Anti-transgender legislation causes psychological distress in trans and gender-diverse people even when they live in states where their rights are protected, according to new research from Virginia Commonwealth University. The anxiety about legislation was a stronger driver of distress than personal discrimination, meaning the culture war is not a local problem: it crosses every border.

The study, published in APA PsycNet and led by Catherine Wall, an assistant professor of psychology at VCU, surveyed 346 transgender and gender-diverse adults across the United States in early 2024. What Wall and her colleagues found should be required reading for every politician who has ever told themselves that this is simply a culture war, a wedge issue, a vote-getter with no real cost. The cost is real, it is measurable, and it lands on people who have done nothing except exist.

The legislation was a bigger driver of distress than discrimination itself

That is the finding I keep coming back to. Above and beyond personal experiences of discrimination, it was the anxiety about anti-trans legislation that was driving psychological distress. Wall put it plainly: "We found that above and beyond everything else in the model, including active experiences of discrimination, that anti-trans legislation anxiety was driving psychological distress."

Think about what that means. Someone can live through an act of discrimination, something specific and directed at them, and the broader legislative environment still weighs more heavily on their mental health. That is the power of a sustained, coordinated political campaign to make a group of people feel unwelcome in public life. You do not need to be in the room where it happens. You just need to know it is happening.

Over 2,000 laws that directly or indirectly target transgender and gender-diverse people have been proposed at state and federal level in the United States since 2020. Many restrict access to healthcare, public facilities, and sports. Each one sends a message. Each one says: we are debating whether you belong here. Taken together, they create something the participants in this study named precisely. They described it as an existential threat. A threat not just to their rights, but to their lives, and to the lives of every trans person around them.

Safe states are not safe from the national conversation

You might expect that living somewhere with strong legal protections would buffer some of this. Wall expected it too. "You would think that if an individual lived in a state that had laws that were preventing discrimination, that they might have lower levels of psychological distress," she said. But they did not. The perception of a national-level threat travelled across state lines and landed just as heavily.

Participants described leaving their home states, or planning to. They described fear about visiting relatives in states with hostile laws. They described worry that their own state could flip at any election. Some wrote of feeling privileged to be able to pass as cisgender in public, which is its own kind of grief: the relief of invisibility as a survival strategy.

This is what a culture war actually costs. Not a debate. Not a difference of opinion. A group of people calculating whether it is safe to visit their families at Christmas.

Connection matters, and community is as powerful as family

One of the genuinely hopeful findings in the research is this: non-familial friendships and community connections were as protective as family support. The two had equally strong relationships to an individual's level of psychological distress. If your family is not in your corner, your community can take on some of that burden. That is not a small thing for trans people who have been told by their families that they are not welcome as themselves.

It is also a reminder that the communities trans people build, the friendships, the chosen families, the groups and networks and spaces they create for one another, are not a consolation prize for the absence of biological family. They are genuinely powerful. They keep people together in very difficult circumstances, and the research says so.

Wall was careful to name this alongside the distress: "It's not just enough to look at trans people within the light of deficit. We also need to look at strength and resiliency factors as well." I think that is right, and I am glad the research acknowledges both. But she was also clear that individual resilience has a ceiling. "It's not going to be enough in the long term to just focus on that individual-level resiliency factor." The problem is societal. The solution has to be too.

The harm is not hypothetical

What this research does, and why I think it matters, is translate something trans people have been saying for years into the language that policy conversations demand. The harm is not hypothetical. It is not a projected risk or a theoretical concern. It is measurable, it is documented, and it is happening to hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to live their lives in a country that has made them the subject of a political strategy.

A culture war has victims. This study names some of them and shows what it is doing to their health. The politicians proposing these laws are not simply winning votes. They are generating a public health crisis, and it does not stay inside the states that pass the legislation. It spreads. It reaches people in the places they thought were safe. It follows them into their homes and into the news they read and into the fear they live with about what comes next.

Trans people deserve to live without that fear. The research is one more piece of evidence that we need to say so, loudly and clearly, and that silence is not neutrality. It is a choice about whose distress we decide to take seriously.