Development of the Attitudes Toward the Atypically Gendered Inventory (ATAG-I)

Abstract

There are presumably two and only two kinds of people in the world: men and women. Above all else, male and female are seen as mutually exclusive, complementing but never overlapping, categories. Like much of the world, Western society rests on the assumption that all persons exist unambiguously as either man or woman.

The foundation undergirding this work posits that the discrete categories of male and female fail to adequately describe that part of human experience referred to as sex and gender, evidenced by the existence of two naturally occurring challenges to this binary: the transgendered and the intersexed. The goal of this work was to develop a reliable and valid assessment of societal attitudes toward the atypically gendered. Construction of the ATAG-I involved five steps: 1) A list of potential items was composed via the domain-sampling method of instrument development based on content analysis of the relevant literature; 2) A retranslation task was conducted on a group of three atypically gendered participants; 3) A second retranslation task was conducted on a small group of naïve adults; 4) A test-retest analysis was conducted; 5) Data was collected on a large sample for reliability analyses and to gather evidence of content and construct validity. The result was a valid instrument that yielded highly reliable scores.