Research

My research is broadly concerned with the enforcement of social identity boundaries, particularly for oppressed groups and often in the context of gender/sex.

I am especially interested in understanding how these psychological processes might look different in intergroup contexts (i.e., in which dominant groups attempt to enforce oppressed group boundaries) and intragroup contexts (i.e., in which oppressed group members attempt to enforce the boundaries of their own oppressed group). With an eye to structural factors that maintain the boundaries of oppressed groups, I've also conducted meta-scientific work to understand how social psychology as a field maintains the gender/sex binary.

Enforcement by Dominant Groups

This line of work focuses on understanding how and why dominant groups (e.g., cisgender people, men) enforce of the gender/sex binary. Attitudes toward transgender-related policies are one mechanism through which binary gender/sex categories are maintained by dominant group members. In a forthcoming paper, we found that anti-trans policy attitudes are multidimensional but attitudes toward different types of policies are relatively consistently correlated with psychological constructs such as discreteness beliefs about gender identities and categorization of trans people in their superordinate gender category (Means & Morgenroth, in press). I have also more broadly examined the anti-trans attitudes and rhetoric of cisgender (or mostly cisgender) people.

Selected research on this topic:

Means, K. K. & Morgenroth, T. (in press). Bathroom Bills and Gender-Affirming Care Bans: Understanding People’s Views on Different Types of Transgender Policies. American Psychologist. Pre-print
Morgenroth, T., Means, K. K., Mueller, A. S.*, & Sass, K. D.* (2024). The Contradictory Nature of Anti-Transgender Rhetoric. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 15(7), 848-862. PDF

Enforcement by Oppressed Groups

Perhaps counterintuitively, members of oppressed groups sometimes also strictly enforce the boundaries of their own oppressed group. One example can be seen in gender-critical feminists, a group of feminist women opposed to the inclusion of transgender women in the category of women (see Means & Morgenroth, in preparation). My dissertation work (in progress) expands beyond gender/sex to examine who tends to enforce the boundaries of oppressed groups more broadly (e.g., more prototypical and/or privileged members of these groups) and their motivations.

Selected research on this topic:

Means, K. K. & Morgenroth, T. (in preparation). Gender-Critical Feminists’ Beliefs About Transgender Women’s Stereotype Conformity and its Harmfulness. [Contact for current manuscript]
Means, K. K. & Morgenroth, T. (in progress). Gatekeeping the Margins: Group Boundary Maintenance in Oppressed Groups.

Structural Enforcement

I am also interested in understanding the enforcement of category boundaries at a structural level. My work on this topic has mostly focused on how research challenging the gender/sex binary is devalued in social psychology, being unpublished frequently by high-status journals and funded infrequently by the NSF (Means & Morgenroth, 2024; see image to the right). My ongoing research directly examines gender researchers' experiences with and perceived barriers to publishing in high-status journals, with a focus on understanding whether binary-challenging research faces even more barriers to publication in high-status outlets than gender research operating within the binary and for what reasons.

Selected research on this topic:

Means, K. K. & Morgenroth, T. (in preparation). Publishing Gender Research in High-Status Journals: Experiences and Perceived Barriers. [Contact for current manuscript]
Morgenroth, T. & Means, K. K. (2025). Reviewing Research on Trans and Nonbinary People in Social Psychology: Insights and Future Research Directions. European Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication. PDF
Means, K. K. & Morgenroth, T. (2024). The Ubiquity of the Gender/Sex Binary: Power and Status in Social Psychology. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 2, 1455364. PDF

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