In a new paper, Brooke Wells, Jennifer Le, Nic Rider, and I analyzed data from nearly 2 million American adults who completed the CDC’s nationally representative Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS). (Note that all respondents are 18 or older, so this data can show us trends among adults, but not among children or teens.)
This survey has asked people if they identify as transgender since 2014. Data were available up to 2022 when we wrote the paper. Here, I also include the 2023 data, which was just released a few weeks ago.
Among all adults, identifying as transgender increased from .53% (53 out of 1,000) in 2014 to .89% (89 out of 1,000) in 2023. That’s a 68% increase – considerable, but not the orders of magnitude seen in the number of people being treated for gender dysphoria. And even in 2023 the number of American adults identifying as transgender is still less than 1%. So far it looks like the changes are substantial, but not huge.
But what happens when we look at trends within age groups? This will better answer the question of whether identifying as transgender has increased among younger adults and if there is a generational shift.
Here, the increases are much larger. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, identifying as transgender has gone from .59% in 2014 to 3.08% in 2023 – which means it has quintupled (increased by a factor of 5) in less than a decade, a 422% increase.
It would be very interesting to ask questions around what treatment(s) the younger cohort sought, if any, and what sort of treatment(s) they received – including individual therapy and/or group therapy plus a follow-up in 5 or maybe 7 years to see if they have had medical intervention and/or still have dysphoria and/or are now identifying as gay and/or are neurodiverse etc etc.