A study published September 18 in American Psychologist reports something many transgender people could have told the researchers without being asked: the bills themselves do the damage, whether or not they ever become law where you live.
The paper, led by Catherine Wall of Virginia Commonwealth University, carries a title taken from one of its own participants — “An environment of fear no matter where I go.”
What did it find?
That anxiety about anti-transgender legislation predicted psychological distress more strongly than participants’ own experiences of discrimination. Not in addition to them. Above them.
In Wall’s words, the effect held “above and beyond everything else in the model, including active experiences of discrimination.” The thing doing the most harm was not what had happened to a person. It was what the person understood to be coming.
How was the study done?
Three hundred and forty-six transgender and gender-diverse adults across the United States were surveyed in early 2024, with both quantitative measures and written responses. The researchers looked at legislation anxiety, news anxiety and news exposure, experiences of discrimination, and sources of social support, then asked which of them best explained psychological distress.
More than 2,000 bills targeting transgender people have been introduced at the state and federal level since 2020. Participants described that volume as an existential threat — not a series of separate fights, but a single condition of life.
Why does it matter that the effect crosses state lines?
Because it undercuts the tidiest piece of advice trans people are given: move somewhere better.
Participants living in states with protective laws reported distress too. A law passed in a state you have never visited still tells you what a legislature thinks you are, and the news carries it to your kitchen table the same evening. Geography buys real protections — it does not buy quiet.
What protected people?
Support, from family and from community, and the study found the two roughly equal in effect. That is worth sitting with. Chosen family is not a consolation prize for people whose relatives will not speak to them; measured against distress, it did comparable work.
Wall is careful about where that leaves us. Individual resilience is not a solution to a structural problem — it is what people are left doing in the absence of one.
What the study cannot tell us
It is a survey taken at one moment, in early 2024, and it relies on what people report about themselves. It can establish that legislation anxiety and distress travel together, and that the association survives when discrimination is accounted for. It cannot prove the direction of the arrow, and a sample of 346 volunteers is not a census of trans America.
Those are ordinary limits, not disqualifying ones. The finding is worth having precisely because it names a harm that has no incident report attached to it. No one is assaulted by a bill that dies in committee. They are only changed by it.
Why this belongs next to the court reporting
Most of what appears here concerns rulings and rules — a statute in Kansas, a judgment in Indiana. Those pieces measure what a law does once it exists.
This study measures the other thing: what the attempt costs, whether or not it succeeds. Two thousand bills, most of which went nowhere. The going-nowhere did not make them harmless.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is legislation anxiety?
In this study it refers to anxiety specifically about anti-transgender legislation — not general anxiety, and not anxiety about news consumption alone, both of which were measured separately.
Where was the study published?
In American Psychologist, on September 18, 2026 (DOI 10.1037/amp0001683). The lead author is Catherine Wall, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Does living in a protective state help?
It helps with the laws themselves, which is not nothing. But participants in those states still reported distress tied to legislation elsewhere, so it does not insulate anyone from the national picture.
Does the study prove the bills cause the distress?
No. It is a cross-sectional survey, so it establishes a strong association rather than causation. The association held even after experiences of discrimination were accounted for.
What reduced distress?
Support from family and from community, in roughly equal measure. The author’s own caution is that personal support networks cannot substitute for a change in the political environment.