What Does Being Transgender Mean?
Being transgender means that your gender identity doesn’t match your biological sex. “Gender identity” and “biological sex” are separate terms. When we say trans people exist, we aren’t arguing against biology. We’re merely affirming that trans people’s existence is valid.
What Is Gender Dysphoria?
Gender Dysphoria is a mental health diagnosis listed in the DSM-5 where someone experiences distress or discomfort when the gender they personally identify with doesn’t match their assigned sex at birth.
What's the Difference?
While being transgender and having gender dysphoria are sometimes linked, the two are not mutually exclusive. Since only gender dysphoria is listed in the DSM-5 and transgenderism is not, we can conclude that being transgender is not a mental illness and that gender affirming care is a rather necessary treatment for gender dysphoria.
What Is Gender Affirming Care?
Gender affirming care is treatment for gender dysphoria and health care services for transgender people of all ages. These services include things like mental health care, medical care, and social services.
What Is Social Transition?
Social transition allows people of all ages to experiment with themselves before deciding if they wish to medically transition one day or not. Social Transition may look like: using a preferred name or a particular hairstyle, wearing different clothing, or disclosing their gender identity to other people in their lives.
What Is Medical Transition?
People who are transphobic will often fear monger by misrepresenting medical transition for children. The truth is that genital surgery for minors is effectively 0% and chest surgery for minors is extremely rare, typically only seen in older adolescents after long medical review. Plus, the vast majority of trans people never undergo surgery at all. Medical transition may include things like using Puberty Blockers (fully reversible), using Hormone Replacement Therapy (partially reversible), or getting Gender Affirming Surgery.
Hormone Therapy for Children is Rare:
Gender affirming medications are rarely prescribed to U.S. adolescents, with less than 0.1% of U.S. adolescents receiving gender affirming medications and that no patients under 12 received hormones.
Positive Outcomes of Hormone Therapy in Young Pepole:
- Young people who used gender affirming medications were: 60% less likely to be depressed.​
- 73% less likely to have thoughts about self harm or suicide. ​
- People who hadn’t used these medications within 3-6 months of their first appointment had a 2-3 fold increase in depression and suicidal thought.​
- A report by The Conversation
Transphobia Increases the Liklihood of Child Suicide:
Suicide attempt rates among transgender youth increased by as much as 72% in the first year after the adoption of state level anti transgender laws.
- A 2024 study by The Trevor Project
Trans Violence Is a Lie
The Gun Violence Archive found that between 2013 and 2025, only 5 out of 5,748 mass shooters were confirmed to be transgender.
Transgender people are in the small minority of mass shooters while cisgender white males make up 96% of them.
Transgender people aged 16 or older are victimized over four times more than cisgender people.
From 2017 to 2020, transgender people aged 16 or older experienced 51.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons.