The Dallas Morning News wants to hear from transgender Texans.
This legislative session, Texas lawmakers have introduced over 80 bills centered on LGBTQ issues. Many of those bills focus on transgender people, seeking to bar teachers from calling a transgender student by their chosen name or to ban gender-affirming care for transgender adults.
If you’re a transgender Texan, we want to know how bills, policies and rhetoric affecting your community have impacted you, if they have. Our brief survey focuses on two categories: your relationship with Texas and mental health.
We chose those categories based on early national data on transgender adults. A study released this month by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found 48% of the transgender people they surveyed either had or were considering moving to a place they perceived as more ive of transgender people. The Williams Institute focuses on law and public policy affecting LGBTQ people.
A Data for Progress survey released in March found 85% of the transgender adults they surveyed said recent LGBTQ-related policies and rhetoric had negatively impacted their mental health. Fifty-two percent said they had considered moving out of their community or state as a result of LGBTQ-related legislation.
Texas is home to about 93,000 transgender adults who make up less than 0.5% of the state’s population, according to a 2022 report from the Williams Institute.
Our survey asks whether you plan to stay in Texas, and whether bills, policies and rhetoric affecting the transgender community have affected your mental health. We’ll also ask you to your identity. We won’t be identifying survey respondents by name without their express permission.
We are not scientists, so this won’t be a scientific survey. If 25 out of 50 respondents answer “yes” to a question, we’ll tell you that — but we won’t say that means 50% of transgender Texans responded “yes.”
If you have thoughts or on our coverage of transgender people that you’d like to share with us, please email us at [email protected]. If you’re not transgender, but still want to share your thoughts with us, please do.
