LGBTQ Agenda: Almost 1% of Americans are trans, analysis says

Nearly 3 million Americans, or 0.8% of the country’s population, are transgender, according to a data analysis from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. The LGBTQ think tank used data from the federal government to arrive at its findings.

The data is sorted into adult and youth estimates. That 3 million figure includes 263,700 adult Californians, or 0.9% of the state’s adult population, among the 546,300 trans adults across the Western states, as well as 84,600 Californians ages 13-17, or 3.2% of the state’s youth population, among the 175,000 trans youth across the Western states. 

The findings were announced during a webinar August 21. While the federal government allowed people on the 2020 census to designate if their relationship is same-sex, it did not ask about sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI). Last year, the census bureau began testing SOGI questions, as the Bay Area Reporter noted, but since the beginning of the second Trump administration the bureau has sought to delete questions about gender identity, the Associated Press reported.  

The Williams Institute first estimated the size of the adult trans population in 2011, estimating 700,000 adults, according to Jody L. Herman, a Williams Institute Scholar of Public Policy at UCLA School of Law, and one of the two researchers on the data analysis.

At the time, data from two sources were extrapolated to make that determination; but in 2014, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s behavior risk factor surveillance system, a national health survey, began asking adults and youth if they considered themselves to be trans; and in 2017, some states began asking this of youth in the CDC’s youth risk behavior surveillance (YRBS) system. 

The new sources of data made a more accurate and up-to-date assessment possible, Herman said on the webinar. 

“We had to go state by state and request the data from the various state-level agencies that administer state-level YRBS data,” Herman said. “We had some success. That process takes quite a bit of time, so it was a team effort and we were able to get data from a handful of states, which was enough for us to use in the model. … It does take a lot of work and time.”

Andrew Flores, who co-authored the report, is an associate professor of government at the school of public affairs at American University. He said on the webinar that the researchers pooled the responses from 2021-2023 in order to have a large enough sample size to have credible estimates.

The American South has the largest total number of trans people – 722,800 adults and 279,200 youth – “but the South is the largest region, population-wise, so that’s expected,” Herman said.

There were not huge disparities between regions and states – the state with the highest percentage of trans adults is Minnesota, at 1.2%, and the state with the highest percentage of trans youth is Hawaii, at 3.6%. Conversely, New Mexico had the lowest percentage of trans adults, at 0.4%, and Delaware had the lowest percentage of trans youth, at 2.5%.

There is not a gender identity breakdown for youth because the CDC’s youth risk behavior surveillance system does not ask that question. However, the adult estimates are that 34.2% of trans adults, or 730,500 people, are trans men; 33.1% of trans adults, or 707,100 people, are nonbinary; and 32.7% of trans adults, or 698,500 people, are trans women.

Youth and adults ages 18-24 were far more likely to identify as trans than older cohorts. For example, 3.3% of youth ages 13-17 nationally identified as trans, compared with 2.7% of adults ages 18-24, 1.4% of adults ages 25-34, 0.4% of adults ages 35-64, and 0.3% of adults 65 and over. Gallup has found similar patterns for LGBTQ Americans generally, with younger cohorts more likely to identify as something other than cisgender and heterosexual, as the B.A.R. previously reported. https://www.ebar.com/story/153179  

“Younger groups are more likely to identify as transgender,” Herman said. “Among adults, there are statistically significant differences between 18-24-year-olds and those 25 and older.”

“I wasn’t particularly surprised by our findings,” Herman said. “It’s very much in keeping with what we’d expect.”

Future data in doubt
However, the researchers did sound the alarm about the Trump administration’s moves against federal data collection of trans populations, saying it could make estimations as extensive as this impossible going forward.

“We do foresee a sizable gap in our ability to use these data sources going forward,” Herman said. “If the next administration were to restart data collection and data processing for the trans population, obviously, that wouldn’t be until 2029 or later, then it will take time to get data collection and processing going again, and we’d need several years of collected data to do the type of study that we presented here; so we’re looking at nearly a decade in a gap in our work which is pretty depressing, frankly.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced it had disbanded several advisory panels to the U.S. Census Bureau. It raised alarms about plans for the 2030 decennial count of the nation's population, and threw into doubt seeing questions about sexual orientation and gender identity be added to various census forms.

Ever since being sworn into a second term in January, Trump has repeatedly moved to end rights for transgender individuals and declared his White House will end "gender ideology." An executive order he signed January 20 shortly after taking his oath of office titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" stated that the term "sex" refers "to an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female" and was not synonymous with "gender identity."

In March, the Department of Commerce terminated the census bureau's three advisory committees: the 2030 Census Advisory Committee; the Census Scientific Advisory Committee; and the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations. The members all received notices saying Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees the census bureau, had determined the committees' purposes "have been fulfilled," according to the Associated Press.

The Williams Institute’s Flores said that data collection is necessary in order to identify patterns; for example, of violence against trans people, and also cautioned that the pair’s estimates may be on the low end.

“It’s likely a larger population because there may be people who went through a gender transition but who don’t themselves identify as transgender, and so these are slightly different populations,” Flores said.

The entire data analysis is available online .

Due to Labor Day weekend, the LGBTQ Agenda column will be on hiatus until Tuesday, September 9.

LGBTQ Agenda is an online column that appears weekly. Got a tip on queer news? Contact John Ferrannini at [email protected].