Transgender

Transgender describes people whose gender differs from the sex recorded for them at birth. The important thing about the word is grammatical: it is an adjective, and it names a relationship rather than a gender. "Transgender" is not itself an answer to "what is your gender?" — a trans woman's gender is woman; trans is how she got there relative to what was written down. That distinction explains most of the confusion the term attracts.

Definition & scope

As an umbrella, transgender covers anyone for whom the assignment and the identity diverge: trans women, trans men, and a large share of non-binary people. It says nothing about medical treatment, legal status, appearance, or how long someone has known. Those are separate questions, and the umbrella deliberately does not require any of them.

It is also independent of sexual orientation. Gender is who a person is; orientation is who they are drawn to. A trans man may be gay, straight, bisexual or asexual, exactly as a cis man may be — the two axes vary freely, and the orientations vertical catalogues the second one separately for that reason.

The complement is cisgender, coined precisely so that "not transgender" would have a name of its own rather than being the unmarked default.

History & origins

The vocabulary settled late, long after the people it describes.

• 1965: the psychiatrist John Oliven used transgenderism in Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, arguing that the then-current transsexualism misleadingly foregrounded sex rather than gender.
• 1970s–1980s: activists including Virginia Prince circulated transgenderal and transgenderist for people living in a gender other than the one assigned without seeking surgery — a deliberately intermediate category at the time.
• 1990s: the modern umbrella sense consolidated, absorbing the earlier narrow usages. Transsexual, the older clinical word, receded as a general term while remaining in use by some people who prefer it.
• 2010s–2020s: population surveys began asking directly, which is what turned the category from an estimate into a measurement.

In practice

Because the term is an umbrella, the population under it is heterogeneous in almost every respect that matters. The 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, with 92,329 respondents, remains the largest dataset on the group's own account of itself; it records wide variation in transition steps taken, documents held, and terminology preferred. A third of respondents also described themselves as gender nonconforming, which is a separate axis again.

What is common across the group is administrative friction — identity documents, healthcare access, and the gap between the two — rather than any shared experience of gender itself.

Psychology

The clinical framing has moved decisively over three decades, and the direction of travel is one-way: away from treating a trans identity as the disorder.

The DSM-5 replaced gender identity disorder with gender dysphoria, relocating the diagnosis from who a person is to the distress some people experience — so that a trans person without distress has no diagnosis at all. The ICD-11 went further in 2019, removing the category from its mental-disorders chapter entirely and re-siting it as gender incongruence under conditions related to sexual health, explicitly to preserve access to care without pathologising identity.

No consensus aetiology exists, and the honest summary is that none is required: the clinical literature has largely stopped asking what causes a trans identity for the same reason it stopped asking what causes a gay one.

Prevalence & culture

How common is being transgender?

Two independent measurements converge closely. Gallup's 2024 release puts transgender identification at 1.3% of US adults; its 2025 survey of more than 13,000 adults gives the same quantity as a range, transgender adults being 12% of the 9% who identify as LGBTQ+ overall — between 1% and 2% of all adults. The Williams Institute's August 2025 update, which pools population-based health surveys, estimates 2.8 million people aged 13 and over — around 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%.

The age gradient is the most striking feature of the data and the most misread. The Williams Institute finds transgender identification at 2.7% among 18–24-year-olds against 0.8% of adults overall, and 3.3% among 13–17-year-olds. Gallup reports the same shape for LGBTQ+ identification as a whole — 23% of adults under 30 against 3% or less among the over-50s — though it does not break transgender identification out by generation. Whether this reflects a change in the underlying population or in who is willing and able to say so is not settled by the numbers themselves, though the pattern — a steep age gradient appearing as soon as a stigmatised identity becomes safer to disclose — is the same one observed for left-handedness and for sexual orientation before it.

Pew's 2022 survey adds the reception side: a substantial and growing share of US adults report personally knowing someone who is transgender, which is historically the strongest single predictor of attitudes toward any minority group.