News Brief

Monday January 6, 2025 9:56 am

As conservative lawmakers continue to focus on transgender youth , a research letter published in JAMA Pediatrics found that less than 0.1% of American transgender teenagers who have private health insurance receive medicines related to gender, according to NPR. 

These medicines include puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone therapies, among others that help transgender people develop more attributes in keeping with their identity. 

“It’s important to put numbers to the debates that are currently happening,” Landon Hughes, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, who co-authored the research, told NPR. “There weren’t any peer reviewed studies that were looking at the rate of hormone use and puberty blocker use among youth in the U.S., and so we wanted to fill that void.”

The researchers looked at data from private insurance claims spanning 2018 to 2022. 

Five million adolescents were included in the data set, less than 18,000 of whom had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Of that 18,000, Hughes told NPR that less than 1,000 accessed puberty blockers and less than 2,000 had access to hormone therapies. 

Meanwhile, according to a CDC survey, 3% of American high school students identify as transgender. 

“It echoes past work that has found that gender-affirming medical care, including puberty blockers and hormone treatment, is relatively rare among all trans and nonbinary people, but especially so among adolescents,” Lindsey Dawson, the director of LGBTQ health policy at the research organization KFF told NPR.

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