Homo- and Trans-Negative Attitudes in Clinical Psychologists and Psychoterapists

Previous studies have shown that mental health professionals are not immune from negative attitudes toward sexual minorities but, on the contrary, they clearly show a positive bias for heterosexuals. The aim of this study is to assess whether mental health professionals are affected by a bias that distorts and impacts the psychological assessment process of transgender individuals. A case description of a fictitious transgender (vs. cisgender) patient was used, together with measures of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). The effects of the experimental manipulation on the therapists’ clinical evaluations were then investigated. A female sample of licensed psychotherapists (N = 218) were presented with clinical vignettes that described a transgender (vs. cisgender) man (vs. woman) reporting depressive (vs. anger outbursts) symptoms and then asked to evaluate the case answering questionnaires concerning diagnosis and prognosis. In order to ascertain whether individual variables (such as authoritarianism) influence the severity ratings of transgender and cisgender clients, a series of moderation models was carried out. The interaction between gender identity and expressed gender on severity was significant only when therapists showed high levels of authoritarianism. The impact and consequences of prejudice against transgender persons in mental health professionals are still largely understudied and unknown. Our data revealed an unexpected result: the moderation model showed that, for high levels of RWA, cisgender women were considered the most severe psychopathological group. These findings indicate the occurrence of a gender bias rather than a transphobic bias in the patients’ clinical evaluation: despite the contents of the clinical vignettes being equal, cisgender women were judged more severely than transgender clients and cisgender men. Results will be compared with those of previous studies focussing on homosexual clients.