The largest survey of transgender Americans ever conducted has found trans people continue to suffer discrimination, harassment and even violence at work, in medicine and at school – but that people who transition have much higher satisfaction in life, and many have supportive families.
This is the first report to document transgender experiences en masse in eight years, and comes amid sustained political attacks on trans rights from conservatives.
“There’s still a drought of information available to lawmakers, the media and advocates regarding our experiences and our needs,” Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Coalition for Transgender Equality (NCTE), said, according to NBC News.
“At best, we’re working in a vacuum of information. At worst, we’re combating dangerous misinformation being spread by anti-trans extremists,” he continued. “Without question, the misinformation and lack of understanding is underpinning these escalating legislative attacks against our community.”
The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey, presents an early look at findings from a survey of more than 92,000 people who identify as binary or nonbinary transgender adults. It is the first such report since the NCTE produced a survey of more than 28,000 individuals in 2015. Individuals were asked a variety of more than 600 possible questions. No respondent received all questions.
Importantly, the transgender survey is large but is not random. Although surveyors weighted the responses to try to account for biases, people who took the survey might still be unrepresentative of transgender people living in the US as a whole.
The report found that 94% of transgender individuals who live at least part of the time in a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth – in other words, who “transitioned” – were either “a lot” (79%) or “a little more satisfied” (15%) with their lives. Nearly 98% of respondents were receiving some kind of hormone replacement therapy, which made them “a lot” (84%) or “a little” (14%) more satisfied with their lives.
“Obtaining hormone therapy through the informed consent model and having access to surgery has definitely changed my life for the better,” one survey respondent, named Taylor, said. “It certainly didn’t fix all of my problems instantly, but it fixed a lot of problems that my dysphoria caused. Now that I’ve been on HRT and had surgery, I can live my day-to-day life without pain, dissociation, and misery.”
Conversely, the sustained political attacks on transgender individuals, almost entirely from the right wing, made about half of trans respondents (47%) consider moving location. At least 10 states force trans individuals to use public bathrooms that correspond to their gender assigned at birth in at least some situations, as opposed to a choice aligned with the gender they identify as; 22 states ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth; 24 ban transgender youth sports participation.
Transgender individuals also continue to suffer discrimination, harassment and even violence. More than a third were experiencing poverty (34% compared with 12% of the US population). More than one in 10 (11%) said they had been forced out of a job because of their gender identity, and about 18% were unemployed (compared with 3.5% of the US population in December 2022).
Further, nearly one-third (30%) said they were verbally harassed in the last 12 months and 39% said they were harassed online. About one in 10 (9%) said they were offered unequal treatment. Three per cent said they were physically attacked in the last 12 months.
These experiences contrasted sharply with the support many trans individuals received from family, support that tended to increase with age. Forty-three per cent of trans individuals aged 16-17 said their families were supportive, all the way up to 63% of individuals older than 65 who felt their families were supportive.
“My whole life has been affected by the fact that my family was very accepting of me,” said Amanda, who is older than 50. “I’m not exactly sure why, but both of my parents always supported my gender and sexual expression even before it was popular to do so. They would intervene at school and in the neighborhood, so I never had the problems that most people had growing up.”
