Transgender friendship experiences: Benefits and barriers of friendships across gender identity and sexual orientation

The present research explores benefits and barriers of friendships for transgender individuals. Participants included 536 individuals who self-identified as transgender or gender variant. Participants completed an online survey asking about friendship experiences with transgender, cisgender, sexual minority, and heterosexual friends. Using a feminist intersectional theoretical framework, content analysis attended to the benefits and barriers to friendship and highlighted patterns of responses by allowing for comparisons across friends' gender identity and sexual orientation. Unique friendship barriers and benefits were found across normative (cisgender/heterosexual) and non-normative (transgender/sexual minority) dimensions of identities. In addition, friendship experiences with transgender and sexual minority friends displayed unique similarities and differences. In our analyses we emphasize the usefulness of a feminist intersectional approach in investigating transgender friendship experience.