Family attitudes toward transgendered people in Turkey: experience from a secular Islamic country.

Objective: In Turkey, an individual with gender identity disorder is stigmatized and isolated from society. The family largely reflects and reinforces these negative views because gender crossing poses a threat to the normatively sanctioned gender classification.

Methods: We examined the acceptance of gender identity differences by the families in 47 relatives of 39 transgendered individuals who applied to a psychiatry clinic for sex reassignment.