The UK press went into a state of shock last year when the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that in the 2021 census, over a quarter of a million people had answered 'no' to the question, 'Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?' That would put the percentage of the nation's trans people at 0.5%, or one in two hundred.
All kinds of objections were raised, mostly on the grounds people must have misunderstood the question because English was not their first language, but perhaps because the usual suspects were looking for an excuse to bury the number. Conservatives find it inconvenient.
In the end, the ONS backed off, so 0.5% is no longer an 'accredited official statistic', but at the same time the ONS pointed out, 'the estimates are considered broadly in line with other data on gender identity.' In other words, while no longer stamped with the brand of official truth, that half a percent is in line with other sources the ONS has checked.
Two of the 'other sources of data' are likely to have been the CDC's Behaviour Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) in the US. Using pooled data, 0.6% of Americans over the age of 13 identify as trans.
What is really interesting is the US 2021-2022 census data, which provides a deeper analysis of what is going on. 5.6% of generation Z adults identified as transgender, along with 2.4% of millennials and 1.5% of gen X.
Boomers? We're at 0.25%. Plot those points against age and you have a trend.
Unless this is a blip – which seems unlikely given how referral patterns have been rising so steeply this past decade – transgender people could potentially become ten times more visible. Notice I am not saying 'more numerous'. There's a case for saying we've always been there in greater numbers than official statistics have shown, but have been keeping our heads down because of intense discrimination.
The oldest members of gen Z will have been nine in 2014 when the leap in trans referral rates began and the youngest are fifteen now, but as boomers and the generations before them age out, all the signs are the situation is changing fast. If that 5.6% figure holds, trans people will become as common as people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Why is this happening? One line of thought is something is causing people who didn't previously identify as being trans to begin doing so, providing fertile ground for conspiracy theorists, but there are clues it lies in something mundane – a change in attitudes.
Gen Z are the first generation amongst whom a majority have agreed male and female are not the only genders.
If you don't believe in something, then you can't identify with it, so this change in attitudes may also account for the sudden surge in non-binary people as gen Z matures. In other words, people who would have been fearful of identifying as trans in the past have become more relaxed about doing so now. Perhaps non-binary folk may always have been there, but only now can see themselves for who they are.
If all of that is so, we aren't looking at a blip and the data may be telling us that as scripts around gender loosen, so are more people accepting they are trans along with gender lying not on a polar scale, but somewhere along a continuum.
And if that is the case, then core scripts are being rewritten.
One of the reasons I think this may be happening is that fifteen years ago, trans people assigned male at birth (AMAB) outnumbered people assigned female at birth (AFAB) by two to one. Now it is the other way around. This is a dramatic swing, about which there is much speculation in the Cass report.
Looking at the data it is tempting to suggest the growth in AFAB referrals is at least in part driven by the acceptance of non-binary gender incongruence by gen Z, because right now, the best figures we have suggest the majority of non-binary trans people are AFAB. We should do our very best to support them, because although conservatives are struggling to work out what non-binary means, their knee-jerk response has been to double down on supporting binary gender stereotypes.
There are two messages to take home. First, you are not alone and second, the membership of Susan's may be very different in a few years' time.
