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. 2023 May 10;18(5):e0284257.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284257. eCollection 2023.

Food insecurity in a Brazilian transgender sample during the COVID-19 pandemic

Sávio Marcelino Gomes  1 , Michelle Cristine Medeiros Jacob  2 , Viviany Moura Chaves  2 , Luciana Maria Pereira de Sousa  3 , Marcos Claudio Signorelli  4 , Daniel Canavese de Oliveira  5 , Clélia de Oliveira Lyra  3 , Luiz Roberto Augusto Noro  3
Affiliations

Food insecurity in a Brazilian transgender sample during the COVID-19 pandemic

Sávio Marcelino Gomes et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Transgender people often live with social vulnerability, largely promoted by gender-based prejudice. Our aim in this article was to raise preliminary data on how the COVID-19 pandemic and perceived prejudice have contributed to the problem of food and food insecurity in the transgender communities in Brazil. We conducted a web-based cross-sectional study, in which 109 transgender people from all regions of Brazil participated. We used the Chi-Square test and Poisson regression modeling with robust variance to estimate the association between food insecurity and the investigated factors. In our sample, 68.8% of transgender people experienced food insecurity, of these, 20.2% experienced severe food insecurity. Our results showed that the difficulties in purchasing food in the transgender community predate the COVID-19 pandemic, yet that the restrictive measures adopted have also impacted overall access to quality food. However, the main explanations for food insecurity were income and employment. In predicting food insecurity, the experiences of prejudice must be considered, and give rise to the hypothesis that specific conditions to which transgender people are exposed explain, to some degree, their vulnerability to food insecurity.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Theoretical analysis model with the relationships between food insecurity, independent variables, and covariates.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Relative food access frequencies in the transgender community.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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