The number of young people who identify as transgender has nearly doubled in recent years, according to a new report that captures a stark generational shift and emerging societal embrace of a diversity of gender identities.

The analysis, relying on government health surveys conducted from 2017 to 2020, estimated that 1.4 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds and 1.3 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds were transgender, compared with about 0.5 percent of all adults.

Those figures illustrated a significant rise since the researchers’ previous report in 2017, though the analyses used different methods.

Experts said that young people increasingly have the language and social acceptance to explore their gender identities, whereas older adults may feel more constrained. But the numbers, which vary widely from state to state, also raise questions about the role of peer influence or the political climate of the community.

“It’s developmentally appropriate for teenagers to explore all facets of their identity — that is what teenagers do,” said Dr. Angela Goepferd, medical director of the Gender Health Program at Children’s Minnesota hospital, who was not involved in the new analysis. “And, generationally, gender has become a part of someone’s identity that is more socially acceptable to explore.”

The notion of what it means to live as a transgender person is also shifting. Dr. Goepferd, who is nonbinary, noted that many teenagers would not necessarily want or need hormones or surgeries to transition to another gender, as was typical of older generations.

The surveys, created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did not ask younger teenagers about nonbinary or other gender identities, which also have been rising in recent years. But nearly one-quarter of the adults in the surveys who said they were transgender identified as “gender nonconforming.”

“We as a culture just need to lean into the fact that there is gender diversity among us,” Dr. Goepferd said. “And that it doesn’t mean that we need to treat it medically in all cases, but it does mean that we as a society need to make space for that.”


Although the total estimated number of transgender people was small — around 1.6 million people 13 and up, or about 0.6 percent of the population — trans identification in recent years has become political dynamite, driven in part by the rise in minors seeking medical treatments. Republican legislators across the country have sought to prohibit such care by criminalizing doctors or investigating parents for abuse, which professional medical groups have condemned.

It was a phase.