Last month the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) released an estimate that the number of trans and gender-expansive people living in the United States totals 2.34% of the population. Using the latest Census estimate of 341.8 Americans, that would total a whopping 8 million people (5 million adults) under the trans umbrella. That number was met with much celebration, as it is significantly larger than the current gold-standard estimate of trans people, which found some 2.8 million aged 13 or older (made by the UCLA Williams Institute in August 2025). Particularly in an election year, when the Democratic Party has taken multiple actions to alienate trans voters, a larger number of potential trans voters would be a huge asset.
Reporting on the HRC study has centered on the fact that younger generations are much more comfortable coming out as trans, suggesting that these numbers could be accurate, and further implying that other studies have been systematically undercounting the number of trans people simply because of the enormous stigma against disclosing a trans identity. Commentators have even suggested that the real number is higher, given that the data was collected by a Federal agency during a time of widespread anti-trans repression.
As wonderful as the news is, it is worth noting the scale of the increase, with this indicating a far greater number of trans people than has ever been recorded by any study in the United States. It would be at least 3x the number found by the Williams Institute and also significantly higher than a 2022 Pew study, which found 1.6% of Americans identify as transgender or nonbinary. It is certainly possible that prior estimates are an undercount—when sharing information about trans people in a professional capacity, I often explain that current estimates of the trans population are probably undercounted for exactly the reasons named above. But a number that nearly triples the Williams Institute survey seems like a lot.
We do not have a count of trans people that simply goes out and tallies how many trans people exist in America. The U.S. Census, which actually does attempt to account for as many Americans as possible and is probably the closest we can come to a full count of trans Americans, did not ask about trans identity in its 2020 iteration. Lacking such a comprehensive count, studies like the Williams Institute and the HRC tallies instead rely on samples, surveying a subset of the population and then attempting to account for the biases inherent in any sample by using statistical methods. The HRC study received approximately 2.4 million responses, (with the actual number of respondents lower, some of those responses were multiples made by the same individual or were removed for other reasons).To reach its count of trans/GNC people, HRC used the Household Pulse Survey, a relatively new, experimental survey. The Household Pulse Survey was initiated by the Census in 2020 and was continued at weekly intervals through the beginning of 2025, when it was brought to an end and transitioned into a different form.In its methodology document, HRC describes the Household Pulse Survey as “experimental,” meaning that its ability to give accurate information is currently being, but is not yet considered fully, established.
The Williams Institute study was conducted in a very different way: it used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a study conducted by the CDC since 1984 that surveys about 400,000 Americans per year. As with the Household Pulse Survey, the BRFSS also relies on statistics to extrapolate its findings to the American population at large. Its methods are much more longstanding and reliable.
So these are already differences between the studies, offering some reason to pause on too much excitement about the HRC study. We also know that survey results can vary quite widely based on how a question is asked. In the Williams and HRC studies there is considerable variance in this regard.
In the Williams study, the respondent is simply asked, “Do you consider yourself to be transgender?” and if they answer “yes” they are further asked “Do you consider yourself to be male-to-female, female-to-male, or gender non-conforming?” Thus respondents are asked to self-identify as trans, and if they do not they are lumped in with cisgender people.
According to the methodology, respondents to the HRC study were first asked the “sex assigned to them at birth” and then asked “whether they currently describe themselves as male, female, transgender, or ‘none of these.’” Anyone who reported a current gender identity that did not match the sex assigned at birth was thrown into a bucket labeled trans or gender nonconforming—unfortunately, respondents were not subclassified beyond that, meaning that we do not know how many respondents identified as trans versus not. This is a major difference between the studies that could very well account for a significant portion of the variance.
Lastly, one strange wrinkle from the HRC study. In its results, the study found the following data for the cisgender and trans/GNC populations: Cisgender Men, 47.26%; Cisgender Women, 50.41%, Trans/GNC, 2.34%. With population averages in the U.S. for men versus women being roughly 50.8% female and 49.2% male, it seems the trans category was almost completely pulling from the male population. That doesn’t really match up with common sense, and research, which suggests roughly equal numbers pulling from the cisgender male and female categories into the trans. Perhaps something in this study may be off.
To be clear, it would be great news to find that trans people are far more prevalent than previously thought. There is a wide body of research indicating that transness is inherent to humanity, so finding that there are more trans people than previously believed would do much to normalize us as just another wrinkle of what it is to be a human.
The HRC study is quite suggestive, and in a better world we would have the means of following up on these promising results. Unfortunately, we live in a world where an authoritarian government is bent on actively erasing trans people, and on making governmental statistics in general less and less reliable. We can hope that when a less harmful government finally takes back power in the U.S., it will begin collecting the data we need to continue getting a fuller picture of just how many trans people there really are.
