Welcome to #TransTuesday! We’ve got lots more data to discuss this week in part 2 of THE 2022 US TRANS SURVEY RESULTS!
If you missed last week, definitely start there and learn about why this survey was so vital, and the importance of it being conducted by trans people.
Only 36% of adult respondents said all of their immediate family knew they were trans and were supportive, 31% said they were “very supportive,” and 28% were neither supportive or unsupportive. While that last category isn’t great, it’s not awful.
And it backs up what I’ve been saying for years… the transphobes are just a (very loud) tiny minority. However, things get a lot more grim when you look at minors, where coming out means they’re still legally under parental control.
Among 16-17 year olds who took the survey, only 44% had supportive immediate families, and 29% had unsupportive or very unsupportive environments. The propaganda war on transition care for trans kids is obviously taking its toll. Those kids deserve so much better.
And if you don’t understand how safe, tested, and needed that care is for kids (there’s no surgeries, damn it), see the trans tuesday on TRANS KIDS AND THE INTAKE EXAM.
11% of adults who took the survey who grew up in a home with family, guardians, or foster parents said that a family member was violent towards them because they were trans, and 8% were kicked out because they were trans.
5% of 16- and 17-year-olds who took the survey and grew up in home with family, guardians, or foster parents said that a family member was violent towards them because they were trans, and 8% were kicked out because they were trans.
Those numbers are slightly better than for the adults, but many of the adults who took the survey could have been 16 or 17 just a year or two ago, too, and the difference in percentages isn’t exactly huge.
34% of respondents were experiencing poverty. Over A THIRD. 18% were unemployed. 11% said they were fired, forced to resign, lost a job, or were forced to resign due to being trans. THIRTY PERCENT had experienced homelessness at some point.
When we tell you trans people lose our jobs, when some feel forced into sex work because they have no other options, when we tell you trans people have no money, this is what we’re talking about. Basically A THIRD OF US have been through this.
In the prior year, 4% had been denied access to a public bathroom and 6% had been verbally harassed, physically attacked, or experienced unwanted sexual contact in public bathrooms.
Compare that 6% with the amount of assaults cis legislators claim trans women make in bathrooms (0%) and you can empirically see they’re fighting a made-up problem to drum up bigoted support, instead of protecting the people who are actually assaulted in there.
Here’s an article about how entirely fictional the entire “bathroom debate” is.
9% said they were denied treatment or service in the past year due to being trans. 30% said they were verbally harassed in the last 12 months because of their gender identity or expression. 39% said that they were harassed online.
3% said that they were physically attacked in the last 12 months because of their gender identity or expression. Keep in mind those stats are for the year prior to filling out the survey, and things change.
When I filled out the survey, I reported that I’d not been verbally harassed in the year prior. But I was in the year following, when I ran into a horrible bigot on my way to one of the WGA strike pickets. It was horrible.
A tweet I made at 9:28 am on July 31, 2023 that reads: going to the WGA picket at Universal and just experienced a horrid, really loud, vocal bout of transphobia from someone passing by (not part of the picket). Super start to the day. Love to be hated for existing.
I talked about the (otherwise largely positive) experience of being out on those strike lines in the summer of 2023 in the trans tuesday on PROACTIVE ALLYSHIP.
70% said they’d feel varying degrees of “uncomfortable” asking police for help (count me among them), and 62% said that was because of being trans (again, count me among them).
Trans Equality has a paper on, in their words, the “epidemic of anti-trans violence” trans people experience at the hands of police. You should maybe give it a read if those numbers were surprising to you.
48% said none of their identification (driver’s license, birth certificate, passport) had the name they wanted on it, and 20% said they only had the name they wanted on at least one ID. only a third had the name they wanted on all identification.
59% said none of their ID had the gender they wanted! 23% said only some ID had the gender they wanted (which means some of their ID has the right gender, and some has the wrong one, and just imagine what that’s like).
Almost HALF of us have ZERO identification with our true names on it, and even more have the wrong gender. Cis folks, just try to imagine for a second what it’d be like to go through life with NO identification that actually matched who you are.
Because if you think it’s not a problem…22% of all respondents reported being verbally harassed, assaulted, asked to leave, or were denied services when they showed an ID with a name or gender that didn’t match what people expected to see.
Having the wrong ID, when you HAVE to show it, FORCEFULLY OUTS YOU to whoever is looking at it. And that opens you up to all kinds of problems.
80% of adults and 60% of 16- and 17-year-olds who were out or were simply PERCEIVED as trans experienced mistreatment in school. That includes: verbal harassment, physical attacks, online bullying, not being allowed to dress in the clothes they want… teachers or staff refusing to use chosen names or pronouns, or being denied the use of restrooms or locker rooms matching their gender identity. Again, the propaganda war being waged on trans kids is having real consequences. We need representatives who will fight it.
47% thought about moving to another state because their state government considered or passed laws that target transgender people for unequal treatment (such as banning access to bathrooms, health care, or sports). 5% had actually moved.
The top 10 states trans people left due to discriminatory laws were Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Sadly I think there’s no surprises there.
That’s the end of the Early Insights from the 2022 US Trans Survey. I hope it’s given you a window, with proof, into the kinds of things trans people are dealing with and begging cis folks to help fix.
These results are pretty sobering, but give us the kind of data we need to push for policy changes and fight for equal rights for trans people. Trans rights are human rights. But we CANNOT get them IF CIS PEOPLE DON’T MAKE IT HAPPEN.
Cis people who live in those top ten worst states, or who are appalled by what you see in this report… what are YOU doing to make it better for trans people?
There aren’t enough trans people to stop these laws on our own. We cannot affect political change on our own, there aren’t enough of us. We’re too small a part of the population.
WE NEED YOU OR NOTHING WILL EVER CHANGE.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com