There are 385.5 million trans people alive today

Estimating a headcount from the best data we have

Foreword: This article uses “trans” as an umbrella term, inclusive of all nonbinary and binary trans and nonbinary genders. It does so because most population studies—particularly censuses—conflate the terms, so it’s impossible to compare data between them without doing so. That said, the best studies that do disambiguate find about a 40%/60% split between binary and nonbinary identities, respectively.

All figures presented in this article are accurate as of March of 2023. Science has a half-life, however, as new and better data is discovered. If you see something presented here which has been surpassed by new research, please let me know, so I can update it!

As a warning, this article discusses death from the AIDS pandemic and from self harm. It does so in a clinical, distanced way, and as a necessary component of producing an accurate headcount.

So, how many trans people are there, really?

We don’t know.

That’s the only possible honest answer, given the data we have. We don’t know how many trans people there are, either in a given country or in the world at large.

But we know that the answers we have are wrong, and we know from science.

And those numbers are the ones everyone quotes.

The common, but wrong, numbers

According to the 2020 US Census, about 1.4 million Americans are trans which, given an overall population of 331 million, suggests a headcount of around 0.4% of the US population. The 2021 UK census found that about 262,000 Britons, or 0.5% of the UK population, are trans. Canada’s 2021 census found only 100,000 Canadians, or 0.2% of the population, are trans. New Zealand’s 2021 census found about 19,400 Kiwis, out of a population of 3.85 million, were trans—0.5% almost exactly. The numbers proceed from here—with a government of a Western country takes a census, they’ll find right around 0.5% of its population is trans, pretty well like clockwork.

These are census figures, though. How could they be wrong?

The hard truth is that censuses are government data collection tools, and the data from them goes into massive databases that those governments use to steer programs, determine policy and, most relevantly, keep tabs on its population. Because of this, there is a long history of minoritized populations lying outright about their minority status. And this isn’t a question of rounding errors either—we’re talking differences in the millions. For better or worse, if you tell the government that you’re trans on a census, they know, and will know forever.

And historically, governments have consistently used that data to oppress their own populations. Often enough, to commit genocides.

The Manzanar concentration camp.

Censuses cannot be trusted to get an accurate headcount of minoritized groups because they’re not anonymous. So long as governmental oppression exists, people will lie about their identities to protect themselves.

Better data, but still with problems

The best data we have about the trans population come from anonymized sociological studies. These solve the main problem that censuses fail—by guaranteeing respondents’ anonymity, those respondents are far, far safer and, as such, are more likely to answer honestly. Respondents might still lie, because being trans is a stigmatized identity—I hardly need to point out the horrifying statements from, among other places, Michael Knowles at CPAC 2023—but the risks of being honest are dramatically lower, so the data is more accurate.

When we consider studies, we want to look for a few specific things. The study must:

1. Be recent

2. Sample large and diverse populations (and, as a result, have smaller margins of error)

3. Have transparent and independent methodologies (so we can drill more deeply into the work of the people who conducted them)

4. Use the most inclusive phrasings possible (because many nonbinary people don’t consider themselves to be trans, simply asking if a person is trans will get a large number of invalid “no” responses)

Unfortunately, few studies meet all of these requirements. One good example of a study that fails is the Williams’ Institute study, one of the largest and most regular censuses of the trans population, which draws upon Centers for Disease Control data—a governmental source which falls prey to the same issues censuses do. A second is a recent study which found 9.2% of all high school-aged youth at a single school district were trans which, while it had excellent methodology in that it allowed and defined a wide variety of gender identities for respondents to choose from, sampled only about 3,000 students, and all in a single school district.

The study that best meets these three criteria is a Pew study released last year which sampled 10,188 respondents which were weighted to be representative of the US’ population at large. This study found 1.6% of all respondents, or about 5.3 million Americans, are transgender. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of high-quality trans population studies are on American populations, so we’ll have to go from that for now. That said, the Pew study isn’t perfect—most importantly its size, while impressive, still leaves a margin of error of 1.6 percentage points in total. This can have some funny effects on small samples, like the trans population measured here. This is true of all sampled surveys, and the overall headcount the Pew study found was pretty middle-of-the-pack compared to other, less robust studies.

But that 1.6%? That number is wrong.

The Pew study found that 5.1% of everyone under 30 identified as trans, and we know that there are major biological components of a trans identity. In turn, that means that are very few reasons, other than older trans people being closeted, why that 5.1% should drop off to 0.3% for everyone over 50, which it did. For clarity: a trans identity is not purely biological, but it’s just as untrue to say it isn’t biological at all.

Biological & psychological components of trans identities

The fact that trans identities are at least partially genetic is not really disputable at this point. Among the most decisive pieces of evidence of this is the incredible rate at which identical twins, whether raised in a single household or separately, are both trans if one is trans. Twin studies for trans identities have confirmed strong genetic roots in over a dozen studies now. While results vary from study to study, due largely to methodological differences, most studies find that between 30-50% of gender incongruence is heritable.

In other words, we have very strong data that says somewhere between a third and a half of what makes a trans person trans comes directly from our DNA.

What physiologically changes make us trans is a much more fraught question. The candidate most often cited—sexually dimorphic brain shape—was decisively struck down in 2021 by a massive metastudy that shredded the very idea that brains are shaped differently based on sex. Since then, investigation into brain neurotransmitter and receptor distribution has been ongoing, and seems the next most likely candidate. Problem is, the fact that we’re now recognizing huge relationships between the microbes we have in our intestines and how we think, so it’s just as likely that whatever sources there are for trans identities are somewhere completely different, where we haven’t even thought to look yet. And none of that even begins to touch on the incredibly high preponderance of neurodiversity of all kinds in the trans population, which could certainly be playing a role, or which could be a red herring, a parallel effect of something completely different.

In short, it will probably be a very, very long time before we know what, specifically, makes trans people physiologically different from cis people. And that’s okay. We don’t really need to know for our purposes—knowing that there’s a biological basis is more than enough.

Meanwhile, from a psychological perspective, you could ask almost any trans person when they realized they were trans and you’ll get a huge range of answers—sometimes from a single trans person, who might tell you something like “Well, I know something was wrong when I was five, but I didn’t know what it was until I was thirty.” While gender incongruence, driven by biology, often sets in quite young, many people lack words or context to understand their feelings, or to even recognize that what they’re feeling isn’t what cis people feel. Trans people very frequently remain closeted, whether to themselves or the world, repressing these feelings in an attempt to fit in to a cisheteronormative world.

And that’s perfectly understandable.

But it also means that the ability to perceive a trans identity, much less realize it, is subject to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. You’ve probably heard of it, but the thing to remember is that to progress to higher-order needs—levels higher on the pyramid—you need to meet the needs of lower-order needs. In other words, if you don’t have a place to live, it doesn’t matter to you whether that place would be safe, and if where you live isn’t safe, it doesn’t really matter to you if you have healthy and fulfilling friendships.

Questions of identity and human connection—the areas where a transgender identity would become apparent—all begin midway up the hierarchy, in Love and Belonging. As a result, people grappling with feelings of physiological or safety insecurity would only rarely be able to even notice problems of that type, much less act on them.

And this makes sense in the context of social acceptance for queer people generally and trans people specifically. Over time, most societies have become significantly more accepting of trans people. Twenty-five years ago, a trans person, Rita Hester, being stabbed to death in a park barely made the local news, and was almost entirely unknown outside of the trans community. Last month, Brianna Ghey’s murder sparked an international uproar and worldwide vigils. Simply put, it’s more safe to be trans today than it was even recently… even if it is still pretty scary sometimes.

All this tells us three things: first, that people simply are trans, and a huge part of that is genetic. Second, that there are normal, important, psychological reasons why a person would be unable to realize that they’re trans, maybe for their entire life. Third, it has become safer to exist as a trans person in recent decades, even though safety numbers are worsening recently.

And that means that there are a lot of trans people out there who either don’t know they’re trans or who are closeted. Any accurate headcount must include them.

The sad figures of attrition

Before we can arrive at those numbers, there’s one other very sad reality we need to recognize: our siblings who didn’t make it. In this category, there are two major drivers: self-harm and the AIDS pandemic.

It has long been cited that trans people have a lifetime suicide attempt rate of around 40%. It’s very difficult to say at what rate trans people complete an attempt, in no small part because many die without ever telling another person that they’re trans. That being the case, the best estimates we can make is to take overall suicide completion statistic rates as a baseline, absent better data. That data says that about 4% of suicide attempts are completed; once we take into consideration that a single person may attempt suicide multiple times before completing their attempts, the actual completion rate is best understood to be around 7%.

Meanwhile, around 700,000 people have died from AIDS since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, and that pandemic overwhelmingly affected people assigned male at birth. It is difficult to say what portion of that population was trans, but not just because of the closeting problem we've been observing. The highest death tolls occurred at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, and at that time, trans people were considered to be a type of gay person of their AGAB, so these statistics literally do not exist. The difference can be very easily seen in the current prevalence of HIV today, where trans women are 66 times more likely to have HIV than the background rate, and trans men are just under 7 times as likely.

We cannot say exactly how many trans people have died from AIDS, except to say that that number was high, given the frequency with which trans people, and trans women in particular, were forced into subsistence sex work through the height of the AIDS pandemic, and that overall HIV prevalence among trans women today is over 40%. As a result, it is safe to say that a fairly high proportion of that 700,000 were trans.

A final item here that must be acknowledged is the rates of violence which trans people are subject to. American trans women, for instance, are nine times more likely to be murdered than cis women, but actual hate crime reporting is incredibly spotty, with entire regions refusing to collect or report data—those numbers, as a result, are known to be wrong, and significantly so. There is no way to correct for them, since we don’t know to what degree they’re off. Unfortunately, we must simply leave an asterisk on the final calculations that an unknown number of trans people were murdered, and that we can’t know for sure how many.

A better estimate of the US trans population

Let’s do some math.

We know that trans identities have a strong base in a person’s genetics, that a person’s ability to realize that identity is strongly affected by their perception of safety, and that it has become safer to be trans in recent times. Our headcount, then, is affected by a classic left-handedness problem; an aspect of normal human variation is suppressed by sociological factors, and as that oppression eases, people are more able to be authentic.

That being the case, we can go back to that Pew study, which found that 5.1% of everyone under 30 was trans. It is likely that that 5.1% is still a significant undercount, given the incredible anti-trans bigotry that remains in the world, but it’s the best number we have, so we must work from there. First, we can assume that that 5.1% is the current base rate for trans identities in the US, because our work in biology and psychology demonstrates that there’s no reason that the rate should drop to any meaningful degree with age. Again, for clarity: this includes all trans and nonbinary people, closeted or not, whether they’ve realized it or not.

That being the case, we have a fairly simple formula to determine the real, current trans population of America:

(Total US Population) * 5.1%= A

A * 40% attempt suicide = B

B * 93% of those who attempt suicide survive long-term = C

B attempts - C survivors = D those who lost their lives to suicide

For a final formula of A - D - AIDS mortality

A total of 331.9 million people live in the US, which means that about 16,453,000 trans people are alive, today, in the US, not accounting for the AIDS pandemic. If we estimate that 200,000 of those who died from AIDS were trans, that would put the total living American trans population at about 16.2 million people, minus an unknown number of victims of violence.

Here’s the fun part. Because of census data, we have good, solid data about the age distributions of American citizens. That means we can do this:

86 million Americans are aged 30-49.

119.57 million Americans are aged 50.

3.5% of all trans Americans aged 30-50 are “missing” (5.1% base trans identity rate - 1.6% are out).

4.8% of all Americans aged 50+ are “missing.” (5.1% base trans identity rate - 0.3% are out).

So, applying the same formula as we used above, setting aside violence and AIDS rates, as we can’t be certain of the age distribution of AIDS mortality:

For anyone age 30-50:
About 1.4 million US citizens of this age are out as trans.
About 3 million US citizens of this age are closeted or don’t know they’re trans.
There’s at least a 1 in 28 chance that any given cis person of this age that you meet… cisn’t.

And:

For anyone age 50+:
About 359,000 US citizens of this age are out as trans.
About 5.6 million US citizens are closeted or don’t know they’re trans.
There’s at least a 1 in 21 chance that any given cis person of this age that you meet… cisn’t.

And, uhh… if you're in one of those age brackets, are under the impression that you’re cis, and somehow wandered in here? Might be worth having a think about that.

But what about everywhere that isn’t the US?

Why stop there?

Suicidality rates vary from country to country, but queer risk remains reasonably constant no matter where we go, and since we can’t figure in violence victimization rates anyway, the single largest variable from place to place can be set aside.

There are just over 8 billion people alive today, which means that, before we account for AIDS, 396.5 million trans people are alive today. About 40 million people worldwide have died from AIDS, so if we use the same proportion of that mortality as in the US—2/7—that means that there are about 385.5 million trans people alive in the world today, minus an unknown number of victims of violence.

385,500,000. Living. Trans. People.

And that’s probably an undercount.