Hegemonic Masculinity and Radical Feminism: How Gendered Ideologies Are Associated with Transphobia
Open Access
- Author:
- French, Raymond
- Area of Honors:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Theresa K Vescio, Thesis Supervisor
Jeff M Love, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Hegemonic Masculinity
Radical Feminism
Transphobia
Anti-trans Attitudes
Social Attitudes
Transgender
Gender Identity - Abstract:
- Recently, there has been an epidemic of violence against trans women, especially trans women of color. To investigate factors associated with anti-trans attitudes, we conducted a correlational study examining the relationship between transphobia, feminist attitudes, and hegemonic masculinity. Also, we included other social attitudes (i.e., Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, and aggrieved entitlement) and personality traits (i.e., trait anger, trait anxiety, and self-esteem). We predicted that transphobia would positively correlate with anti-feminist attitudes and hegemonic masculinity. In addition, we expected hegemonic masculinity to positively correlate with every social attitude scale, with gender-relevant social attitudes (i.e., transphobia and anti-feminist attitudes) having the largest correlations. Over and above gender, we found that hegemonic masculinity and anti-feminist attitudes predicted transphobia, consistent with predictions. Furthermore, we found that hegemonic masculinity positively correlated with every social attitude scale, and the largest correlations were for gender-relevant social attitudes. In exploration, trait anger positively correlated with transphobia for only men. Outside of gender-relevant social attitudes, racism was the largest predictor of transphobia for men, and aggrieved entitlement was the largest predictor of transphobia for women. For men, there was a relationship between transphobia, hegemonic masculinity, racism, and trait anger, which could theoretically lead to the epidemic of violence against trans women of color. For women, there was a relationship between transphobia and aggrieved entitlement, which could theoretically lead to the TERF belief that trans women are men encroaching upon women’s spaces and threatening the identity of cis women.