Anti-Trans Laws Fuel Nationwide Stress, U.S. Study Finds

Transgender people in the United States are being affected by legislation targeting their rights, even if they live in a trans-supportive state, a new study says.

Anti-trans legislation appears to cause more psychological distress than personal experiences of discrimination, according to findings published recently in the journal American Psychologist.

“It generally creates an environment of fear no matter where I go,” one trans person told researchers. “Right now, I haven’t had any gender reaffirming care and it honestly scares me that if I ever did, I could be a target. I may not even be able to receive the care I need because of the government.”

Anti-trans laws affect the psychological well-being of transgender people even if they live in a state with trans-friendly legislation, researchers found.

“Currently, I feel safe, and privileged where I live, but I worry that in the future, the situation may not stay this way,” another trans participant told researchers. “I worry about losing healthcare, or my life, so I often keep the fact that I am transgender hidden.”

More than 2,000 laws that directly or indirectly discriminate against transgender people have been proposed at the state and federal level since 2020, researchers said in background notes. Many of these laws limit access to healthcare, public facilities and sports leagues.

“In a lot of ways, our participants who were talking about fear and expressing fear were viewing a lot of the anti-trans legislation as an existential threat,” lead researcher Catherine Wall, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a news release. “So, a threat to their very existence, threats to their very lives and threats to the lives of all trans people around them.”

For the new study, researchers analyzed survey data collected in early 2024 from nearly 350 transgender and gender diverse people in the United States.

Results showed a strong relationship between psychological distress and anti-trans legislation. They also found a moderate relationship between news anxiety and news exposure.

“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,” Wall said.

The mental and emotional stress bled across state lines, researchers found.

“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,” Wall said.

Instead, people’s perception of a national-level threat appeared to cause them to feel stress even if their state was trans-friendly, researchers said.

For example, some said they feared visiting relatives in states with anti-trans laws, or were worried that their state could pass discriminatory laws at any time. They generally noted profound stress and anxiety around being discriminated against or targeted in a violent act.

People with fewer community ties and less family support tended to have greater stress, researchers said.

Interestingly, family support and community support had equally strong relationships to a person’s healthy psyche, suggesting that the family one chooses can be as strong a protective factor as the family into which one is born, researchers said.

“Understanding the potential beneficial role of social support on resilience is something that is incredibly important,” Wall said. “The role that social support plays can be really beneficial as trans people are navigating this overarching sociopolitical environment.”

More information

Mental Health America has resources for transgender people.

SOURCES: Virginia Commonwealth University, news release, Sept. 18, 2026; American Psychologist, 2026