The Religiosity of Non-Gender Conforming Americans

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 January 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 they want to ‘push transgender troops out of the military.’

It seems like I get asked about the trans issue nearly every day by reporters, my students, and folks in my replies on social media. I readily admit, at this present time, 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.

Here’s my goal here - just try 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 non gender conforming 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, non-binary, 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 non gender conforming community. In 2021, 1% of all respondents indicated that their gender was non-binary and another .3% said that they were “other” for this question. In real numbers, the CES polled 25,700 folks in 2021 - 252 said that they were non-binary and 77 said that they were ‘other.’ Remember, a typical poll has about 1,000 people. You would be lucky if you captured 15 non-male/non-female folks in a data collection like that.

The non-binary 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%.

In the rest of this analysis, I am just going to combine these three surveys together. That gives me a total population of 110,200 and a total non-binary/other sample of 1,146. More than enough to have some real statistical confidence.

Of course, the propensity to identify as something other than male or female is related to age - let me visualize that. This is a birth year analysis of the sample.

Among people born between 1925 and 1970, there are very few folks who ID as non-binary or other. It’s a quarter of a percent. The trend line doesn’t begin to rise until we get to people who were born in the late 1970s and then it clearly begins to climb. When looking at people born in the early 1980s, it’s just about 1% then it rises above 2% among folks born in the early 1990s. In this sample, among people born after the year 2000, at least 4% of them describe their current gender as non-binary/other.

What does this look like when I break down into simple generations?

There are very, very few non-gender conforming folks in the Silent Generation or among the Baby Boomers. It’s less than 1 in 300 among those two generations. And it doesn’t increase that much for Generation X, either - just .4%. The big jump, of course, occurs among Millennials. Among folks born between 1980 and 1995, 1.4% say that their current gender is not male or female. For Generation Z it rises to 3.2%. Let me reiterate this point, though - this is not the share of Gen Z that is part of the transgender community. This is only the proportion who say they are non-binary or other when asked about their gender. People who have transitioned would likely be missed in large numbers by this approach.

Let’s pivot now to the question of religion. Here’s the religious composition of those who identify as male or female compared to folks who ID as non-binary/other.

Among the non-binary crowd, only 13% say they are Protestants. That’s nearly 20 points lower than the rest of the sample. Additionally, only 7% are Catholic, compared to 18% of the male/female sample. Put simply, about half of the male/female sample identifies as Protestant or Catholic, compared to just 20% of the non-binary/other sample. There are very few Christians among the non-gender conforming community. Of course, the non-religious percentages are much higher among the latter group. In this sample, about 60% of the non-binary/other group said they were atheist/agnostic/nothing in particular. It was just 35% of the male/female sample.

The other big disparity is the ‘something else’ option. In the survey, this shows up after folks are given 11 other response options that include things like Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim. When they choose this option, they are given a text box in which to describe their current religion. I have always seen this as the “I don’t want to be easily labeled” choice. It would logically follow that people who don’t want to be put in the standard male/female categories would also bristle at being placed in a traditional religious category.

What about religious attendance, though?

Among the non-binary/other sample, 57% said that they never attend religious services - that’s 23 points higher than the male/female part of the sample. Throw in the ‘seldom’ option and nearly 80% of the non-gender conforming folks go to church less than once a year. That’s about 25 points higher than the rest of the sample. What about the high attending categories? For the male/female sample, one quarter are in church each week. For the non-binary sample, it’s less than 10%. For those wondering, in a total sample of over 110,000 folks, the CES managed to locate 98 non-gender conforming people who are weekly religious attenders.

If I haven’t made this clear yet - the non gender conforming crowd is significantly less religious than those who say that they are male or female.

But let me finish this analysis by showing you the results of me toying around with regression in trying to predict the likelihood of someone identifying as non-binary or other.

This is an interaction model that controls for a variety of factors including education, income, religious attendance, and religious affiliation. Easily the most predictive factor that I could find was political ideology. Look at the left side of the graph - this is the youngest part of the sample. Among 20 year old liberals, this model predicts that over 6% of them will identify as non-binary or other. The lines for the moderates and conservatives are statistically the same - a bit less than 2% would ID as non-gender conforming.

For older liberals, they are much less likely to be non-binary compared to younger ones. When looking at just 40 year olds, about 2.5% of liberals are non-gender conforming and then when looking at those over the age of 50, the differences between liberals, moderates and conservatives is not substantively large.

From a purely academic perspective, I want to understand the broad parameters of this movement. This is obviously an incomplete picture based on the question wording. But it’s a first attempt that clearly establishes the fact that non-binary folks are much less religious than the male/female. I hope to model what good social science looks like in the social media age. A dispassionate attempt to just ‘get the numbers right.’ The world has too many hot takers. We need more impartial referees.

Code for this post can be found here.

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