Is jealousy different among transgender people?

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We experience jealousy in response to the loss or threat of losing a romantic partner to an imagined or real rival for a partner’s attention. The intensity of our jealousy may be partly determined by which characteristics of a rival are considered important in mate selection. For example, heterosexual women value characteristics such as dominance and status in a male partner and, therefore, male jealousy would be motivated by a rival who is highly rated for these characteristics. Heterosexual men have a preference for the physical beauty and youthfulness of a female partner and, therefore, female jealousy is likely driven more by female rivals who are highly rated for these qualities.

Transgender people have a gender identity that does not correspond to their biological sex and, therefore, the question arises whether it is biological sex or gender identity that motivates the jealousy of transgender people who may be threatened by a rival to attract the attention of their partner.

This question was investigated by Arístegui, Castro Solano, and Buunk (2019), whose study also considered two other factors.

• Orientation towards social comparison, which can be defined as the extent to which we are interested in the thoughts and behaviors of others in similar situations. Essentially, individuals with a high level of social comparison experience more jealousy than those with a lower level of social comparison.

• Intrasexual competitiveness, which is characterized by wanting to consider ourselves better than others and expressing envy and discontent by excluding and denigrating others when we judge that they are treated more favorably than us.

In their study, the researchers employed 228 transgender people, 134 male-to-female with male partners and 94 female-to-male with female partners. Participants then saw a scenario depicting a jealousy-provoking situation, depicting a party in which a potential rival attempted to flirt with their partner. The gender of the rival varied depending on whether the scenario was read by a female-to-male transgender participant or a male-to-female transgender participant.

Following this, participants were asked: “When my partner and another man/woman were flirting with each other, I felt particularly jealous when the other person…. There were 24 attributes describing the rival, and participants were asked to rate how jealous they would feel toward each one. The 24 attributes have been grouped into four broader categories: physical attractiveness (for example, beautiful figure, beautiful legs), physical domination (e.g. muscular, physically stronger), social power (e.g. more authority, better education), and community social attributes (e.g., better listener, more sensitive).

Participants then completed measures of orientation towards social comparison responding to items such as “I always like to know what others would do in a similar situation” and “I often compare myself to others in terms of what I have accomplished in life,” and intrasexual competitiveness, answer questions such as “I tend to look for negative characteristics in attractive transgender/non-transgender women” and “When I’m dating, I can’t stand it when men pay more attention to a transgender/non-transgender friend of mine non-transgender of the same sex. only for me.

What caused jealousy

Regardless of gender identity, in both groups it was common attributes which caused the most jealousy, followed by physical attractiveness in the male-female group, and physical domination in the female-male group.

The degree of jealousy motivated by physical domination of a rival was greater among female-male participants than among male-female participants. However, the degree of jealousy motivated by physical attractiveness And power and social domination of a rival was greater among male-female participants than among female-male participants. This difference is consistent with findings from studies of heterosexuals and suggests that transgender people’s jealousy is determined by their gender identity and not their biological sex.

The fact that male-to-female transgender participants reported more jealousy in response to power and social domination in relation to female-to-male transgender individuals seems surprising given that these attributes are typically linked to male competition. The researchers believe this could be due to the cultural diversity of the Latino population employed for this study.

Intrasexual competitiveness

Another finding was that individuals in the female-male and male-female groups who scored high on the scale intrasexual competitiveness The measure reported more jealousy motivated by all categories of rival characteristics. In general, male-to-female transgender participants scored higher intrasexual competitiveness compared to female-male participants. Intrasexual competitiveness is typically associated with male competition with other males, suggesting that, overall, intrasexual competitiveness is determined by biological sex and not gender identity.

Several limitations can be identified in this study. First, the participants were heterosexual-identified transgender people and, therefore, it was difficult to determine whether rivals’ jealousy-provoking characteristics in this study were driven by sexual orientation, gender identity, or, of course, biological sex. Another anomaly in this study is that most of the transgender women participants engaged in sex work, which may have led to unusually high results in intrasexual competitiveness.

However, this is the first study showing that transgender people’s jealousy is driven by gender identity rather than biological sex.