Views on Transgender Rights in 22 Countries

Overall Public Supporting Rate for Transgender Rights

Prejudice against the transgender community in 10 different countries*

I agree that transgenders should be protected from discrimination by the Government*

Significant difference between the last five and top five countries

The countries are dorganized according to the supportive rates from low to high. The bars present the proportion of people from ten countries, who strongly or somewhat agree with the four following statements.

There is dramatic difference between the top five and last five countries. Especially in Russia, almost more than 50% of the participants showed very serious prejudice and discrimination against the transgender group.

On the other side, people who think transgender group havemental or physical issues and violate their culture in last five countries are nearly twice as that of the top five countries.

People’s stereotyped attitudes and beliefs about transgender communities

Survery questions:

They have a form of mental illness
They have a form of physical disability

They are committing a sin
They are violating the traditions of my culture

In countries with higher support for transgenders' rights, people were more likely to believe that the government should protect this group from discrimination. Furthermore, this percentage increasedas education levels increased. Notably, in countries with lower levels of support, this proportion decreases as the level of education increases.

As the level of education increases, the average percentage of participants expressing support increases by
9.20%.

As the level of education increases, the average percentage of participants expressing support decreaded by
9.80%.

Our visual visualisation was created based on the dataset Transgender Rights Survey(https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/2016-12-transgender-rights-survey), committed by Jsvine on GitHub in December 2016. This dataset contains the results of online surveys from 22 countries and an offline survey from one country, investigating different aspects of local citizens' attitudes towards transgender people and possible prejudices.

*Note: This dataset contains leading questions in the survey. Research has shown that leading questions can be leading in terms of participant responses, which is likely to lead to inaccurate or somewhat misleading results in the dataset. Our data analysis and conclusions are based solely on this dataset and do not represent a completely realistic picture.

Main story

An analysis of attitudes towards the transgender community in 22 countries shows that the level of support for this community varies considerably from country to country. At the same time, the countries that share this view are geographically concentrated. For example, Europe, North America and South America all show very supportive attitudes towards the transgender community. However, in Asia, particularly in Russia, a very high proportion of respondents believe that transgender people's rights should be restricted.

To find out why, we analyse the different perspectives of prejudice towards the transgender community in different countries. The five countries with the lowest support rates are generally prejudiced against the transgender community. We suspect this may be because these geographically close countries have similar cultures or laws regarding gender stereotypes. In Argentina and Sweden, for example, individuals can change their legal gender without surgery or a doctor's permission. In countries such as Russia, South Korea and Poland, however, transgender people often need a doctor to diagnose them with 'gender identity disorder' before they can change their gender, which in a sense, contributes to discrimination and prejudice.

We then analysed participants' perceptions of different educational levels on whether transgender people should be protected from discrimination by the government. In countries with higher support for transgenders' rights, people were more likely to believe that the government should protect this group from discrimination. Furthermore, this percentage increased as education levels increased. Notably, in countries with lower levels of support, this proportion decreases as the level of education increases. According to our research, the more educated a group is in a country, the more dominant it is in mainstream opinion. We suspect this also leads to a further increase in prejudice against transgender groups among the country's population.The combination of these factors may be one of the reasons why there are such contrasting views of transgender groups in different countries.

Choice of Visual Encoding

From the dataset, we extracted data corresponding to six questions on transgender rights. First, we made a dumbbell chart from these data to compare the level of support for transgender rights among women and men in each country. We chose the dumbbell chart because it clearly shows the differences between the two data sets. We then added the average support for males and females in each country and divided it by two to get the overall support for transgender rights in that country. For this data set, we decided to use the Choropleth heat map to show the support for transgender rights in each country on the world map. It allows us to visually and clearly show and compare changes in support for transgender rights in different countries within geographical regions.

Having looked at the support rates, we wanted to delve deeper and explore the reasons behind them. Therefore, we selected the top and bottom five countries in terms of support and analysed their different views on each of the four questions regarding prejudice against transgender groups. In this step, we chose the grouped bar chart because it visually demonstrates how perceptions of different questions change depending on the participants' country.

Finally, we wanted to show the educational distribution of participants in different countries who agreed that the government should protect transgender people from discrimination. To highlight the differences in the different educational proportions, we chose to use a proportional area map (half circle), a variation of the circular proportional area map. It can visualise the proportions of supporters between countries and allow for simultaneous comparison of differences in educational levels.

Aesthetic Design

The top-down layout is used to help the audiences gradually drill down into the data. And we used pink, blue and white as our primary colours, as they generally represent transgender internationally.

In addition, we have used some collage art to aid in emphasising core concepts. For example, we integrated elements representing masculinity and femininity into one visual, blurring their gender and the transgender community that is repressed by manipulating traditional ideas. Through these collage elements, the user can visualise the theme of the chart. For the annotations, simple icons, guiding vector graphics and highlighted words are used to help the user understand the data more clearly. Such annotations are used throughout the page.

*It is essential to emphasise that many leading questions were used in our chosen dataset, which may have led to a degree of guided responses from participants. However, our data visualisation and analysis are based on this dataset. Therefore our data analysis may not be the most accurate results and does not reflect the most realistic situation.

Group member:

Rose Jia: xjia6929_480446875
Hengshen Zhang: hzha4311_480406606
Ruochen Li: ruli0993_480025876
Xinnuo Yu: xiyu0511_510077749

Feedback from our client:

1: "The work that supports this dataset it self has some very leading questions. Do you believe this is a sin, are much more likely to result in yes answer."
2: "Do data transformation instead of more annotation."
3: "Introduce the data source. Who and why collected and these data."
4: "The radar chart is beautiful but it’s difficult to compare. You may want to change it into four charts or charts with straight axises."

Key changes:

1.To prevent the readers from misunderstanding the bias in survey questions, we summarized the essential information of the data resource. We mentioned it at the beginning and end of the blog.
2.The second chart is changed to Grouped bar chart for a better comparison between different countries.
3.Unnecessary annotations are deleted.
4.An explanation of the data is listed below to enable the readers to think independently.