New Study: 0.1% Of Teens Getting Gender-Affirming Care

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that teenagers were getting gender-affirming surgeries at school and there was a rapid increase in the number of teens receiving gender-affirming care. A new study shows that’s not the case at all. From LGBTQ Nation:

Using a dataset of private health insurance claims from 2018 to 2022, researchers at Harvard and Folx Health examined the medical care that over five million teens were getting.

“The total number of youth who had any diagnosis of gender dysphoria was less than 18,000,” Harvard School of Public Health postdoctoral research fellow Landon Hughes, who worked on the study, told KUOW.

“Among those folks, there were less than 1,000 [youth] that accessed puberty blockers and less than 2,000 that ever had access to hormones.”

That works out to less than 0.1% of teens with private insurance getting access to gender-affirming care.

That number surprised some researchers since the CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender. But, as this new study shows, many trans people either can’t access  (or don’t want) gender-affirming care.

Despite claims that teens are being railroaded into gender-affirming care, very few of them are actually getting it. [image or embed]

— LGBTQ Nation (@lgbtqnation.com) January 6, 2025 at 12:15 PM