A Comparison Between Self-Identified Evangelical Christians' and Nonreligious Persons' Attitudes Toward Transgender Persons

The present study provides the 1st descriptive survey study to date that reports attitudes and beliefs toward transgender persons with a sample of the U.S. evangelical Christian population. Data were collected from 483 participants (nonreligious n = 253, evangelical Christian n = 230) recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The study employed the Transgender Attitudes and Beliefs Scale-a psychometrically sound and culturally sensitive, 3-factor (interpersonal comfort, sex/gender beliefs, and human value) 29-item scale-to assess attitudes and beliefs toward transgender. Data were analyzed using two-way analyses of variance, item analyses, independent samples t tests, and Pearson's correlations. Findings indicated that evangelical Christians showed significantly lower attitude scores and a more dichotomous or fixed view of gender compared to their nonreligious counterparts. At the same time, evangelical Christians displayed greater variability in their attitudes toward transgender persons and had high ratings on the human value factor overall (measuring the extent to which a person affirms transgender persons' intrinsic value as a person), which was, in turn, less correlated with the other factors-interpersonal comfort and sex/gender beliefs-than for their secular reference group. On questions pertaining to civil rights, evangelical Christians, on average, gave significantly lower ratings than did nonreligious persons, though the effect size was small on the issue of access to housing.