“I feel like God doesn't like me”: Faith and Ambiguous Loss Among Transgender Youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective The present study expands the use of ambiguous loss theory into the realm of religion and religious rejection for sexual‐ and gender‐minority people, an area that has previously been addressed primarily as an issue of minority stress. Background Research has demonstrated that religion‐based, nonaffirming messaging from family and faith communities is correlated with decreased health and well‐being of sexual‐ and gender‐minority persons, who are, like most Americans, likely to have been raised in religious (predominately Christian) homes. Existing research has begun to explain why nonaffirming faith affiliation seems to negatively impact sexual gender minority people, but it does not explain the mechanisms of long‐term distress. Methods This study is a qualitative thematic analysis of religion and family data from semistructured interviews with 63 transgender youth from the United States, Canada, and Ireland who reported being raised in religious Christian homes. Results Analysis revealed that the narratives of participants who had been members of a psychological family of faith included all of the core elements of ambiguous loss, suggesting that individuals can experience ambiguous loss in relationship to a faith community and to God. Discussion This study presents a new application of Boss's ambiguous loss theory and offers a framework for understanding why sexual‐ and gender‐minority people from Christian backgrounds might experience long‐term distress in relation to faith and spirituality whether they stay in their faith communities of origin or move on to something else. Implications The experiences of transgender people examined through the framework of ambiguous loss and the concept of the psychological family of faith could be applied to research with people from any demographic in relation to loss of faith or faith community. This information may contribute to the study of family ruptures that occur as a result of family experiences of ideological or moral incompatibility (e.g., deconversion, political realignment, leaving a cult).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".