Leveraging insights from the psychological science of gender stereotyping to advance scholarship on gender-diverse individuals' pain experiences

There is evidence of gender disparities in pain experience and pain care as well as the role of stereotypes in perpetuating discriminatory care, however most of this work focuses on comparisons between cisgender men and women; little is known about gender-diverse individuals’ pain experiences and outcomes. We consider the value of extending existing cisgender-focused frameworks to understand how the application of gender stereotypes in clinical care contribute to pain care disparities and perpetuate bias, stigma, and discrimination experienced by gender-diverse people. First, we review the literature on stereotype content and stereotype application processes that are theorized to contribute to gender discrimination in pain treatment. We then leverage this extant framework to conduct a novel empirical investigation into the culturally endorsed pain-relevant stereotypes (i.e., trustworthiness, competence, mental illness, and emotional dramatization) of transgender men, transgender women, and nonbinary individuals (as well as cisgender men and cisgender women for replication and comparison purposes). We find that a sample of U.S. adult participants (N = 221) consistently endorsed more negative cultural stereotypes relevant to pain for gender-diverse than cisgender individuals illustrating how stereotype application may undermine high quality and equitable pain treatment of gender-diverse individuals. Based on our findings, we illustrate how this stereotype application may manifest in clinical contexts. Finally, we integrate existing social psychological theorizing to identify opportunities to decrease the impact of stereotypes in the clinical pain encounters.

Perspective

Gender-diverse individuals experience pain care disparities, which are in part attributable to cultural stereotypes. Building upon stereotyping theory and research from social psychology, we show that pain-relevant negative stereotypes are applied to gender-diverse individuals and highlight opportunities to interrupt stereotype application in clinical interactions to improve health equity.