Education Week - March 8, 2017 - 6

SNAPSHOT

Student Data

How Many Transgender Children Are There?
By Evie Blad
As policymakers and educators debate the rights of transgender children in schools, they have no
federal data to answer even the most basic question: How many transgender children are there?
That's because publicly collected data on transgender individuals-part of a U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention survey-is not collected in every state, and participating states only survey
adults.
Although it's generally believed that transgender children make up a relatively small share of the
population, advocates surmise some are now more likely to "come out" and transition at younger ages
than in years past because of greater public awareness of the issue.
About 0.7 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds living in the United States identify as transgender, some
150,000 teenagers, according to an estimate released in January by the Williams Institute at the
University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. The think tank, which researches issues related
to sexual orientation and gender identity, based its estimates on statistical modeling rather than direct
surveys of children.
More work is needed to gather more representative and demographic data about transgender youths,
the organization says.

A NEW ESTIMATE

Getty

Researchers estimate
about 0.7 percent of
U.S. 13- to 17-year-olds
identify as transgender,
roughly 150,000
teenagers. Researchers
and advocates say that
more precise data is
necessary to inform
educators and the public.

Why are data on transgender
students important?

How did researchers create
their estimate?
The Williams Institute used data from the CDC's
Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System,
a telephone survey that asks adults a range
of health- and demographic-related questions.
Nineteen states asked optional questions about
transgender identity in 2014, and an additional
eight states asked those questions in 2015.
6 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 8, 2017 | www.edweek.org

Researchers looked for correlations between
transgender status and other factors, such as
age and religious affiliation. They matched those
correlations against demographic data in every
state to create estimates for the teenage population.

Are there efforts to collect
more federal data on
transgender students?

Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via AP

Federal civil rights laws should protect the
interests of transgender children, regardless of how
many there are, advocacy groups say. But more
complete data could help explain the need for clear,
consistent policies related to transgender students
to state and local officials, they say.
Questions about transgender students have
only grown since the Trump administration
rescinded Obama-era guidance on gender identity
last month. That guidance had put schools on
notice that they could be found in violation of the
sex-discrimination protections of Title IX of the
Education Amendments of 1972 if they didn't honor
students' gender identity.
In withdrawing that guidance, the Trump
administration left it to state and local
decisionmakers to determine how to handle a
range of issues, including what restrooms and
locker rooms transgender students should use,
whether to call them by their desired pronoun,
and how to handle identifying their gender on
student records.
For educational leaders, conversations about
those decisions can remain hypothetical for a long
time-until a transgender student enrolls in their
school. Because transgender students represent
a small proportion of the population, it can take a
while for smaller, rural districts to confront such
issues. When they do, it can be a scramble.
And the decisions can lead to criticism from
various corners, school leaders say.
Texas school athletics officials, for example,
have faced stiff criticism after they required a
transgender boy to compete against girls even
after he underwent hormone therapy and said he
wanted to compete in the boys division. He recently
won the state's girls' wrestling championship,
and parents and other athletes complained that
the testosterone treatments gave him an unfair
advantage.

SOURCE: Williams Institute

IN THE NEWS
Texas high school wrestler Mack
Beggs, front, reacts after winning
the girls Class 6A 110-pound
championship final in Cypress, Texas
last month. Beggs, a transgender
boy, has been undergoing hormone
therapy as he transitions from
female to male. The governing body
that oversees Texas high school
sports requires Beggs to wrestle in
the girls' division because of its rule
that restricts sports participation
based on the sex listed on an
athlete's birth certificate.

Some researchers and advocacy groups have
pushed in recent years to expand the data that
federal agencies collect related to students' sexual
orientation and gender identity. Questions added in
recent years to surveys collected by the CDC and
the U.S. Department of Education have provided
additional data points about bisexual, gay, and
lesbian students, but none has focused on gender
identity.
Advocacy groups say adding more questions
about such issues to federal surveys would help
examine how LGBT students are treated in
schools, whether they experience higher rates of
peer victimization, and how those experiences
affect their lives and academic outcomes.
But that push comes amid complaints from some
education leaders that data collection is already
cumbersome and overwhelming. And, in some
states, parents have pushed back against student
surveys out of privacy concerns.
To this point, most data on the experiences of
transgender students are collected by groups like
GLSEN and other advocacy organizations and by
academic researchers.

What's next in the national
debate over transgenderstudent rights?
At least six cases are in federal courts right now
that are related to schools' transgender-student
policies. Those include the case of Gavin Grimm, a
Virginia boy who sued his district after it would not
let him use the boys' restroom.
The U.S. Supreme Court is due to hear Grimm's
case March 28. His lawyers and lawyers for the
Gloucester County, Va., school board both said
in filings last week that they want the court to
proceed with the case. The school board, however,
asked for a delay to allow the U.S. solicitor general
to weigh in on how Title IX and its accompanying
regulations apply to transgender students. n

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Education Week - March 8, 2017

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