Nearly 1% of Americans, over 2.8 million people, identify as transgender, according a new study from the Williams Institute, a University of California, Los Angeles-based research organization focused on sexual orientation and gender identity issues, The Hill reported.
According to the study, roughly .08% of Americans ages 18 and older identify as transgender. That’s over 2.1 million people. Nearly 3.3% of 13- to 17-year-olds in the U.S., or 724,000, identify as transgender.
Researchers used data from two public health surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: the 2021- 2023 Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System and the 2021 and 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
“Younger generations are more likely to identify as transgender, and we expect that trend to continue,” Jody Herman, the study’s lead author and a Williams Institute senior scholar of public policy, said in a statement. “Youth and young adults are more likely to identify as transgender due to a variety of factors, including a greater willingness among younger individuals to disclose that they identify as transgender on surveys.”
The study’s figures are consistent with other national surveys on LGBTQ identification. In a February Gallup Poll, 23.1% of Generation Z respondents said they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or “something other than heterosexual,” compared with 14.2% of millennials and 5.1% of Generation X respondents.
Most transgender people in the U.S. — about 279,000 — live in the South, according to the study, which is consistent with previous years’ findings. Around 175,000 transgender Americans live in the West, 156,000 in the Midwest, and 114,000 in the Northeast, the Williams Institute found.
The Trump administration has worked to remove public health datasets and information about transgender people and identities from federal government websites. At the top of the CDC’s webpage for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System is an advisory stating, “Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female.”
“The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities,” the advisory reads. “This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.”
The Williams Institute pushed back against the adminstration’s efforts, saying the data is essential to determing accurate health policy for minority groups such as transgender people.
“Federal datasets that include questions about sexual orientation and gender identity have provided critical information to researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and the public,” study author Andrew R. Flores, a distinguished visiting scholar at the Williams Institute, said in a statement. “Removal of these questions from federal surveys … would significantly hinder the ability of researchers to assess the health, experiences, and needs of transgender people in the United States.”
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