How many people are affected by the recent waves of GOP-led anti-LGBTQ+ legislation? The data is not usually part of their lawmaking.
In the past three years at least 21 states have passed laws targeting gender-affirming care for transgender people, or making it illegal for transgender kids to play sports, or made it a crime for transgender people to use the correct bathrooms. But missing from every one of these legislatures has been any understanding of how many people they’re affecting.
The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law is a think tank focused on researching LGBTQ+ demographics to inform lawmaking and public policy decisions.
“We can’t study the impact without knowing the population,” said Christy Mallory, legal director of the Williams Institute.
According to their research and most advocacy groups, approximately 1.7% of all Americans are born intersex – meaning they depart from typical ‘male’ or ‘female’ physical categorization in some way. They might have extra or missing sex-liked chromosomes, they might have significant physical variations, they might have minor variations that they don’t learn about until they have their fertility checked. This is not a part of being transgender, usually, but does carry similar needs in terms of gender-affirmation.
Laws prohibiting gender-affirming care will keep intersex patients from being able to access treatment, but no consideration was given to this in lawmaking.
Just how many is hard to determine, as hospitals aren’t required to track or report intersex characteristics (nor should they be).
Intersex aside, according to the Williams Institute there are also over 13 million people in the United States who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, almost 4% of the total population, or one in twenty-five. Almost 2 million of those identify as transgender, the population most heavily harmed by the recent legislation. Most of those say they understood that they were transgender in childhood, and those who are supported and allowed to transition report similar statistics of happiness and mental health to the bulk of the population.