Queers in Quarantines: Impact of Lockdown and Social Distancing on Psychology of Transgender

Abstract

The unexpected emergence of a novel and dangerous virus widely known as coronavirus (COVID-19) has brought in global health crisis and has socioeconomically disrupted the lives of people to a significant extent. In order to curb the spread of the contagious infection, nationwide lockdown and sometimes shutdown is announced by the state which has adversely affected the lives of many members of transgender community who are solely dependent on social interactions for their livelihood such as begging in streets and trains, entertaining in marriage functions and baby showers, engaging in prostitution. Consequently, the lost livelihood, clogged income stream, exhausted savings, burden of debt have imbued psychological distress among them. This study has analyzed the association of social distancing and lockdown constraints to psychological outcomes (i.e., depression, anxiety issues, financial stress, lack of social support, and loneliness) among transgender people amid COVID-19. Transgender participants (N = 150, mean age = 42.5) were selected through snowball sampling from India who responded to the questionnaire through both online platform and offline modes. Findings show that there is positive association between any two of the variables and the degree of association is quite reasonable with the range from 0.534 to 0.945. Further, in order to evaluate the hypothesis a series of regression analysis is conducted. Results highlight the negative impact of social distancing and lockdown constraints on psychology of transgender individuals.