Think All Trans Kids Are White and Middle Class? Think Again.

It’s an article of faith among those who believe in the social contagion hypothesis that trans youth are almost all white and middle class. Demographic data does not back that up.

by Evan Urquhart

Is transgenderism a social contagion infecting white progressive middle class families? The short answer is “that’s fucking stupid” but the myth that trans identity is a phenomenon of white middle class kids is widespread on the right. Because the only families of trans youth who are at all visible to conservatives are white and middle class, and because the right wing relies on anecdotes and vibes rather than data, the idea that being trans is a middle class white cultural phenomenon has been propagating on the right without any attempt to establish what the reality is.

The assumption that all trans youth are white and middle class cropped up today in an article for American Thinker, a minor conservative news and opinion site. The main purpose of the piece, by conservative writer Trevor Thomas, was to complain that some coverage of a Georgia ban on gender affirming care for youth has included the stories of youth who will be impacted by the ban. In Thomas’ opinion, this makes it propaganda.

Thomas first brings up a family that has two transgender youth, claiming that this would be “a near statistical impossibility.”

screenhot from American Thinker

Even on the statistics he’s wrong, of course: Just as some people are struck by lightning more than once in their lives (in 2013 one man was by lightning twice in one day), having two people in some families who experience something that at least 0.5 percent of people experience would be a statistical inevitability in a country as large as the US. In addition, some experts believe transgender identity has a strong genetic component, which would make it much more likely to occur in some families than others.

Thomas segues from this massive cock-up on how statistics works over to the vague idea that kids “in the hood” aren’t trans. He treats this as self-evidently true, and credits a tweet from a former GOP congressional candidate, which he seems to have found in a post on a conservative aggregator that consists of a half dozen conservatives tweeting about the myth that all trans youth are white. [insert screenshot amthink2]

screenshot from Twitchy

Trans youth are not, in fact, disproportionately white.

A 2022 study in the journal for the American Academy of Pediatrics looked at data on nearly 200,000 high school age youth across 16 states, and found that white youth were underrepresented among youth who identified as transgender in data collected in both 2017 and 2019. In 2017, 60 percent of the high schoolers who took the Youth Risk Behavior Survey were white, but only 42 percent of the trans identified youth were. In 2019, 54 percent of survey respondents were white, but only 47 percent who identified as transgender were. This is of course only one study, and these numbers aren’t fully representative of all trans youth in their respective years (the study mentions leaving out kids who don’t attend school, and kids in states that don’t collect this data). Still, no reasonable interpretation of this data could realistically co-exist with the premise that transgender identity in youth is primarily a social contagion among white middle class youth.

So, where does this perception come from? In part, it comes from the people who write news stories and the families they choose to shine a spotlight on. Reporters typically draw on their social and professional networks to find sources, and if those contacts are white and middle class, the families they’ll find to profile are very likely to be white and middle class as well. Additionally, as with other social justice movements, the trans rights movement often seeks to put its most respectable, mainstream face forward. In America, this means middle class white families. These voices tend to be more amplified, their stories widely spread, because activists believe (not without cause) that mainstream America will be more sympathetic to stories of families like these.

A second factor in why the face of transgender youth is disproportionately white and middle class is the disparity in health care access Americans face. White, affluent Americans are more likely to have high quality health insurance and have access to specialists, including ones who specialize in gender affirming care. The population of youth who have access to gender affirming care is much smaller, and almost certainly much whiter, more affluent, and more progressive, than the much larger, more diverse population of youth who identify as transgender. Bringing gender affirming care to more of the youth who need it has long been a goal of the trans rights movement, one now very much on the backfoot due to bans based on misinformation, such as the idea that trans identity is a phenomenon of the white middle class.