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Tracking how many people identify as transgender is about to get difficult [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2025-08-31

Federal data collection on gender improved markedly in 2014 after relevant questions were added to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System and other surveys, and researchers believe about 2.1 million U.S. adults and 724,000 teens aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender.

To arrive at these estimates, we drew from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey and Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System, which provide the most comprehensive data on the gender identity of Americans. Though these datasets are the best available to make these estimates, we lack state-level data in certain cases. So we used a statistical technique called multilevel regression and poststratification to fill in those gaps.

But this data is going away with the Trump administration's decision to no longer collect it, requiring respondents to declare "male" or "female." As a result, scientific insight into gender identification is about to become less reliable.

Should gender identity data collection be reinstituted under a new presidential administration in 2029, federal surveys will need to be updated and administered. Once data collection resumes, three years of new data are required before we can update our estimates. While we and other researchers will look to other data sources in the interim, there's nothing that can fully replace federal data sources. In the end, no amount of data suppression can erase the reality on the ground. Millions of transgender youth and adults will continue to live in communities across the U.S. – in cities and small towns, in red states and blue states.

Previously:

• Sexology's war on transgender children

• Can anti-transgender bias in media be measured?

• Mattel debuts their first transgender Barbie

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/08/31/tracking-how-many-people-identify-as-transgender-is-about-to-get-difficult.html

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