Data from the new KFF/Washington Post Trans Survey
Welcome back! Between my son’s third birthday and Pesach preparation, it has been quite a busy week here! I even wrote this in between Pesach cleaning and cooking. But I still wanted to take some time to talk about the new data from Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and Washington Post that I mentioned last week.
Due to the Jewish holiday, I will be taking next week off. I hope everyone has a wonderful Pesach and Easter. And if you are new here, don’t forget to subscribe below and share! This is still a new newsletter so any sharing would be greatly appreciated.
As I mentioned last week, the KFF and the Washington Post have released a survey of transgender individuals. Compared to many major national newspapers, such as the NY Times, the Washington Post has done a good job in talking about the transgender community in a respectful and truthful manner. This study provides some good insight into what’s happening in the transgender community. This study includes 515 transgender adults and 823 cisgender adults across the United States. You can find the baseline data here. This newsletter will be a little longer than normal as we explore some of the datapoints that I think are particularly interesting.
Importantly, a lot of what is said in this dataset isn’t new. It is fairly recent and provides us with a good perspective on the transgender experience both over individual’s lives as well as the past 12 months. For this newsletter, charts which I felt were easier to read I just added in. For a few of the more complicated charts, I simplified them. It’s the same data, but presented in a way that is a little easier to read.
A few important datapoints:
When asking about safety growing up, we see some important divergences between transgender and cisgender individuals. While 86% of adults in general said they felt safe at home, only 69% of transgender individuals felt safe at home. At school, only 55% of transgender individuals reported feeling safe growing up. In youth sports, that number was 44% and in religious gatherings, the number is 35%. This dataset doesn’t control for age, which may impact some of this data, but it is still showing a lot of possibility for trauma when an individual doesn’t feel safe.
In terms of experiencing discrimination, below we can the different types of intrusions and harassment which transgender people experience. This includes 64% of transgender individuals reporting verbal attacks and 25% reporting physical attacks.
One of the biggest attacks on transgender rights currently is focused on gender affirming care for youth. I have a separate newsletter on this type of care, which you can read here. As we can see below, in this study, most people understand they are transgender before the age of 18, with 32% of respondents understanding at age 10 or younger. This shows the importance of supporting transgender kids from an early age.
Below are a few edited tables focusing on mental health. The mental health crisis among the trans community (and the LGBTQIA+ community in general) is not new; there is quite a bit of research linking poor mental health among transgender individuals to low levels of support both from family and society. Below, we can see that almost 50% of transgender respondents reported their childhood to be somewhat or very unhappy. We can also see higher levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety among the transgender community versus the larger American community.
We often talk about transgender individuals but there is a whole family unit involved. Indeed, transgender individuals are just as likely to have a child under the age of 18 living in their household. So when we discuss gender identity and expression with children, it is not just that children may identify as a gender different than assigned from birth but they may have a family member, including a parent, who identifies as transgender.
Next we want to look at what transitioning mean for many transgender individuals. I will be talking about gender affirming care in adults in a later post, but the short answer is it’s an individual decision based on what the transgender individual feels is best for them. As we can see below, everyone makes different decisions (and some individuals don’t take any gender affirming care at the time of this study). While there are studies which explore why, this study does not have any answers. As laws become ever more restrictive in certain states, not just for youth but also for adults, sadly it will become more difficult for transgender individuals to get the transitioning and mental health services they need and deserve.
27% of respondents have moved to a location that is more accepting of transgender individuals. I think this number will go up this year. It is not easy for someone to just pick up and start over in a new state or city, but transgender networks are starting to explore how to build up opportunities for transgender individuals to move from hostile states to less hostile locations.
I want to end with this last datapoint: how much does your health care provider know about trans health. It is fair to ask how much (if at all) transgender care comes up in medical education at any level. Education about supporting transgender individuals and communities should be a part of medical education; not just about transitioning but all aspects of transgender health.
This dataset gives us a good look at the current state of the transgender community. One of the points of this newsletter in general is there is a lack of knowledge of aspects of the LGBTQIA+ community, especially the transgender community.
Please feel free to ask me any questions about the data. Due to the way it is presented, I cannot do a full analysis to see how different subgroups of the trans community responded. Some of your questions may also be answered in other articles or data.
I hope everyone has a wonderful week and a great Pesach and Easter.