Anti-transgender rights legislation and internet searches pertaining to depression and suicide.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether anti-transgender rights legislation among state legislators is associated with increased suicide- and depression-related Internet searches. Employing a quasi-experimental non-equivalent control group design, we focused on bills that were introduced to state legislatures from July 2019 to July 2020. As our panel is constructed of 51 states/territories over a 52-week time frame, our final dataset is composed of 2,652 observations. Results showed that states' passing of anti-transgender rights bills were linked with suicide- and depression-related Internet searches. Second, introducing or debating the bills did not have an association with Internet searches. Third, the defeat of anti-transgender bills was linked with fewer depression-related searches. Finally, the LGBT context in the state affected the results: anti-transgender legislation had a particularly strong association with suicide-related Internet searches when the state had a high LGBT population density.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2022 Cunningham et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)