Journal Club: How Discourse Shapes Bias
A 2025 paper studies implicit bias and its link with legal discourse.
by Veronica Esposito
Over the past few years, polls have shown a decline in public opinion support for trans rights. Studies done by the Pew Research Center have shown declines in public support for trans athletes, medical care for trans minors, trans bathroom rights, and others in the years between 2022 and 2025.
In a research paper published earlier this year, researcher Eliane Roy and colleagues attempted to determine if these changes in public opinion are at all related to the dramatic increase in anti-trans legislation being passed in state-level governments throughout the United States.
Examining things on a state-by-state level, Roy et al. found a strong correlation between the degree of anti-trans legislation in a given state and changes in implicit and explicit biases against trans people—the study concluded that efforts to enact hateful legislation against trans people have negatively influenced biases against this group.
How exactly did they reach this conclusion? First, Roy et al. needed a measure of implicit and explicit biases against trans people.
For this, the authors drew on the data collected from some 500,000 individuals on implicit and explicit biases via Harvard University’s Project Implicit. Implicit biases occur when individuals are biased toward or against a certain group without conscious knowledge, whereas explicit biases are conscious expressions of bias.
Founded in 1998, Project Implicit offers numerous tests that anyone can take to measure their level of implicit bias against a variety of demographics. The project includes tests on its website that ask participants to “quickly sort words into categories that are on the left and right hand side of the computer screen by pressing the ‘e’ key if the word belongs to the category on the left and the ‘i’ key if the word belongs to the category on the right.” In this way, participants measure associations between groups like “transgender” and “cisgender” and charged words like “good” and “bad.”
Readers are encouraged to take the test and see for themselves. For the transgender assessment, Project Implicit first trains participants to distinguish between photos of well-known trans and cisgender people. Then it asks participants to distinguish between either “cisgender people and negative words” or “transgender people and good words” as quickly as possible. A follow-up activity then has participants distinguish between “cisgender people and positive words” or “transgender people and negative words.” The website measures how quickly users complete these tasks, gathering a measure of implicit biases. Finally, participants complete a brief questionnaire to measure their explicit biases regarding transgender and cisgender people.
Once it had this data on biases in hand, Roy et al. then drew a 2020 state-by-state level analysis made by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) to determine how inclusive each state’s laws were for trans people. States were awarded a point for each inclusive law and lost a point for each harmful law. MAP is a nonprofit think tank founded in 2006 that seeks to promote democracy and inclusion through, in part, publishing data on equality measures for the LGBTQ+ community.
Using these measures, Roy et al. found a strong correlation between anti-trans legislation and implicit biases against trans people. This map displays their findings:
The research conducted in this paper falls within a larger collection of research indicating, as Roy et al puts it, that “new social norms can be signaled via policy-making institutions like the administration boards or legislative bodies.” Contrary to what many Democrats have asserted—that they must work with the existing preferences of the voter regarding trans people and other issues—this research demonstrates to the contrary: policy influences the development of social norms, not vice versa.
This paper builds on research conducted by Phillip Edward Jones and Paul R. Brewer that has demonstrated the immense influence of elite signals regarding trans rights. Their research demonstrated that in 2015 there was virtually no difference in support for trans rights among those who followed politics closely versus those who did not; but in 2016, after a wave of elite discourse regarding bathroom bans, there was a marked difference between those who follow politics and those who don’t. Jones and Brewer concluded that the signals given by elites caused politically aware voters to quickly change their beliefs. Their research indicates that messaging only necessarily impacts a subset of “tuned in” participants in democratic systems; among the less politically engaged, they argue that conflicting messages led to an overall muddled signal: “Unlike their more aware counterparts, however, these individuals would be less likely to distinguish between liberal and conservative sources, and more likely to accept conflicting considerations on the issue.” It would be fascinating for further research to determine if such muddled messaging still occurs in 2025, when trans rights issues have become much more widely debated and polarized.
Taken together, this growing body of research demonstrates the immense importance of the messages being signaled by political institutions, non-governmental agencies such as medical providers, and other discourse leaders, such as politicians and celebrities.
This research indicates that these actions are doing more than harming children in need of medical care. As more and more medical providers signal a lack of support for trans youth by pre-emptively rescinding gender-affirming care, in spite of sizable financial resources and shield laws in many blue states, these actions are collectively establishing norms against trans rights, inclusion, validity, and medical care.
Against these shifting norms, it is vital that politicians, institutions, and individuals continue to voice support of trans rights. This discourse is very materially transforming the world that trans people must live their lives in. Research like Roy et al. demonstrate that words carry weight, and actions matter more than ever as we see support for trans people erode throughout multiple Western democracies.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.