Healthcare professionals, and in particular nurses, are more biased against transgenders than people who are not healthcare professionals, finds a study. According to the study, published in the journal Heliyon, nursing healthcare professionals were significantly more likely to agree with statements like “I believe a person can never change their gender” or “I think there is something wrong with a person who says they are neither a man nor a woman” compared to other healthcare professionals and non-healthcare professionals.

“Our finding that nurses have higher levels of implicit bias towards transgender people may be related to a tendency to conflate sex and gender identity, as shown by higher levels of agreement with transphobic statements that conflate these two distinct concepts,” wrote authors Daniel W. Derbyshire of the University of Exeter and Tamsin Keay of Coventry University.