Effects of everyday discrimination on sexual minority people's experiences of health care stereotype threat.

Sexual minority people report higher rates of discrimination than heterosexuals, and this discrimination may interfere with people's experiences of healthcare services. Drawing from the Generations dataset, a national probability dataset of 1244 sexual minority people, we explore how experiences of discrimination across contexts are associated with expectations of discrimination within health care via health care stereotype threat (HCST) and attribution of discrimination, and whether these patterns vary across cisgender sexual minority subgroups. Results suggest everyday discrimination is positively related with HCST, net of associations with stigma, psychological distress, and self-rated health. Additionally, gay men report a stronger association between experiences of everyday discrimination and HCST compared to sexual minority women. Attribution of discrimination to sexual orientation explains a greater portion of the association between sexual orientation and HCST for gay men than other sexual minority subgroups. Findings highlight implications for perceptions surrounding care and may inform interventions targeting the discrimination sexual minority people face.