Examining The Religiosity Of Gender Nonconforming Americans
(ANALYSIS) One of the primary storylines of Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office was his focus on the issue of transgenderism. It’s an issue that he certainly campaigned on, and within hours of taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, he had signed a number of executive orders related to the issue.
One of those orders said that the federal government would only recognize two genders from this point forward: male and female. This means that the passport office will not issue any documents with the gender listed as “X” going forward. The Trump administration has also made it clear that it wants to “push transgender troops out of the military.”
It seems like I get asked about the transgender issue nearly every day by reporters, my students and folks in my replies on social media. I readily admit that it may be the most caustic and divisive social issue of this era of the culture war.
Just keep it civil in the comments, please. I don’t have any desire to become some type of community policeman.
My goal here is to give you the very best estimates possible about the share of Americans who don’t currently identify as male or female in the United States and then describe the overall religiosity of this group.
Certainly, the issue of gender identity is deeply intertwined with religious convictions, so it makes sense that a lot of gender nonconforming folks would be on the secular end of the religious landscape. But I don’t know if anyone has really tried to make that plain.
So, let’s start with just a simple analysis of the gender question. In 2021, the Cooperative Election Study began asking the gender question with expanded options. It simply asks, “What is your gender?” and there are four options listed: man, woman, nonbinary, and other. This is the share who chose those last two options across the last three available surveys.
(By the way, I know that this question is not capable of fully describing the contours of the transgender movement. If someone was born female, but currently identifies as male, that would not be fully assessed in the way that these questions are worded. They would just say that they are male. All I can show you here are people who did not choose to be gender conforming).
The first thing that you should know is that it is incredibly hard to get an accurate count of a very small subsection of the American population. Trying to figure out how many Hindus there are in the United States using survey data is just about impossible, given that they are likely less than .5% of the public.
That certainly applies to the gender nonconforming community. In 2021, 1% of all respondents indicated that their gender was nonbinary, and another .3% said that they were “other” for this question.
In real numbers, the CES polled 25,700 folks in 2021. Of those, 252 said that they were nonbinary, and 77 said that they were “other.” Remember, a typical poll has about 1,000 people. You would be lucky if you captured 15 nonmale/nonfemale folks in a data collection like that.
The nonbinary and the other percentage did drop in the 2022 survey, which surveyed 60,000 folks. But then it jumped back up again in the 2023 survey to basically the 2021 levels.
It would be statistically inappropriate to look at this survey and make some broad claim about the growth or decline of this gender identity. It’s just inadvisable.
I think the big takeaway for me is that the share of Americans who do not identify as a man or a woman is likely about 1% of the public or maybe just slightly higher. It’s certainly nowhere near 2%.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.