ABSTRACT
Discriminatory laws and policies can restrict and hamper the lives and health of sexually and gender diverse (SGD) adolescents. While these laws and policies may directly affect risk and resiliency through what is regulated and imposed within them, legislative efforts, laws, and policies may also feed into a wider structurally stigmatizing climate with a broader health impact. Theory on the socioecology of sexual and gender minority stigma exposure may aid in explaining these health consequences among SGD adolescents through a chronosystem with immediate, accumulating, or lasting effects across spatiotemporal contexts, a nested multilevel system with cross-level effects, and mechanisms linking stigma exposure to health. The legal epidemiology of SGD adolescent health has increasingly become the subject of research in recent years. Yet, the current literature has predominantly relied on cross-sectional designs and mostly originated in the United States. An overview of this literature is provided and recommendations for future research, following the outlined socio-ecological framework, are discussed.
