Nonbinary ID Drives Increase in Trans & NB College Students

Reports that trans and nonbinary students have tripled in the University of California system are complicated by the disproportionate number of nonbinary identifying students driving the shift.

by Evan Urquhart

A number of conservative leaning news outlets have picked up on reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle that shows the number of transgender and nonbinary students has greatly increased in recent years. The topline number of trans and nonbinary students combined went from 0.6% in 2019 to 1.9% in 2023, leading to headlines describing this as a “dramatic rise” (Fox News), a “boom” (Washington Examiner), or describing the number of trans and nonbinary students as having “tripled” (Sinclair affiliates).

screenshot from the Washington Examiner

The stories in conservative media were uniformly shallow and derivative, with none including new reporting or information beyond what’s present in the SF Chronicle. That original story, published on February 6, relied on “demographic data released last month” and did not include any links out to the relevant data, making independent verification of the numbers more difficult. The University of California releases a yearly accountability report which may contain and/or be the source of these statistics, although the highlighted portions of the data do not include a simple breakdown of students by gender.

One interesting item in the SF Chronicle’s reporting that was downplayed both in the original story and the conservative rehashings of it is that all or most of the increase in “students identifying as gender non-conforming, nonbinary or transgender” came specifically from students identifying as nonbinary. In 2023, only 0.2 percent of UC undergrads identified as transgender men, and only 0.1 percent identified as transgender women. The SF Chronicle’s report was not granular enough to determine whether that represented an increase or decrease from 2019; either way binary transgender people were a relatively small proportion of the 1.9 percent of students who identified as either transgender or nonbinary and the increase from 2019 was centered around nonbinary identification.

In a national conversation dominated by discussions of gender-affirming medical treatments and the demonization of transgender women there have been very few attempts to understand the increase in nonbinary identification among young people, but this is far from the first time it has shown up in demographic data. A representative sample conducted by the Washington Post/KFF also found that the majority of Americans who tell pollsters that their gender identity is different from their birth-assigned sex identify as non-binary or gender nonconforming, rather than as trans men or trans women.

Nonbinary is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of presentations and self-conceptions. Some nonbinary people also identify as transgender, while others do not. Some nonbinary people experience gender dysphoria (a feeling of painful incongruence around one’s birth-assigned sex) and/or seek to medically transition, others do not. Some nonbinary individuals present much of the time as their birth-assigned gender, some present all or most of the time as a member of the opposite gender, and many present as in-between genders, outside genders, or are fluid in their presentation. While the extent to which binary trans people conform to gender stereotypes or expectations has been overstated, nonbinariness explicitly rejects them and instead emphasizes individuality and authenticity in a person’s gender identity and expression.

The embrace of nonbinary identities by America’s young people is one of the great unexamined stories of the current moment of political tension over gender. While nonbinary identities has seen more recognition and discussion in news coverage, the center of the gender “debate” has continued to focus around binary identified, medically transitioning transgender men and women. This focus does not reflect the composition of those who identify in some way outside their birth-assigned sex, particularly among young people, for whom nonbinary identity is increasingly the standard mode of queer identity. Who identifies as nonbinary, how, and why they do is an essential but still largely unexamined piece of the larger puzzle around what, exactly, has really increased, one that is being lost completely in these stories touting an increase in “nonbinary and transgender” identities among young people, even in the mainstream media.