Others have argued that hostility towards transgender identity is in part due to the challenge it poses to the idea that gender is based on observable physical and behavioral characteristics determined at birth. Rad and colleagues surveyed a sample of 1323 American adults, asking them to identify the gender of transgender people who medically transitioned, finding that the type of transition procedure mattered but its direction did not. Specifically, biological changes resulted in the target being more identified with their self-identified gender than their birth-assigned gender, but there were no significant differences between male-to-female and female-to-male transitions. Moreover, compared to male test subjects, female test subjects were more likely to identify the targets as their self-identified gender. This gender difference was larger in younger, more liberal, and less religious non-Midwestern respondents. The authors further showed that gender category beliefs (ratings of the transgender person's post-transition gender identity) were strongly associated with attitudes and feelings of warmth towards transgender people. However, gender category beliefs performed better in predicting bathroom policy preferences compared to feelings in unseen data, indicating that beliefs about what gender is and how it is determined are significantly linked to transphobia and support for anti-transgender policies. The authors argue that this pattern is consistent with theories that transphobia is rooted in a hierarchical social classification system where low-status groups (e.g., females) view the hierarchy in less essentialist ways than high-status groups (e.g., males).
Others have argued that hostility towards transgender identity is in part due to the challenge it poses to the idea that gender is based on observable physical and behavioral characteristics determined at birth. Rad and colleagues surveyed a sample of 1323 American adults, asking them to identify the gender of transgender people who medically transitioned, finding that the type of trans,ition procedure mattered but its direction did not. Specifically, biological changes resulted in the target being more identified with their self-identified gender than their birth-assigned gender, but there were no significant differences between male-to-female and female-to-male transitions. Moreover, compared to male test subjects, female test subjects were more likely to identify the targets as their self-identified gender. This! gender difference was larger in younger, more liberal, and less religious non-Midwestern respondents. The authors further showed that gender category beliefs (ratings of the transgender person's post-transition g,ender identity) were strongly associated with attitudes and feelings of warmth towards transgender people. However, gender category beliefs performed better in predicting bathroom policy preferences compared to feelings in unseen data, indicating that beliefs about what gender is and how it is determined are sig!nificantly linked to transphobia and support for anti-transgender policies. The authors argue that this pattern is consistent with theories that transphobia is rooted in a hierarchical social classification system where low-status groups (e.g., females) view the hierarchy in less essentialist ways than high-status groups (e.g., males).