You Won't Believe How Many American Teens Think They're 'Transgender'

Madeline Leesman | October 09, 2024 10:00 AM

A study released this week states that 3 percent of American high schoolers now identify as “transgender.”

The survey published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday found that in addition to the 3.3 percent of high schoolers who think they are “trans,” another 2.2 percent are questioning their gender identity.

Teenagers who indicated that they are transgender or questioning their gender identity experienced higher levels of bullying at school, the survey found. The survey included more than 20,000 high school students from public and private schools across the country. The 2023 study was the first to ask the question surrounding transgender identity.

In the survey, around one in four transgender students said they’d attempted suicide in the past year. This was compared to 11 percent of “cisgender” girls and 5 percent of “cisgender” boys (via The New York Times):

Roughly 70 percent of transgender and questioning students reported feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness for a period of more than two weeks in the past year, compared with half of cisgender girls and 26 percent of cisgender boys. Ten percent of transgender students reported receiving medical treatment from a doctor or nurse for a suicide attempt in the past year, compared with 2.6 percent of cisgender girls and 1 percent of cisgender boys.
Transgender students were also much more likely to experience bullying and isolation at school. Just 37 percent of these students reported feeling close to others at school, versus 62 percent of boys and about half of girls. And they were five times as likely to report having unstable housing in the past month.

“We have 5 percent of young people in the country who, because of the way they identify around their gender, are stigmatized, bullied, made to feel unsafe, feel disconnected at school and consequently have poorer mental health and higher risk for suicide than their cisgender peers,” said Kathleen Ethier, the director of C.D.C.’s adolescent and school health division, said, according to the Times.

“That’s just heartbreaking,” Ethier added.

In 2022, a study conducted by researchers at UCLA’s Williams Institute claimed that 0.5 percent of all American adults, 1.3 million people, and about 300,000 youth 13 to 17 years old identify as transgender, which Townhall covered.

Despite this, pro-transgender advocates claim time and time again that social contagion and gender ideology curriculum do not play a part in these numbers, which are growing rapidly.