Roughly 2.8 million Americans aged 13 and older identify as transgender, accounting for approximately 1 percent of the U.S. population in that age group, according to a new estimate from the Williams Institute, a research organization focused on sexual orientation and gender identity issues.
About three-quarters of people who identify as transgender in the U.S. are under 35, according to the report published Wednesday, and 25 percent are between 13 and 17. Williams Institute researchers used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) — public health surveys administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — and statistical modeling to estimate the population of trans adults and youth in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
About 2.1 million adults identify as transgender, accounting for approximately 0.8 percent of Americans aged 18 and older, according to Wednesday’s report. Roughly 3.3 percent of 13 to 17-year-olds in the U.S., or 724,000, identify as transgender.
“Younger generations are more likely to identify as transgender, and we expect that trend to continue,” said Jody Herman, the report’s lead author and a senior scholar at the Williams Institute. “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.”
That finding is consistent with national surveys on LGBTQ identification. In a February Gallup poll, 23.1 percent of Gen Z said they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or “something other than heterosexual,” compared with 14.2 percent of Millennials and 5.1 percent of Gen X.
The Williams Institute, affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, has tracked the number of transgender people in the U.S. since at least 2011. In 2022, the group estimated that 1.6 million Americans identified as transgender.
Most transgender people in the U.S. — about 279,000 — live in the South, according to Wednesday’s report, 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.
Of all adults who identify as transgender, 33 percent are transgender women; 34 percent are transgender men and 33 percent are nonbinary, according to Wednesday’s report.
The group’s estimate comes as President Trump’s administration works to remove public health datasets and information from federal government websites about transgender people and identities. Affixed at the top of the CDC’s webpage for the YRBSS, which the Williams Institute used in its calculation on Wednesday, is an advisory that “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.”
Federal health agencies, including the CDC, were ordered to restore online datasets taken down after Trump issued an executive order in January prohibiting the government from promoting “gender ideology.” Each of the restored webpages leads with notices condemning “gender ideology.”
The White House has also sought to remove questions about gender identity from national surveys on crime victimization and sexual violence. In February, former U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos told NPR that the bureau had moved to strike gender identity questions from several surveys it conducts because of Trump’s Jan. 20 order.
“Federal datasets that include questions about sexual orientation and gender identity have provided critical information to researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and the public,” Andrew R. Flores, a distinguished visiting scholar at the Williams Institute and one of the authors of Wednesday’s report, said in a statement. “Removal of these questions from federal surveys — such as the BRFSS and the YRBS — would significantly hinder the ability of researchers to assess the health, experiences, and needs of transgender people in the United States.”
