More than 3% of youth aged 13 to 17 now think they are transgender, a new report released Wednesday found.
A whopping 724,000 kids over the age of 13 in the United States and 2.1 million adults claim to be transgender, according to a new report from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. The numbers amount to 3.3% of children and 0.8% of adults.
Younger people are still far more likely to claim a transgender identity than older adults, the Institute reported, with 76% of those over 13 who claim the identity under the age of 35. Despite making up only 8% of the overall population, 13 to 17-year-olds make up 25% of those claiming to be transgender.
Some studies have found that an increasing number of people identifying as transgender — especially young girls — could be due to social contagion. One 2023 study found that more than half of teen girls who claim to be transgender had friends who also claimed to be transgender, and that teens of both sexes were more likely to claim a transgender identity when they have friends who are also transgender.
