ONE in five people have admitted to feeling prejudice towards transgender people in the first research study on attitudes in Northern Ireland.
The report entitled `The Missing T: Baselining Attitudes Towards Transgender People in Northern Ireland' extracted data from the 2018 Northern Ireland Life and Times (NILT) survey.
Co-authored by Dr Siobhán McAlister from Queen's University Belfast and Dr Gail Neill from Ulster University, it indicates that 72 per cent of people describe themselves as "not prejudiced at all towards people who are transgender".
Of the remaining, 21 per cent expressed "very" or "a little" prejudice, while seven per cent said that they did not know.
It revealed those who know a transgender person were less prejudiced and more approving of transgender rights.
More than half those surveyed were "approving of, or comfortable with, transgender people accessing public toilets, utilising domestic violence refuges and changing their legal gender".
Women were significantly more comfortable than men with such access.
Dr McAlister said there are "relatively few" national surveys of attitudes towards transgender people, with this one "(pointing) to positive attitudes towards transgender people and fairly high levels of support for the realisation of their rights".
Dr Neill said there are "unprecedented levels of interest in matters of gender and sexual diversity and identity".
"The NILT data demonstrates the importance of collecting and analysing attitudes towards gender identities separately to attitudes towards sexual identities," she said..
Gavin Boyd of LBGT support organisation Rainbow Project said it is "so important for people and the state to start gathering data" on transgender people.
"If you're not measuring people then they are invisible and it has been a real problem, particularly with trans issues on the past, that they were invisible to the state."
NILT surveyed a representative sample of 1,201 people aged 18 years or over on a range of topics.
Further details available at: https://www.ark.ac.uk/nilt
