Researchers claim non-traumatic experiences of transgender people cause PTSD

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Sarah Valentine, PhD, Boston University School of Medicine

Source: Journal of Trauma and Dissociation
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
This Happened
In July 2024, a study was published claiming to show that transgender-related experiences and the negative perceptions transgender people hold of themselves are fear-inducing enough to cause posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
 
Who Did This?
Psychologist Sarah Valentine, PhD, conducted the study. Her program of research addresses care for PTSD among racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minority populations.
 
The Claim
The study was conducted on 43 transgender and gender diverse (TGD) adults who responded to advertisements distributed at clinics and at a conference. They found that transgender-related stress experiences significantly associated with severity of PTSD symptoms.
The authors interpreted this to mean that transgender-related stress causes PTSD even though the stress is not the life-threatening type of stress that is known to cause PTSD. The revelation of this, according to the researchers, is that this conclusively explains why TGD people show PTSD at higher rates than the general population.
 
Analysis
The measure of transgender-related stress experiences was flawed at least three different ways. (1) Seventeen items measured events, such as “difficulty finding a bathroom to use,” and “heard negative statements about transgender” people, but no attempt was made to determine if these were experienced as positive or negative. The literature on stressful experiences has shown that it cannot be taken for granted how different individuals perceive events. (2) No attempt was made to date each event. The researchers did not know if reported events happened before or after development of PTSD symptoms. (3) Twenty-nine items measured perceptions (e.g., “People don’t understand me because they don’t see my gender as I do” and “When I think about my gender identity or expression, I feel unhappy”), which are not experiences. It's conceivable that participants imagined what others think about gender even if discrimination acts rarely happened to them.
These types of perceptions seem nearly identical to a character trait called neuroticism. Decades earlier, it was established that one of the best predictors of who develops psychiatric syndromes, including PTSD [1], was neuroticism, which describes excessive anger, anxiety, irritability, and emotional instability following minor frustrations, difficulty calming, and viewing situations as overwhelming [2].
An alternative explanation of the findings is that a large proportion of this self-selected TGD sample had high levels of neuroticism, and many, if not most, of the PTSD symptoms were false positives.
 
Why Is This Happening?
What’s the value to transgender people and their advocates of creating a narrative that existing as a transgender person puts them at higher risk for PTSD? It doesn’t help individuals manage distress or attain self-knowledge if it teaches them erroneously that society is the problem, behaviors are misdiagnosed, and they should not engage in introspection about their own weaknesses.
The value seems apparent when these types of flawed studies are placed in the context of historical ideologies for fighting social injustice that derive their appeal from oppression. We are witnessing an attempt to control language in academia by creating a category of “oppression-based stress” [3] that has special power to harm. The truth is that everyone faces stress, and there is no good evidence that oppression stress is any different from other stress in quantity or quality. The only difference is the valence that some advocates place on oppression as part of an ideology that fits their worldviews.
 

REFERENCES
[1] McFarlane AC (1989). The Aetiology of Post-traumatic Morbidity: Predisposing, Precipitating and Perpetuating Factors. British Journal of Psychiatry 154(2):221-228. doi:10.1192/bjp.154.2.221.
[2] Widiger TA, Oltmanns JR (2017). Neuroticism is a fundamental domain of personality with enormous public health implications. World Psychiatry 16(2):144-145. doi:10.1002/wps.20411. 
[3] Sarah Valentine and Kelly Harper (4/17/2023). Adaptation of evidence-based treatments for PTSD for sexual and gender minority youth. Grand rounds presentation for University of California, San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. YouTube accessed 7/30/24.


Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page.