A Data Portrait of Cisgender, Transgender, and Gender-Nonconforming Populations in the United States: A Research Note

The transgender population is a critically underresearched population in the United States, owing to rare measures on national and state-level surveys that ask about sex and gender or transgender identification. Consequently, we know relatively less about the sociodemographic, socioeconomic, family, and health lives of gender minorities. In this research note, I use population-level data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to provide a data portrait of cisgender, transgender, and gender-nonconforming populations on a range of sociodemographic (e.g., sexual identity, race and ethnicity), socioeconomic (e.g., education, homeownership), family (e.g., union status), and health (e.g., number of poor mental health days) characteristics. Results reveal that gender minorities are younger than cisgender men and cisgender women and are disproportionately sexual minorities and people of color. Gender minority groups also experience lower socioeconomic status, report drastically different family lives, and bear the burden of worse health compared with cisgender people. I conclude by contending that descriptive research of this nature can illuminate compositional differences between cisgender and gender minority populations, provide rationales for adjusting for certain characteristics, and highlight potential explanatory mechanisms to make better sense of well-established findings (e.g., the transgender health disadvantage).