Less than 0.1% of teenagers with private insurance in the United States are receiving gender-related medicines, according to first-of-its-kind research from Harvard School of Public Health.
The laws passed by Republican legislatures in half the U.S. states and the stream of anti-trans publicity generated by groups like Focus on the Family target only 18,000 American youth who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria — at most — and, more practically, fewer than 2,000 youth who ever have had access to hormones.
“It’s important to put numbers to the debates that are currently happening,” Landon Hughes, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard School of Public Health told NPR’s Morning Edition. “There weren’t any peer-reviewed studies that were looking at the rate of hormone use and puberty blocker use among youth in the U.S., and so we wanted to fill that void.”
“The politicization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth has been driven by a narrative that millions of children are using hormones.”
Hughes and his colleagues at Harvard and Folx Health analyzed a data set of private insurance claims from 2018 to 2022 that included more than 5 million adolescents.
“The total number of youth who had any diagnosis of gender dysphoria was less than 18,000,” Hughes explains. “Among those folks, there were less than 1,000 (youth) that accessed puberty blockers and less than 2,000 that ever had access to hormones.”
The research was reported Jan. 6 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.
Previous research by the Williams Institute at UCLA found about 1.6 million Americans ages 13 and older identify as transgender. That’s 0.6% of the population. When narrowed to youth ages 13 to 17, that number drops to 300,000, representing 1.4% of that age-group population.
Landon D Hughes
But not all adults and not all youth who identify as transgender require medical intervention, the JAMA Pediatrics letter explains.
Previous research reported by JAMA found gender-affirming surgical procedures are rare among adolescents — despite claims by politicians such as President-elect Donald Trump that kids are getting surgery while at school.
The new research sought to add to that knowledge by examining the frequency of use of puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone therapy. For some youth who identify as transgender, doctors prescribe such noninvasive therapies to allow the child to reach age 18 or older before making body-altering decisions. Cases of minors receiving any kind of gender-affirming surgical procedures are virtually nonexistent.
Researchers said their use of data from adolescents with private medical insurance could have skewed the numbers higher than what would be found in the general population that includes those without private insurance. Because of the cost of hormone therapy, it is less frequently accessed by the uninsured.
“These rates may be the highest estimates, with lower rates expected among those with less-comprehensive private insurance, Medicaid recipients and the uninsured,” the letter explains.
“The politicization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth has been driven by a narrative that millions of children are using hormones and that this type of care is too freely given. Our findings reveal that is not the case,” Hughes said in a Harvard news release.
In the most recent election cycle, Republicans spent a reported $222 million on anti-transgender and anti-LGBTQ ads.
Related articles:
What will it take for you to care about transgender people? | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
The transgender obsession | Opinion by Martin Thielen
Focus on the Family affiliate is the unifying force behind campaign to restrict transgender rights