With transgender people being an ever-present part of the discourse from the TV screen to the dinner table, many are curious about the demographic data around transgender people (and others are merely speculating about it).
So, let’s explore how many transgender people there are in the US right now, how the numbers and percentages of the transgender population have changed, what encourages or discourages people to seek to change their current gender identity, and what conclusions we can draw from all that demographic data.
What Percentage Of The Population Is Transgender?
The quick answer here is that the transgender population makes for a <1% of the general population. There are different demographic estimates according to which survey you’re looking at, but most put the exact number somewhere between 0.1% and 0.6%, as per the Taimi.
This is a rather huge range, however, even if it doesn’t look like it at first. Even just in the US alone, 0.5% of the population means over a million people in the community. Globally, half a percentage would mean over 40 million people which is a very sizable number even if it is a small proportion of the population.
What’s more, there are outlier statistics that indicate/speculate the total percentage of people who identify as transgender or as a gender different from their sex assigned at birth can be greater than 0.6%, if people were free to transition without peer pressure from the society around them and their local institutions.
Whatever the case, even just within a range of 0.1% to 0.6% of the population, the total number of trans people is still quite significant for us to take transgender issues seriously.
Does The Percentage Of The Transgender Population Increase Over Time?
According to the research survey and estimate of the Williams Institute, the number and percentage of trans people in the US population has remained steady over time. However, the number of young people who identify as transgender individuals has increased over those older identify as transgender, according to data collected.
According to a national survey in the Publication of the American Public Health Association, the percentage of people identifying as transgender individuals has increased from 0.53% or 5 out of 1,000 in 2014 to 0.89% or 9 out of 1,000 in 2023.
This is a 68% increase in surveys, which is quite considerable, but the total number is still under 1%. What’s more, even those 68% increase is still much lower than the percentage of younger adults who report suffering from gender dysphoria in surveys.
Will The Percentage Of People With Transgender Or Non Binary Gender Identity In The Adult Population Continue To Increase And By How Much?
The key thing to note from the above data isn’t so much that more people and more young people identify as transgender and not with their sex assigned at birth. Instead, it’s the fact that the percentage of such people changes.
This indicates that it isn’t so much the number or percentage of transgender individuals that changes, but the number of people who able and willing to come out as transgender or nonbinary.
Simply put, in previous years – and in more regressive parts of the world today – when and where trans people were pressured into conforming with the traditional gender binary out of fear of discrimination, the number of people who openly deviated from the gender they were assigned at birth, whether male or female, was low.
So, should public pressure on people to conform to traditional gender norms decrease, it isn’t unlikely that the percentage of people who identify as transgender or nonbinary also increases. The fact that the US and the broader West have been on an upward trend for a while, however, doesn’t mean that things can’t regress again.
Why Are We Only Looking At Survey Data On The Transgender Population In The US?
Obviously, the United States is not a representative sample of the broader world or even just of the West.
However, matching statistics from the US with those of other Western countries, such as the UK, Germany, Australia, and others is tricky, because every country uses slightly (or often significantly) different methods for collecting data from respondents and conducting their research and statistical estimates.
This is to say, the fact that the percentages of trans people in the US and the UK vary isn’t just because there are different numbers and percents of trans and nonbinary people in the US and in the UK – it’s because institutions in the two countries interview respondents, collected new data, and process their research in different ways.
Other Key Statistics About People With Different Gender Identity Than Their Sex Assigned At Birth
1. Are Transgender Women, Transgender Men, Or Non Binary People More?
As the Williams Institute reported, in their surveys of the 1.3 million people in the US who identify as transgender, about 38.5% of the participants or 515,200 people reported identifying as transgender females. A lower percent of 35.9% or 480,000 people reported identifying as transgender males, even though the difference isn’t all that significant.
The third group of participants three response options were 25.6% (or 341,800 people) who reported in surveys that they identify as gender nonconforming.
This would mean that a majority of the transgender population in the US is transgender females (people who transitioned from male to female), but they lead with only a very slim majority, as transgender males (who transitioned from female to male) are very close to them in numbers, according to research.
2. Are There Racial Or Ethnic Differences Among Transgender People Compared To The General Population?
Gender differences are far from the only ones between trans people, according to respondents. In terms of ethnic and racial differences, the trans people seems to have as much diversity as the US as a whole.
This is to say, about the same percentages of trans adults and youth reported belonging to particular ethnic groups (white, black, Asian, native, etc.) as Americans adults more broadly.
The only exception was the fact that more trans people identify as Latinx and fewer people identify as white.
It’s not exactly clear why this disparity exists, but a good guess is that there is a major overlap between the Latin and white demographics, with many Latin people being easily able to identify as both or either.
So, with more people among the transgender population being relatively progressive in their politics, it’s probably not surprising that fewer white Latin trans people refuse to identify just as white and instead identify as Latinx.
3. Are Transgender Youth More Numerous Compared To The Transgender Older Adult Population?
One constant in almost all research on the matter is that many more people among the youth identify as trans, compared to transgender adults.
In the US, about 1.3 million adults (0.5% of people over 18 years of age) identify as transgender, while 300,000 young adults between the ages of 13 and 17 (1.4% of people in that age range) identify as a transgender person.
The difference between adults and young adults becomes even more stark if we look at people in even more specific age brackets above the age of 18. For example, for people over the age of 65, only 0.3% reported having transgender identities.
4. Does The Transgender Population Vary Between The US Northwest And The Midwest?
What is even more telling about the way politics, societal pressure, and access to health and medical care affect how many adults and young adults identify as gender nonconforming or transgender people is the fact that there are significant differences between the different states within the US.
To be more precise, the statistics look like this:
- For youth (13 to 17 years of age) the percent in the Northeast is 1.8% but in the Midwest it’s 1.2%.
- For adults (18 and older) the percent in the Northeast is 0.6% but in the Midwest it’s 0.4%.
As with previous data on transgender adults and youth, the presence of higher numbers of transgender people in certain parts of the country indicates that access to health facilities, acceptance in the community, and freedom from legislative discrimination allow people of all ages to lead the lives they want to and identify however they feel best.
5. Transgender People Are More Likely To Belong To A Sexual Minority
According to surveys and research by BMC Public Health, transgender adults are more likely to have a sexual orientation other than heterosexual compared to their cis gender peers.
Among the transgender adults questioned about their sex preferences in the survey, 18.9% responded they identify as bisexual, only 17.6% identified as straight, and 18.1% simply answered that they identify as queer.
It’s not yet conclusive how and why identifying in a survey with a different gender identity than the sex you’ve been assigned at birth results or correlates to having a queer sexual orientation as an adult.
A common conclusion made by many people – and by the survey and research team at BMC Public Health too – is that people who have been exposed to inclusive measures of gender identity and sexual orientation have more diverse sex preferences and identities themselves.
As a result, they also have partners who themselves have queer gender identity and desires because they are not as rigid and willing to regress to the standard heteronormative approach to sex as most other cisgender adults.
Instead, according to this survey and others, members of the transgender population and adults with other queer and gender nonconforming identities, see sex and gender as much more flexible and subject to change.
his is why a transgender person is not only more likely to not be straight, but to use gender neutral pronouns, to be more accepting of others gender identity and preferences, and more.
What Conclusions Can We Draw From The Demographic Data On Trans People?
The numbers and proportion of trans people and the prevalence of young people in the overall transgender population do indicate that the main factors for how many people come out as transgender, a nonbinary gender, or any other umbrella term that captures such groups have to do with their acceptance in society, health care access, and especially the lack of discrimination in their close community.
Negative attitudes toward trans and queer people in broader society, a threat of physical violence, a lack of health care options, a sense of discrimination against the transgender population, legislative discrimination (lack of legal rights), and other similar factors do appear to have a strong effect on whether transgender people come out and even how they respond in surveys.
Does That Mean That Restricting Access To Health Care Facilities and Legal Rights “Stops” People From Transitioning?
On paper, it appears to be an accurate estimate that restricting the access of young queer people to sex education, health facilities, disease control, legal rights, and general acceptance in their population reduces the estimate of transgender people (as well as people of atypical sexual orientation and queer people in general) in a given area.
However, this assumption made by people with negative predisposition toward their transgender peers incorrectly assumes that:
1) The numbers aren’t skewed by a lot of young people who simply move to states and areas where they can live better lives.
2) Even if true, forcing transgender people to live as the gender and sex they were assigned at birth doesn’t make their lives happier, as evident from the suicide statistics among young transgender people (as per surveys by the Trevor Project here).
In other words, restricting the access of transgender men and women, and other gender nonconforming people to health facilities. legal rights, and societal acceptance doesn’t make them “happy and productive cis gender members of society,” but only pushes them to look for ways to move out of the regressive society they have been forced into.
Read More: click here
