Share as much of the information below as you can with your group, and use it to respond to general questions as they come up in the sessions.

It seems that every time you turn on the news, it’s filled with stories about transgender and nonbinary people. And most of those stories center the views of people who are cisgender—that is, who are not trans or nonbinary—and who have no close relationships with transgender or nonbinary people. And yet there are about 1.6 million transgender and nonbinary people in the United States. Here are some other facts about gender-expansive people, based on research from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

NOTE: The facts that follow use the term "identify as transgender." Be advised, and share with your group: “Identify as,” in this demographic information, does not necessarily tell us who people are. And, we must not let it suggest that trans identity is a choice! “Identify as” only tells us how people check boxes on forms. Many transgender and nonbinary people do not disclose their identity to Census or other researchers. For this reason, demographic reports likely underestimate true numbers.

• Over 1.6 million people identify as transgender in the United States. That’s about 0.6% of the total population.
• Of US adults, 0.5% (about 1.3 million) identify as transgender. Among youth ages 13 to 17, 1.4% (about 300,000) identify as transgender.
• Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) are gender nonconforming.
• Transgender people are younger on average than the overall US population. Youth ages 13 to 17 are almost five times more likely to identify as transgender than are adults ages 65 or older.
• The racial/ethnic distribution of youth and adults who identify as transgender appears generally like the US population, though research has found that transgender youth and adults are more likely to identify as Black, Indigenous, or biracial than white.

Those telling the stories of transgender people often frame their lives as out of the ordinary. It is true that each story of transformation and change is extraordinary, but each is also simply the story of a person living their life, sharing radical love, and expanding our understanding of the vast diversity of humankind. This year’s Common Read invites the reader and study groups to learn about transgender people and their lives from thirty-five people who fall somewhere on the spectrum of our gender diversity, and from their families.

The word transgender comes from the prefix trans, which means “through” or “across,” and gender, which is the fact or condition of belonging to or identifying as having a connection to specific cultural ideas of what it means to be male or female. There have always been some who transcended those constructed ideas of what men are or what women can do, and there have always been some who were assigned a male or female role but lived authentic lives outside of that label. Even though the media frames hormone therapy and gender affirmation surgery as central to transgender experiences, people can be transgender without ever seeking medical intervention.

In truth, even though the root “trans” may seem to imply movement from one place to another, people who come out in their authentic identity are affirming and revealing to the world who they have always been. Sarah McBride, who shares her story in the book, said in a recent interview,“I’ve always been Sarah. My gender identity has always existed. I’ve always been a woman. Gay people aren’t straight before they come out as gay, and transgender people are who they are before they come out and transition.”

There have always been people who expanded gender beyond the male/female binary. In ancient Greece and Asia Minor, priests of the deities Cybele and Attis were assigned male at birth but wore feminine clothes and often opted to castrate themselves. The first convert noted in the New Testament (Acts 8:27–39) was an Ethiopian eunuch, an earlier term for a person of transgender experience. According to Jewish and Roman scholars, men became eunuchs either through their own choice or through conscription.

In the fifth century in Lebanon, a person named Marina, known as a woman, changed his name to Marinos and entered a male monastery. He was so accepted as a man by his peers that he was falsely accused of fathering a child, whom he then adopted and raised as his own son. In 1577, King Henry III of France dressed in women’s clothing and insisted on being addressed as Her Majesty.

In many places throughout the world, a wide variety of transgender communities have existed for thousands of years. These include the Kathoey and Hijra communities in Southeast Asia, the five gender roles traditionally recognized by the Sulawesi tribes of Africa, the Khanith groups on the Arabian Peninsula, the Fa'afafine of Samoa and other island nations, and the Zuni Ihamana in North America. Indeed, when the first Europeans arrived in the Americas, they encountered multiple communities that not only included gender-expansive people but centered and honored them as spiritual leaders with a closer connection to the spirit world or to a divine creator. The first nonbinary Euro-American person in the United States is recorded in the same year we became a nation: 1776. The Public Universal Friend was a twenty-three-year-old Quaker who, dying of disease that fall, was reanimated as a genderless teacher in the likeness of a genderless god and went on to live a genderless life, preaching throughout the Northeast.

While the modern news seems to focus on the lives of transgender women, until the past few decades it was transgender men who were more visible. This is because, under the Victorian era’s Cult of Domesticity, women lived private lives and men lived in public, so the stories of those living as men were more likely to be preserved. During the Civil War and the era of western expansion, over two hundred people who had been assigned female at birth enlisted as male soldiers. Many of them lived the remainder of their lives as male, even after being discharged from the military.

The stories in this book include descriptions of hard times and struggles, but ultimately are stories of what it means to thrive as a human, what it means to reach a place of euphoria that comes with true authenticity.

Jazz Jennings, who cowrote the foreword to the book with her mom Jeanette, responded to a media question about being transgender a few years ago by noting that “being transgender is not just a medical transition. It’s discovering who you are, living your life authentically, loving yourself, and spreading that love towards other people, and accepting one another no matter the difference.” Actor Elliott Page noted of his own experiences in coming out, “I can’t begin to express how remarkable it feels to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self.”

The stories shared in the pages of this UU Common Read are lessons for each of us on what that type of authenticity looks like, and how we can each seek it in our own lives.