Did you hear that 3 percent of American teenagers are transgender, more than tripling (actually quadrupling) previous estimates?
If you got your news from the CNN, CBS, the Associated Press, or even Teen Vogue or Cosmo, you may have. The story is bogus, based on abuse of survey data, and the scholars who know the matter best say so. The 3 percent figure “include[s] those who do not identify as transgender,” one researcher explained.
It’s a case study in how media sloppiness about science can create a false narrative that then becomes conventional wisdom.
This episode starts with a new study out of Minnesota estimating three percent of high school students identify as transgender or gender nonconforming. The Associated Press reported on the study on Monday, comparing the Minnesota study’s three percent figure to the findings of a 2017 UCLA study which estimated that 0.7 percent of 13-to-17 year olds identified as transgender. AP stated that the new study indicated “[f]ar more U.S. teens than previously thought are transgender or identify themselves using other nontraditional gender terms.”
Many outlets picked up and ran the AP story, and even more publications followed up with their own reports, parroting the comparison with the UCLA study.
Take, for instance, CNN’s report, which summarized the new research and concluded, “That’s a big jump from the UCLA study, which was published in January 2017 and estimated that 0.7% of American teens ages 13-17 identify as transgender.”
Here’s what CBS kept in their rewrite of the AP study: “Although the study only included teens in two grades, the rates are higher than a UCLA study released last year estimating that 0.7 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 are transgender, or about 150,000 kids.”
And here’s Teen Vogue: “The researchers analyzed surveys taken in 2016 by nearly 81,000 teens in Minnesota. Of them, nearly 2,200 said they identified as transgender or gender non-conforming. This is a greater percentage than in other studies: A 2017 UCLA study estimated that 0.7% of people ages 13-17 identified as transgender.”
You’ll find similar conclusions drawn in Bustle, the Advocate, NewNowNext, and Cosmopolitan.
This media narrative leads readers to conclude the latest research suggests more and more teenagers are identifying as transgender every year. That may well be true, but it’s not supported by a comparison of the two studies, because they’re not measuring on the same terms.
As I noted Tuesday, the three percent figure includes students who identified both as transgender and as “gender nonconforming.” The study’s “gender-nonconforming” category was broad, including those who consider themselves “genderqueer,” “genderfluid,” or “unsure about their gender identity.” UCLA’s 0.7 percent figure includes only those who identified as “transgender,” meaning that it would necessarily be a smaller number.
The source of this faulty comparison may be pediatrician Daniel Shumer whose companion paper to the Minnesota study cites the 2017 research in claiming the new findings “[support] recent findings that reveal that previous estimates of the size of the TGNC population have been underestimated by orders of magnitude.”
Jody Herman, a scholar of public policy at UCLA Law’s Williams Institute, is one of the authors of the 2017 study. In a Wednesday email response to my queries, Herman wrote, “Daniel Shumer’s statement assumes these estimates are comparable, but they are not. Each of the studies he cites has measured gender identity differently. The Minnesota Student Survey used a broader definition than prior studies in that they also include those who do not identify as transgender.”
“Even though the Minnesota study is not generalizable to the United States, nor comparable to these prior studies,” she said, “it is a valuable contribution to the research for this population, especially since data about this population are rare.”
The narrative most outlets ran with was misleading to readers, based on an unfortunate misinterpretation of the UCLA study that could have been avoided with a brief review of the research.
When you consider how many combined readers consumed the shoddy coverage of this study, clearing up the misinformation is more than a matter of hair-splitting. The conversations swirling around transgender youth issues are serious ones, and deserve accurate media coverage. This is a case study in how easily bad information can make its way to a large media audience.
