Fijian Reactions to Transgender-Directed Workplace Mistreatment: The Moderating Role of the Victim’s Group Identification

Across the world, there is anecdotal evidence that transgender women tend to minimalize easily discernable identity cues to reduce the likelihood of facing anti-transgender prejudice and discrimination. Thus, we believe that an examination of whether variability in transgender women’s group identification (i.e., strong or weak transgender group identification) might influence important life outcomes (e.g., workplace mistreatment) certainly seems warranted. Moreover, in the Pacific Island of Fiji there is strong qualitative evidence of a pervasive pattern of anti-transgender prejudice. However, there has been minimal empirical examination of factors that might influence such prejudicial reactions. We explored (N = 294), in a case of transgender-related workplace mistreatment (i.e., unfair termination), whether victim group identification (i.e., strong vs. weak) would influence perceived victim culpability, endorsement of co-worker support (i.e., agreeing that the victim should receive co-worker support), and termination endorsement (i.e., support for the termination) among Fijian participants. We further examined whether transgender-related prejudice moderated these effects. At high levels of prejudice, there was greater negative responding (i.e., greater perceived culpability, less support endorsement, greater termination endorsement) towards the strongly identified victim relative to the weakly identified victim. Conversely, at low levels of prejudice, there was no impact of group identification level on perceived culpability. Unexpectedly, low prejudice individuals also reported a “favorability bias” (i.e., greater support endorsement, less termination endorsement) towards the strongly relative to the weakly identified victim.