NIH: Transgender far more likely to support violent radicalization

Researchers at the University of Montreal and McGill University in Montreal looked at 3,100 Canadian college students between 16 and 25 years old. It is a very diverse sample. They included French speakers, English speakers, children of immigrants, Christians, Muslims, and non-religious. Also included were 79 “transgender and gender-diverse” participants.

Each person was given interview questions to quantify them for the following categories; search for meaning in life, presence of meaning of life, future orientation, and depression.

Then each person was given a score on the “Radicalism Intention Scale [RIS] to measure their potential to support “violent radicalization”

The Radicalism Intention Scale (RIS) is a four-item subscale of the Activism and Radicalism Intention Scales (ARIS) (61). It assesses an individual’s readiness to participate in illegal and violent behavior in the name of one’s group or organization. Respondents rate their agreement with four statements on a seven-point Likert scale, with higher scores indicating more support for VR (range 4–28). A sample item is: “I would continue to support an organization that fights for my group’s political and legal rights even if the organization sometimes resorts to violence.” The scale has good psychometric properties among young adults (62, 63). Cronbach’s Alpha and McDonald’s Omega for the sample were both 0.85.

The transgendered had the highest RIS score of any group by a huge margin. Essentially, the researchers found that the “transgendered” to lack a sense of meaning in life and have a high level of depression.

The results were published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2022. They entire study was published online by the US Government’s Nation Institutes of Health [NIH] in 2022.