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Article
Marital Status Differences in Suicidality among Transgender People
Plos One
  • Hui Liu, Michigan State University
  • Lindsey Wilkinson, Portland State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-1-2021
Subjects
  • Transgendered persons in population research -- Evaluation,
  • Gender identity,
  • Transgendered persons -- Medical care -- Research
Disciplines
Abstract

The suicide rate for transgender people is among the highest of any group in the United States. Yet, we know little about disadvantages or resources available to transgender people to prevent suicide. The overall purpose of this study is to assess how marital status modifies the risk of suicide among transgender people. We analyzed data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey to predict marital status differences in both suicide ideation and suicide attempt in the past year. The analytic sample for suicide ideation included 17,117 transgender respondents (9,182 transwomen and 7,935 transmen), and the analytic sample for suicide attempt was limited to 8,058 transgender respondents (4,342 transwomen and 3,716 transmen) who reported suicide ideation in the last 12 months. Results from binary logistic regression models suggested that never married and previously married transmen and transwomen, regardless of their partnership status, generally had higher risk of both suicide ideation and attempt than their married transgender counterparts with only one exception: never married transwomen had lower risk of suicide ideation (but not attempt) than their married transwomen counterpart after sociodemographic characteristics were accounted for. These findings draw attention to the heterogeneity of the transgender population, highlighting marital status as a key social factor in stratifying the life experiences of transgender people.

Rights

Copyright: © 2021 Liu, Wilkinson. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0255494
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/36571
Citation Information
Liu H, Wilkinson L (2021) Marital status differences in suicidality among transgender people. PLoS ONE 16(9): e0255494. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0255494