Transgender Population in US

Since the Social Security Administration started in 1936, 135,367 people have changed their name to one of the opposite gender, and 30,006 also changed their sex accordingly, the study found. Of Americans who participated in the 2010 census, 89,667 had changed their names and 21,833 had also changed their sex.

Data like this “can promote informed policy and ultimately cast light on a part of our society traditionally kept in the shadows,” Benjamin Cerf Harris, an economist at the Census Bureau, wrote in the paper.

People were most likely to make the change in their mid-30s, he found. But transgender women — those assigned to be male at birth who identify as women — often began later in life than transgender men.

Of the 135,367 likely transgender people who changed their names with the Social Security Administration, 65 percent were transgender men and 35 percent were transgender women. Transgender women, meanwhile, were more likely than transgender men to note the change in their sex with the government. (From 2002 to 2013, the Social Security Administration required proof that genital surgery had been completed before people could change their sex in official records, but it no longer does.)

Not all people who change their names do it with the Social Security Administration. But transgender people can face privacy and other issues when official documents show different identities. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security notified employers if an employee’s name and sex did not match Social Security records.

One of the basic challenges with gathering this data is that most questionnaires require people to specify whether they are male or female — a choice that does not accurately reflect some people’s identities. The people who were most likely transgender based on their Social Security records were 1.6 times as likely as non-transgender people to check neither box on census forms, and 6.5 times as likely to check both, Mr. Harris found.

That has far-reaching ramifications for understanding gender identity, he said, “because this question appears everywhere, from surveys to credit card applications to all the forms we fill out at the doctor’s office.”

In Mr. Harris’s study, census data showed that people who were likely to be transgender based on Social Security data were more likely than the general population to be white, Native American or of two or more races.

Christine Jorgensen in 1953 was the first widely known transgender person in the United States. After serving in the Army during World War II, she later worked as an actress and nightclub entertainer. 

Also, states with laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual identity, like Washington, Oregon and Vermont, had larger shares of transgender people.

States without those laws had the smallest shares, including North and South Dakota, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky and West Virginia. 

Comments

If they could all fit together in one town, they could all move to a state like Washington and figure out how they want to build their own bathrooms.

 Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader