Public Opinion of/Climate for

This entry reviews public attitudes about trans people and trans rights. Very little was known about such public knowledge and attitudes prior to the mid-2000s. The earliest study in the 1960s of a representative sample of medical professionals revealed sharp differences in the legitimacy of medical interventions for transsexual people. Since then, social psychologists have developed scales of attitudes toward trans people, although usually based on student or other convenience samples. Since 2010, representative studies in the United States and across the globe have started to build a knowledge base. This literature suggests that the correlates of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men and LGB rights tend to associate similarly with trans people and trans rights. American adults, however, tend to be more antagonistic to ...