Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government
identified as transgender and that another 2.2% of students said they were questioning their gender identity. Students who identify as transgender or question their gender identity face higher rates of bullying, depression, suicide attempts, and isolation than their peers, according to the survey.This is the first nationwide report tallying the number of transgender teenagers, but previous reports estimated the number to be much lower.
“If the age trend holds, we would imagine as time goes on, that younger age group might have more youth identifying as trans,”she said. However, a continued increase in the number of transgender-identifying children is difficult to predict as the CDC’s study is the first of its kind. Persistent feelings of hopelessness and sadness in the past 12 months affected 71.9% of trans-identifying students, and 69.9% of gender-questioning students shared these feelings of hopelessness. Comparatively, 50.5% of females and 26% of males reported similar feelings over the course of 12 months.
“We have 5% of young people in the country who, because of the way they identify around their gender, are stigmatized, bullied, made to feel unsafe, feel disconnected at school and consequently have poorer mental health and higher risk for suicide than their cisgender peers,” said Kathleen Ethier, the director of CDC’s adolescent and school health division. “That’s just heartbreaking.”