Do you know someone who is transgender? If not, you might be part of a shrinking majority of Americans who do not personally know someone who identifies as trans.
According to a Pew Research Center study published Tuesday, 42% of Americans polled said they know someone who is transgender, a figure that rose five percentage points over the past four years. Additionally, 26% said they know someone who prefers to use gender neutral pronouns such as they and them, up eight percentage points since 2017.
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Transgender individuals are people “whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth,” explained GLAAD.
Overall, the Pew study found that while there is a growing share of adults who know transgender people, Americans’ comfort level with referring to individuals by their preferred pronouns has remained stagnant. Around 48 percent of Americans said they would be somewhat uncomfortable using gender-neutral pronouns and 56 percent believe that gender is determined by the sex assigned to someone at birth.
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“In recent years, several prominent Americans have come out as transgender or gender nonbinary,” said the Pew study. “Governments at both the federal and state levels also have moved toward putting more legal protections in place for transgender people and formally recognizing nonbinary identities. At the same time, a record number of state-level bills have sought to limit definitions of gender to the sex people are assigned at birth.”
When broken down into different age categories, responses showed that more people under 30 (53 percent) said they knew more transgender individuals and that gender identity could differ from sex assigned at birth (56 percent).
Different views on transgender issues caused backlash against 55-year-old “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling by her Millennial fans last year, according to the Atlantic.
According to Pew, apart from younger adults, Democrats and those with more education are generally more likely to report knowing a transgender person or someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns.