By Nathaniel Frank and Kellan Baker

In a trio of cases heard in October, the Supreme Court weighed whether discrimination against LGBT people should be legal. Over the course of those and related cases, a handful of scholars who oppose legal protections for LGBT Americans claimed in a legal brief that “research about discrimination and its effects” on LGBT people is “deficient and the claims based on it unsupported.” This claim rings false to many researchers who study this issue, as well it should, because the evidence of a link between anti-LGBT discrimination and health harms is both robust and well-supported.

That’s not just idle supposition. Our research team at the What We Know Project, an initiative of Cornell University’s Center for the Study of Inequality, sought to better understand what is known about the link between discrimination and LGBT well-being. To that end, we spent two years conducting the largest known review of the peer-reviewed scholarship on the relationship between anti-LGBT discrimination and health harms. What we found is a remarkably consistent conclusion that discrimination harms LGBT people in far-reaching — and sometimes life-threatening — ways.

The stakes of these findings are high: If the presence of stigma, prejudice and discrimination harms LGBT people — and the research shows that it does — learning how to reduce those harms may be a matter of life and death. Questions about the impact of discrimination have a bearing not only on court cases and pending legislation in Congress and many states but also on the policies and practices of hospitals, businesses and other organizations seeking to balance religious liberty with the concrete harms that discrimination can cause LGBT people. Read more via Washington Post