Perceptions towards transgenders in Turkey: Prejudice and general conservatism

Transgender identity is a topic discussed in social context by people. It may be seen that there may be negative attitudes towards transgenders. In fact, there may be several reasons of those kinds of attitudes. One of those reasons may be political ideologies of people. Political conservatism and political liberalism are two ideologies that have great differences with little similarities. While political conservatism supports the idea that traditions must be preserved and radical changes damage the society and individuals must behave in accordance with the social and cultural norms and values, political liberalism focuses on personal liberty and individuals must have freedom to behave as they wish. As a result of those properties, tolerance level of conservatives and liberals may vary towards transgenders. On the other hand, tolerance means the respect towards other people. Without tolerance, great conflicts and problems are seen in societies. At that point, it is may be beneficial to investigate tolerance to transgenders in terms of different ideologies. Aim of that study is evaluating political conservatism and political liberalism in terms of tolerance towards transgenders. In order to reach that aim, demographic data scale is used including age, gender, marital status etc. At the end of this scale, participants will be asked whether they tend to liberalism or conservatism as political views. Data will be analyzed using SPSS 20.0 (IBM Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) and chi-square test will be used. According to the results of the study, the results obtained from the survey have indicated that "The prejudice regarding to the transexuals would increase as the conservatism of the individuals increases."