Since 2020, more than 2,000 bills that directly or indirectly discriminate against transgender and gender-diverse people have been proposed at the state and federal level in the United States. Many of these measures restrict access to gender-affirming healthcare, limit the use of public facilities consistent with gender identity, or bar transgender people from participating in sports leagues aligned with their identity. The sheer volume of proposed laws, regardless of whether they ultimately become statutes, appears to shape the psychological landscape for transgender and gender-diverse adults across the country.

To quantify that impact, the research team analyzed survey data collected in early 2024 from 346 transgender and gender-diverse adults in the United States. The survey assessed participants’ anxiety about anti-transgender legislation, their personal experiences of identity-based discrimination, their levels of social and familial support, their degree of community connectedness, and related measures of exposure to news coverage. The design combined quantitative modeling with a qualitative analysis of open-ended responses, allowing the researchers to trace both the statistical structure of distress and the lived experiences behind it.

The quantitative results were unambiguous. Anti-transgender legislation anxiety showed a strong relationship with psychological distress, and that relationship held above and beyond every other variable in the model, including active experiences of discrimination. In other words, the ambient threat of legislation outweighed the psychological weight of discrimination participants had personally endured. The analysis also identified a moderate relationship between news anxiety and news exposure, suggesting that the media environment through which people follow these bills contributes an additional layer of stress.

Support systems emerged as a critical counterweight. Participants with lower community connectedness and weaker familial support reported greater psychological distress, while those embedded in supportive networks fared better. Notably, the study found that familial support and community support carried equally strong relationships to distress levels, a finding with practical implications: friendships and community ties outside the family can be just as protective as family bonds in sustaining the mental wellness of transgender and gender-diverse people navigating a hostile sociopolitical environment.

Wall emphasized that the field should not view transgender people solely through a lens of vulnerability. It is not just enough, she said, to look at trans people within the light of deficit; researchers also need to examine strength and resiliency factors. The study’s attention to social support reflects that orientation, treating community and family connection not as background variables but as active buffers against a stressor that operates at the scale of national politics.

The qualitative strand of the research revealed how pervasive the sense of threat had become. Many participants reported having experienced, or fearing they would experience, difficulty accessing gender-affirming care or living openly as transgender people. Others described rising discrimination and violence associated with the surge in anti-transgender legislation, and a corresponding increase in fear for their safety and well-being. Crucially, these fears were voiced regardless of whether participants lived in a state that had actually enacted anti-transgender laws, underscoring that perception of a national threat can drive distress even where local protections exist.

Wall noted that one might expect individuals living in states with anti-discrimination laws to show lower levels of psychological distress, but the data did not bear that out. Instead, participants’ perception of a national-level threat likely shaped their emotional state. The qualitative responses illustrated this dynamic in concrete terms: some participants had left or intended to leave their home states for jurisdictions with transgender-friendly laws; others feared visiting relatives in states with anti-transgender legislation; still others worried that their own state could pass such laws at any moment. Some described feeling privileged simply to live in a transgender-friendly state or to be able to present as cisgender in public. Across responses, participants reported profound anxiety about being discriminated against for being transgender or being targeted in a violent act.

According to Wall, many participants who spoke about fear were framing the legislative wave as something more fundamental than a policy dispute. In a lot of ways, she said, participants expressing fear were viewing the anti-trans legislation as an existential threat, a threat to their very existence, to their very lives, and to the lives of all trans people around them. That framing helps explain why protective state laws offered limited psychological shelter: when the threat is understood as national in scope, no single state’s legal environment fully neutralizes it.

The findings carry implications for both clinical practice and public policy. On the individual level, Wall said, understanding the potential beneficial role of social support on resilience is incredibly important, because the role that social support plays can be genuinely beneficial as transgender people navigate the overarching sociopolitical environment. But she cautioned that individual-level buffers cannot substitute for structural change. Such overwhelming psychological distress, she argued, needs societal solutions, especially as anti-transgender legislation continues to spread, and it will not be enough in the long term to focus only on individual-level resiliency factors. As the number of proposed bills continues to climb, the study suggests that the mental health consequences of legislation should be counted among its most significant effects, felt by transgender and gender-diverse people wherever they live.

Subject of Research: Psychological effects of anti-transgender legislation on transgender and gender-diverse adults in the United States

Article Title: Anti-transgender legislation causes psychological distress even in states with trans-friendly laws, according to VCU research

Article References: Anti-transgender legislation causes psychological distress even in states with trans-friendly laws, according to VCU research. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: transgender health, anti-transgender legislation, psychological distress, American Psychologist, Virginia Commonwealth University, social support, gender-affirming care, discrimination, community connectedness, mixed-methods research, legislative anxiety, mental health

The research team, led by postdoctoral researcher Xinyi Zhao of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, together with colleagues, undertook what the authors describe as the first global longitudinal analysis of when gender differences emerge over the course of academic careers in psychology. Rather than examining a single country or institution, the team traced the publication histories of 78,216 psychologists worldwide who began their academic careers between 2000 and 2014. The data were drawn from the Scopus database, one of the largest bibliographic repositories in existence, which allowed the researchers to follow individual career trajectories across borders, institutions, and decades. Scientific publication activity served as the indicator of an active research career: a researcher who had not published any scientific work for at least five years was considered to have left active research.

The scale of the dataset matters, because attrition from academia is a slow, diffuse process that is easy to miss in cross-sectional snapshots. By tracking cohorts over time, the researchers could pinpoint exactly when the gender gap opens. Their answer: the largest differences appear between the fourth and sixth year after a researcher’s first scientific publication. This is a period during which the risk of leaving research rises substantially for everyone, as the initial excitement of a doctoral project gives way to the pressures of establishing an independent profile. But the rise is sharper for women than for men. The gender gap in attrition is most pronounced about five years after the start of a research career, precisely the window in which many researchers are finishing doctorates, moving between institutions on short-term contracts, and competing for their first permanent positions.

The cumulative effect of this early divergence is stark. By the thirteenth year of their careers, around half of the female researchers in the sample had stopped publishing altogether. Among men, that same halfway point of attrition was not reached until roughly five years later. In other words, even in a discipline where women form the majority of those entering, men sustain active research careers for meaningfully longer on average. This pattern helps explain a puzzle that has persisted for years: women are well represented among doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers in psychology, yet remain significantly underrepresented in professorships and other senior positions. The bottleneck, the study suggests, is not at the door of academia but inside it.

Lead author Xinyi Zhao framed the motivation for the work in terms of this paradox. In psychology, she noted, women are well represented among doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers, but far fewer reach the highest career levels. The team wanted to understand when women are more likely to leave academia and which factors are associated with this pattern. That framing is important, because much of the public debate about gender in science has concentrated on access—on pipelines, admissions, and the so-called leaky pipeline metaphor. The new findings redirect attention to retention, arguing that the bigger hurdle appears not to be entering academia but staying in it.

To probe possible causes, the researchers went beyond simple headcounts and modeled a range of factors that might plausibly influence whether a researcher stays active. These included publication output, citations, collaboration networks, and institutional characteristics such as the scientific reputation of a researcher’s institution. The strongest predictor of long-term retention turned out to be early publication output. In particular, a high number of first-authored papers—publications for which a researcher carries primary responsibility—was associated with a higher likelihood of remaining scientifically active over the long term. In later career stages, the number of last-authored papers, which conventionally signals scientific independence and leadership responsibility, became the more important indicator. Collaboration networks and institutional conditions were also associated with retention, but these relationships were considerably smaller than the effect of authorship patterns.

Crucially, however, none of these measured factors fully accounted for the gender difference. Even after publication output, citations, networks, and institutional prestige were taken into account, women remained more likely than men to leave research, and the difference was especially pronounced during the early years of academic careers. This residual gap is the study’s most consequential finding, because it rules out the simplest explanations. If women were leaving simply because they published less or worked at less prestigious institutions, controlling for those variables would have erased the difference. It did not. Something not captured in bibliographic data is shaping who stays and who goes.

Zhao was careful to caution against misreading the results. The findings, she emphasized, should not be interpreted as reflecting differences in scientific potential. Rather, they suggest that structural conditions and challenges during certain stages of life influence the career paths of female and male researchers differently. The publication-based analysis cannot, on its own, establish why women are more likely to leave. Information on starting a family, caregiving responsibilities, or individual career decisions was simply not available in the Scopus-derived data. The authors are explicit about this limitation, and it shapes how the findings should be understood: the study maps when attrition happens and what career-level factors correlate with it, but the underlying mechanisms require other kinds of evidence.

Some of that evidence comes from a companion study led by Zhao, published in Higher Education, which surveyed more than 8,000 researchers with children from 119 countries. Its results point toward one plausible mechanism: early parenthood is associated with greater career disruption for women than for men. Women in the survey were more likely to postpone starting a family until after completing their PhD. When parenthood did occur during the doctoral phase, their chances of completing a doctorate, achieving high scientific visibility, and remaining in research over the long term were lower than for men in comparable situations. Zhao described the two studies as complementary: the current work shows when women are more likely to leave research, while the survey findings suggest that the challenges of balancing an academic career with starting a family may be an important part of the explanation.

The research team concludes that science policy should place greater emphasis on the early career phase, the very window—roughly years four to six—where the gender gap in attrition is widest. Mentoring programs, transparent evaluation procedures, and better conditions for balancing research and family responsibilities could, the authors argue, help retain more women in academia over the long term. The findings also draw attention to a previously underexamined aspect of gender equality in academia: while discussions often focus on women’s access to academic careers, the decisive barriers may emerge later, once researchers are already inside the system. The team plans follow-up studies that will survey scientists around the world directly, asking about their career decisions and experiences, in order to move from mapping the attrition gap to understanding it from the perspective of those who leave. For a discipline that studies human behavior and prides itself on evidence-based practice, the message of its own career data is difficult to ignore: the pipeline is not leaking at the entrance, but midway through, and fixing it will require addressing the structural conditions of early academic life rather than only the question of who gets in.

Subject of Research: Gender differences in attrition from academic psychology careers

Article Title: Women leave psychological research more often than men

Article References: Women leave psychological research more often than men. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: psychology, gender gap, academic careers, attrition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, publication output, early career researchers, parenthood, retention, bibliometrics, American Psychologist, science policy