Traditional estimates project that roughly 2% of teenagers — and the population as a whole — identify as gender-diverse, but a new study in Pittsburgh places that number at least five times higher, saying that nearly 10% of teens admit to having some form of nontraditional gender identity. If the stats from this new study hold true across the nation, then the number of individuals who consider themselves transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, or who identify outside traditional gender norms could be vastly higher than previously thought.
The newly released data comes from a study of 3,168 high school students conducted in Pittsburgh by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Seattle Children’s Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the UCLA School of Medicine.
Dan Avery of NBC News reported on the study, where researchers “found that nearly 1 in 10 students in over a dozen public high schools identified as gender-diverse — five times the current national estimates.”
