For better or worse, money is status in a capitalistic society. Although wages are far from the only metric we have to determine how much society values an individual, it’s nonetheless a frequent shorthand ascertaining someone’s rank on our social hierarchy.
By this metric, trans people—and cisgender women—are grossly devalued. Research published in 2025 by Christopher Carpenter and colleagues looking at trans people in Canada found some shocking results: despite being the best-educated group surveyed, nonbinary individuals assigned female at birth made a whopping 44% less than cisgender men (whom, of course, had the highest earning potential of all). They were followed by trans women at 33% less, nonbinary folks assigned male at birth (30% less), cisgender women (29% less), and trans men (27% less).
As Carpenter et al. summarize, this is a vast disparity for AFAB nonbinary people: “This is an enormous earnings gap: it is larger than the earnings gaps faced by Black men in the United States and larger than earnings differences faced by Indigenous men relative to White men in the 1990s.”
Although Carpenter’s work builds on other research into the trans wage gap, there are a few factors that make his work stand out. It uses restricted-access data from the 2021 Canadian Census, which is mandatory and is administered to roughly 98% of the nation—Carpenter uses long-form data, which comprises about 25% of Canadian citizens, a huge data set. The researchers wind up surveying “over 6,400 nonbinary people and 7,600 transgender people,” a gargantuan sample size in excess of 14,000 people.
As Carpenter et al put it, this “[allows] us degrees of freedom to control for detailed demographics and to investigate differences throughout the earnings distribution.” Carpenter’s data uses earnings information that are backed up by tax records and that contain a vast array of variables, such as “age, education, immigration status, religion, health status, family structure, location, time worked, and job characteristics including occupation and industry.” In essence, they can control for confounding factors and determine that wage differences are solely based on transgender status.
It also allows Carpenter to include trans people who have not yet pursued medical treatment or changed documentation—this category is often missed in other studies and particularly excludes nonbinary individuals. As Carpenter et al. note, the means of counting employed in this study—to collect both sex assigned at birth and current gender identity—is considered the “gold standard” for finding an accurate count of trans and nonbinary people
Interestingly, this rather exhaustive counting process found that only “0.34 percent of the full sample of Canadians age 25-59 is nonbinary or transgender,” marking a very low data point in the various counts of trans people in a given nation—other counts have found on the order of 0.5%, 1%, or even as much as 2-3%. This in itself is a fascinating finding, given the ongoing discourse as to precisely what fraction of the population identifies as trans or nonbinary.
In the paper, Carpenter et al. share the important finding that trans people at the bottom of the wage scale find it that much harder to make their way up. As they put it, the data suggest that there is a “sticky floor” dynamic at play. Similar to a glass ceiling—which only lets marginalized groups proceed so far up society’s hierarchy—a sticky floor means that those who start further down the hierarchy ladder find it that much harder to ascend the rungs. Thus, those who face intersecting forms of oppression—such as being Black and trans, or being trans and non-cisnormative—find it all the more difficult to increase their earnings potential.
This helps explain Carpenter’s finding that AFAB nonbinary individuals face the biggest wage penalty of all. In the paper Carpenter speculates that this could be due to “the combination of being female at birth . . . and the violation of female gender norms.” It’s easy to also imagine another potential source of wage oppression: living an identity that is gender-nonconforming and thus not easily legible as one of the binary sexes puts that much more of a burden on this group. Unsurprisingly, Carpenter also notes that “nonbinary people are six to eight times more likely than cisgender people, and two times more likely than transgender people, to report at least one mental health condition (such as depression or anxiety).”
Carpenter does relay the relatively good news that these earnings disparities are smaller when he “control[s] for detailed job characteristics like occupation and industry and . . . for weeks of work and full-time work,” meaning that those fortunate enough to make it into more desirable sectors are able to somewhat overcome the earnings penalty to being trans. As Carpenter points out, this means that affirmative action policies and nondiscrimination requirements—two things that the Trump Administration is broadly attacking across many marginalized groups—are powerful ways of reducing wage inequality for trans people.
As Carpenter at al. argue, one of the significant things about this research is that it is being undertaken at a time when the U.S. government is making itself willfully blind to the fact that trans people exist, thus making such documentation of the trans wage gap in the U.S. that much more difficult and subject to error and outright omission. This scholarship is required reading for politicians who want to undo this damage, as well as for nonprofits and other institutions striving to support trans people who live in an oppressive society.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.
