What is “Community”? Examining social antecedents of community connectedness and its relationship to resilience among young transwomen

Research on the health of young transwomen has neglected the social, political and cultural contexts of health ignoring the interactions between these multiple social forces. While upstream public health interventions have focused on HIV prevention activities at an individual level, the need for a more nuanced understanding for community-level interventions continues to grow.

This study is a cross-sectional investigation of community connectedness and other critical social antecedents among 274 young transwomen, ages 16-24, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Univariate and bivariate analyses were conducted to identify relationships between community connectedness and significant lived experiences (e.g. homeslessness). ANOVA was used to examine differences in mean resilience, body dysmorphia and gender discrimination among levels of community connectedness.

Greater proportions of young transwomen reporting higher community connectedness also report having experienced unstable housing in their lifetime (X²=9.854, p<0.01), having ever engaged in sex work (X²=8.221, p<0.05), and using binary gender conforming identity labels (X²=12.711, p<0.05). Significant differences across 3 levels of community connectedness in mean resilience were found (F(2, 271)=4.170, p<0.05.). No significant differences were found across levels of community connectedness and body dysmorphia (F(2, 255)=2.545, ns) or gender discrimination (F(2, 269)=4.564, ns).

This study finds that greater community connectedness is positively associated with increased resilience. These findings reveal critical footholds which foster community connectedness among young transwomen. Public health efforts and interventions must address important lived experiences such as unstable housing, sex work, and how transwomen choose to identify in order to build on these in-culture pathways associated with community connectedness.