The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has finished its first-ever survey of the mental well-being of high school students who identified as transgender across all 50 states.
The 2023 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 3.3% of high school students identified as transgender and that another 2.2% of students said they were questioning their gender identity. Students who identify as transgender or question their gender identity face higher rates of bullying, depression, suicide attempts, and isolation than their peers, according to the survey.
Approximately two-thirds of these students said they identified with the female sex.
This is the first nationwide report tallying the number of transgender teenagers, but previous reports estimated the number to be much lower. Taking CDC data from just 15 states collected in 2017 and 2019, researchers at the Williams Institute extrapolated and estimated that 1.4% of teenagers identified as transgender in a 2022 report.
“Data like this is exceedingly rare,” Jody Herman, senior scholar of public policy at the Williams Institute and an author of the 2022 report, told the New York Times. “It certainly fills in significant gaps in our knowledge about trans youth.”
Herman said the institute has found more and more youth are identifying as transgender, outpacing the number of adults who identified as transgender.
“If the age trend holds, we would imagine as time goes on, that younger age group might have more youth identifying as trans,” she said. However, a continued increase in the number of transgender-identifying children is difficult to predict as the CDC’s study is the first of its kind.
Of these students who identified as transgender, a quarter of them reported having attempted suicide in the past year, whereas 11% of female students and 5% of males reported having attempted suicide. Ten percent of transgender students said they received medical treatment for their suicide attempt in the past year, compared to 2.6% of high school girls and 1% of high school boys.
Persistent feelings of hopelessness and sadness in the past 12 months affected 71.9% of trans-identifying students, and 69.9% of gender-questioning students shared these feelings of hopelessness. Comparatively, 50.5% of females and 26% of males reported similar feelings over the course of 12 months.
When it comes to transgender-identifying high schoolers’ experience at school, they had higher rates of skipping school due to feeling unsafe and bullying, and they also had lower rates of feeling connected to other peers at their school.
“We have 5% of young people in the country who, because of the way they identify around their gender, are stigmatized, bullied, made to feel unsafe, feel disconnected at school and consequently have poorer mental health and higher risk for suicide than their cisgender peers,” said Kathleen Ethier, the director of CDC’s adolescent and school health division. “That’s just heartbreaking.”
The CDC has made recommendations to make a greater push to implement suicide prevention and healthy dating programs in schools.
The release of the survey comes as more than a dozen states have passed laws putting restrictions on transgender surgeries and therapies and preventing transgender people from using their bathroom of choice.
The Trevor Project, an LGBT nonprofit group, conducted a study published in September that found transgender youth reported more suicide attempts in states passing restrictive laws than states that didn’t.
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However, a study published in the Australian Journal of Psychology found that people with gender dysphoria have a high likelihood of dealing with other comorbidities such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and autism.
“While treating gender dysphoria as the primary condition is important, psychiatric comorbidities often have a greater likelihood of persisting into the child’s future and complicating mental health outcomes throughout the medical transition,” the study stated.