The Underestimation of Transgender Women's Vulnerability to Sexual Harassment

Abstract

Despite experiencing sexual harassment more frequently and more severely than cisgender women, transgender women survivors’/victims’ experiences of workplace sexual harassment are often omitted or ignored. Drawing from theorizing on victim prototypes and perceptions of sexual harassment, we show across six studies (total N = 2,022) that people incorrectly believe that transgender women are less likely to experience workplace sexual harassment compared to cisgender women. This effect is stronger among individuals who deny that transgender women are, in fact, women. We also show that people perceive transgender women who experience unwanted advances to be less credible than cisgender women experiencing the same harassment. Perceptions that transgender women are unlikely and non-credible victims of sexual harassment have important implications for understanding the erasure and neglect of transgender women survivors and the obstruction of transgender women’s civil rights.