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Kentucky Lantern

By Sarah Ladd

This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. 

When transgender Americans experience discrimination — like being harassed or denied equal services and medical care — they’re more likely to have poor mental health, a new report shows.

“Health and Wellbeing: Findings from the 2022 US Trans Survey,” released by the Advocates for Trans Equality Education Fund on Wednesday, includes insights from surveying 84,170 trans adults across the United States.

The report doesn’t break down results by state, but the organization said that transgender Americans in all states and Washington D.C. participated in the survey in 2022. Questions covered general health and access to health care, transition related care, sexual and reproductive health, mental health, life satisfaction and happiness and substance use.

Ankit Rastogi, the director of research at Advocates for Trans Equality, said during a Tuesday press conference that the organization conducts the survey because “the best way to learn about trans people is to ask trans people.”

“We need social acceptance and family support and the ability to live our lives authentically in public safely,” Rastogi said. “These are all means to create better health and well-being among trans people.”

Among other findings, the report shows:

• Trans people who have supportive family members reported lower rates of suicidality than those without support. Among those with no victimization, 31% reported considering  suicide in the past year, lower than the 50% for those who were verbally harassed, 53% for those who were denied equal treatment and 63% for those who were physically assaulted.
• Older Americans surveyed reported better health than younger respondents with 78% of those 65 and older vs. 60% of 18-24-year-olds rating their health as good or better.
• About 84% wanted gender-affirming care and about 60% received it.
• Trust in health care providers was higher in 2022 than in 2015, when the organization last conducted the survey, with half of respondents saying all their providers knew they were transgender compared to 40% in 2015. Many health care providers were supportive of their trans patients. early 3 in 4 (73%) respondents who disclosed their transgender status to their provider reported they felt treated with respect by at least one provider — higher than the 62% in 2015.
• Despite greater trust in medical  providers, trans individuals still put off seeing a health care provider because they fear they’ll be disrespected. The survey shows this is true for 32% of trans men and 20% of trans women.
• The fear of mistreatment isn’t unwarranted. The survey shows 47% of gender non-conforming Americans had negative experiences with health care providers in the 12 months leading up to their survey.

Olivia Hunt, the organization’s director of federal policy, said the survey results can offer policy makers and the general public a better understanding of what it means to be a transgender person in America.

“Over the past decade, the idea of trans people has become something that’s more and more prominent in the media and popular consciousness,” Hunt said during the Tuesday press conference. “But unfortunately, to most people, including those lawmakers and policymakers that I and my team meet with so often, trans people ourselves are just an abstract idea, an idea that’s based on stereotypes and assumptions and often incredibly inaccurate pop culture representations of trans people.”

Involvement in advocacy, Hunt said, will help make “trans people real” rather than a composite of a stereotypical character.

And, she said, “having real, concrete and rigorous data about the realities of trans people’s day to day lives” helps to dispel misinformation.

“Trans people live all around the country. We’re not just a community that exists in some sort of abstract ‘somewhere else.’ We’re in every state and territory, in towns and cities from coast to coast, and almost certainly in every single congressional district,” Hunt said. “That’s something that I think is still not really there in the public consciousness.”