Few transgender minors receive gender-affirming drugs, study finds: Injections

Cross-sex hormones, including testosterone, are part of a gender-affirming treatment that has been banned in half of the states.

Rory Doyle for The Washington Post//Getty Images

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Rory Doyle for The Washington Post//Getty Images

How Many Transgender Teens in the U.S. Receive Sex-Reassignment Health Care? According to the reviewed research paper published on Monday in JAMA Pediatricsthe answer is very, very little.

It’s a key piece of data as Republican lawmakers in Congress and across the country continue to target transgender youth in contexts ranging from sports to bathrooms to doctors’ offices. In a legislative sprint Over the past few years, half of US states have banned gender-specific care. Some of these laws have been blocked in court, and one such court case was just arguing at the US Supreme Court in December.

The help in question includes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone therapy, drugs that help transgender teens develop characteristics that match their gender identity. The use of these treatments is supported by major American medical groups, including American Academy of Pediatrics.

“It’s important to put the numbers to the debate that’s going on right now,” he says Landon Hughesresearch fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. “There haven’t been any peer-reviewed studies looking at hormone and puberty blocker use among youth in the US, so we wanted to fill that gap.”

Hughes and colleagues at Harvard and Folx Health, an LGBTQ virtual health company, used a dataset of private insurance claims from 2018 to 2022 that included more than 5 million teens.

“The total number of young people who had any diagnosis of gender dysphoria was less than 18,000,” Hughes explains. “Among these people, there were fewer than 1,000 (young people) who received puberty blockers and fewer than 2,000 who ever had access to hormones.”

In other words, the study found that less than 0.1% of privately insured teens in the US are transgender and receiving gender-specific medications.

AND the latest mental health research from the CDC found a much higher percentage — 3% of high school students identified as transgender. It is noted that not all transgender people seek medical diagnosis or treatment related to their identity Lindsay Dawsondirector of LGBTQ health policy at the KFF research organization. “It’s much more common to change your hair style, change your clothing style, use a different name,” she says, pointing to KFF research.

Dawson, who was not involved in the study, said the study was notable for its large sample size. “This echoes past work that has found that gender-affirming health care, including puberty blockers and hormone treatment, is relatively rare among all transgender and non-binary people, but especially among adolescents,” she says.

Hughes says the study puts the political focus on this group into perspective. in last electionAccording to a report AdImpact shared with NPR, Republicans spent more than $222 million on anti-LGBTQ ads.

“It’s a very, very small number of people who have managed to consume all the oxygen in our political discourse in the last few months,” Hughes notes.

The American Principles Project, a conservative political advocacy group that has opposed transgender policies for years, is likely to push for a ban on care for gender-affirming minors under the Trump administration, John Schweppe, the organization’s policy director told NPR in November.

“We’ve polled it and we’re pretty sure the American people agree,” says Schweppe.