In the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has uniquely threatened the LGBTQ community, especially transgender people, due to existing disparities in income, housing and health care. But with historically rooted hesitancy toward the vaccine, some experts and community members worry that transgender people won’t receive vaccinations as quickly — or access them as easily — as their cisgender peers.
Vaccine hesitancy certainly exists among transgender people, especially among trans people of color, who tend to have more mistrust of the medical system. Although more than half of transgender adults said they’d get vaccinated as of January 2021, a higher rate than the general adult population, the percentages varied by race and decreased among non-white respondents. LGBT people of color and trans people overall were also most concerned about factors like affordability, effectiveness and side effects.
That mistrust — which is based on historical neglect and abuse of marginalized populations — compounds concerns over the vaccine’s potential interaction with Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). And researchers haven’t provided data to assuage these fears.
