According to preliminary findings from the largest poll on transgender and nonbinary Americans’ quality of life, they experience high rates of harassment and unemployment.
The National Center for Transgender Equality collected responses to 600 questions from over 92,000 transgender and nonbinary Americans, aged 16 and above, across all states in the US. The preliminary results were released on Wednesday.
More than three times as many people responded to the most recent poll, which was completed in late 2022, as to the one that was completed in 2015. At a press briefing, survey head Sandy James remarked, “You don’t see data sets like this,” according to the New York Times. “Thousands of transgender people understood how important it was for them to be heard.”
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Transgender
What did they want Americans to hear?
Many respondents reported daunting financial challenges. Eighteen percent said they were unemployed, much higher than the national rate, and one-third said they had experienced homelessness at some point in their lives. More than one-quarter reported not seeing a doctor when they needed to in the previous year because of cost.
But financial problems were not their only burden to bear: nearly a third said they had been verbally harassed in the previous year, while 3% said they were physically attacked in the last year because of their gender identity. Still, they also shared positive experiences. Nearly 94 percent said they were more satisfied with their lives since transitioning. Among those receiving hormones, 98 percent said the treatments had made them more satisfied with life.
Since the 2015 survey, state legislatures have enacted restrictions on transgender health care for minors and adults, bathroom access, school sports participation and gender identification on legal documents. State legislatures are now considering nearly 400 such bills, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Times reported.
That anxious reality surfaced in the findings: Nearly half of the 2022 survey respondents noted they had considered moving in the previous year because of restrictive bills passed or introduced in their state, while 5 percent had actually moved. Forty-four percent reported serious psychological distress in the previous 30 days.
“A steady condition, an environment, has been created in which people are not able to thrive,” James said during the briefing. “And trans people are trying to move through their lives, as anyone else in the United States wants to do.” The 2022 survey was the first to include respondents ages 16 and 17, and they comprised more than 8,000 of the total respondents. What struggles did these teenage respondents report?
Sixty percent suffered mistreatment at school, as well as being barred from using their chosen names, pronouns or bathrooms to match their gender identity. Minors were also more likely than adults to say they had relatives who were not supportive of their gender identity, with 5 percent adding that family members had been violent toward them because they were transgender.
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