A new report estimates that teenagers are “significantly more likely” than older Americans to identify as transgender even though the number remains low overall.
The UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute estimated in a report released Friday that 1.6 million Americans 13 and older identify as transgender — only 0.6% of the general population in that range.
That includes 1.4% of Americans from age 13 to 17, compared to 0.5% of all U.S. adults and just 0.3% of those 65 and older. The report estimates that 300,100 U.S. teens identify as transgender.
“Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population,” states the report, which analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report found that while the percentage and number of transgender adults “has remained steady over time,” a growing number of teens have identified as transgender since 2016.
“Youth ages 13 to 17 comprise a larger share of the transgender-identified population than we previously estimated, currently comprising about 18% of the transgender-identified population in the U.S., up from 10% previously,” the report notes.
Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) are “gender nonconforming.”
Transgender youth and adults are both “more likely to report being Latinx and less likely to report being White compared to the U.S. population,” the survey added.
The survey found the largest share of transgender teens in the Northeast, where it estimated that 1.8% of youths from 13 to 17 identify as transgender. The Midwest had the smallest share of transgender teens, only 1.2% of that age range.
At the state level, the study estimated that 3% of teens in New York identify as transgender, the highest in the nation. In Wyoming, 0.6% of teens identify as transgender, the lowest in the nation.
