understand the world. When a person in our lives is willing to struggle with cognitively new territory, even though it can feel deeply uncomfortable for them, this is a sign that they care—and remembering that can help us be patient as they learn. Ashton has experience with this: 

    “My grandparents still struggle with proper pronouns, and even my name sometimes. But they’ve both expressed interest in improving and apologize when corrected. I point them toward educational resources, including Rachel’s work. I don’t do more because I don’t have the capacity. It’s very much a mutual negotiation—their desire to improve coupled with my boundaries and ability to educate.” 

    In-group love

    Payne shared one study, looking at hundreds of civilizations, which “found that the more a civilization valued loyalty to their own group, the more warlike they were and the more they valued violence against other groups. Being a morally virtuous member of your groups and being a nightmare to out-groups are two sides of the same coin.” 

    Evidence is beginning to accrue that oxytocin, often called the “cuddle” or “love” hormone, increases feelings of connection with our own close groups, but fosters stronger negativity toward out-groups. One of my key takeaways from reading Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray is that hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have primed humans to fear harm coming from outside their known groups—and more often than not, this harm was non-human. But now, in the modern West, we don’t have to watch out for unseen, non-human harm, so that part of our brain may be looking for human harms. Think about how many TV shows involve harm to individuals that comes from strangers, which is disproportionate to what actually harms us. My suspicion is that this searching for harmful strangers couples with oxytocin and the human bonding system to make us anxious and potentially hateful toward out-groups with which we don’t have regular contact. The situation is even worse when political groups work to leverage this anxiety and potential hatred for their own gain.

    In addition to being on the lookout for harm from kinds of people we’ve never met, we have a “psychological immune system” that operates as unconsciously as our physical immune system. The psychological immune system protects our sense of self and well-being. Studies are beginning to show that one way it does this is by applying a positive sheen to groups we belong to that are integral parts of our identity. For example, my sense that lesbians are some of the best humans on the planet stems in part from my psychological immune system protecting that core identity for me—and the downside is that it can cause my mind to obscure when some lesbians are behaving in harmful ways. (This explains parts of my early dating life and my perplexity about anti-trans lesbians.)

    This feeds into what Payne calls the “psychological bottom line …”

    “The first nonnegotiable principle is that I am a good and reasonable person. The second principle is that my groups are good and reasonable people. When the psychological immune system protects us from threats, it does it by finding a way to make everything else add up to the psychological bottom line.”

    Payne also explores the studies showing that people with negative impressions of one out-group tend to have similar negative feelings about other out-groups: “Researchers today find that people who have negative attitudes toward Black Americans also tend to dislike Hispanics, immigrants, Muslims, and other out-groups.” This means that folks who are experiencing strong in-group bonding with Republican groups may be easily swayed to transphobia, even if they wouldn’t hold those opinions on their own. And because of the power of the psychological immune system, once their identity group has seized upon transphobia as important, change becomes much harder—but not impossible! 

    The good news here is that once a group starts to change at that group level, the change can ripple through the members. We can approach this in a fractal way: working to create educational resources for specific groups and talking with individual members. We can also see that there are many groups we may choose to disengage from—and understand that if there’s a person in your life who’s strongly identified with an anti-trans group, the best step you can take for yourself may be to step away until other forces have worked change at the group level, or the person becomes less identified with that group. 

    Power and dominance

    The terms used to study these groups include Right-Wing Authoritarian (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). People caught in an authoritarian/social dominance system may not be able to change their perspective until their trauma is dealt with—and that’s not any of our jobs. This group is high on my list of folks to personally avoid and politically fight. 

    This is true even as I recognize that a lot of these people are swimming in trauma. As Darcia Narvaez says:

    “…our human instincts still are to be egalitarian when we are well-nurtured and have experiences of playful egalitarianism—but modern society raises children to be easily stressed and stresses them as adults so much that many can’t think or feel properly and so learn to prefer authoritarianism. In my analysis, following Alice Miller, instinctive submission to authority comes from an early life experience of trauma or neglect that creates a brain that is threat reactive and easily submits to a powerful authority figure.” 

    I can have compassion for someone’s traumatic experiences and still get the hell away from them. This is the group that it seems most effective (and much safer) to deal with on a community and political level. 

    In summary: Finding hope

    There are a lot of reasons a person can engage in transphobic behavior or support transphobic public policy. I think it’s important to understand these because of the way transphobic attacks can evoke a sense of shame. If we know they’re in a power and dominance setting, we can understand that efforts to shame trans folks are weapons they’re using to maintain dominance—and we can resist. 

    When we understand that someone may be motivated by in-group bonding or need for closure, we can see that they’ve probably never thought deeply about trans issues. They’re much more interested in their own psychological security than shaming us. It’s also likely that in the future, presented with enough evidence, contact, and group change, they’ll feel differently about trans folks. 

    Do you have further questions about grappling with transphobia or finding good resources? Let me know in the comments on this post if you’re so inclined.

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    Sources and further resources

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