The Human Rights Campaign estimates that 25.6 million LGBTQ+ adults live in the United States, with 2.34% of all US adults identifying as transgender or non-binary. That is double what previous estimates had suggested. The figure comes from analysis of data collected from more than 2.2 million people through the US Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey, making it by some distance the most robust count ever attempted.

That number is easy to read and move straight past the people inside it. Double the estimate is not a rounding correction. It means that every law passed to exclude trans people from healthcare, every ban on gender-affirming care for young people, every policy designed to remove trans people from public life, has been doing all of that to twice as many people as the debate acknowledged. The political conversation has been built on a significant undercount, and that undercount has never been neutral. When you make a group smaller on paper, you make it easier to treat their needs as marginal.

Where the previous numbers went wrong

The gap between this study and earlier estimates comes down, in large part, to methodology. Gallup's widely cited figure of around 9% for the broader LGBTQ+ adult population was based on telephone surveys of roughly 13,000 people. Phone surveys have a well-documented problem with socially sensitive questions: people are less likely to disclose something that feels risky when another human being is on the line. The HRC's approach, using an online survey administered by the Census Bureau with a sample more than 160 times larger, created the kind of privacy that makes honest answers easier.

This is not a flaw unique to Gallup; it is a structural problem with how this population has always been counted. And it matters, because policies get shaped around the numbers that exist, not the reality that does not yet have a number attached to it.

Texas, and what "everywhere" actually means

The HRC's president, Kelley Robinson, said something in her statement that I think deserves to be read plainly: "LGBTQ+ Americans are everywhere." In Texas alone, the estimated LGBTQ+ adult population is 2.24 million people, more than 12% of all adults in the state. Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston both appear in the top fifteen most populous metros for LGBTQ+ people. Thirty-nine states have an LGBTQ+ adult population greater than 10%.

I think about what it means to live in Texas right now, to be one of those 2.24 million people, and to watch your state treat your existence as a problem to be legislated away. The numbers do not make discrimination more acceptable; if anything, they make the scale of the harm clearer.

The data that will not exist

Here is the part that troubles me most. This study used data collected between 2021 and 2024, when questions about sexual orientation and gender identity were included in the Household Pulse Survey. When the Trump administration took office in 2025, those questions were removed, along with similar questions from more than 350 other federal data collection surveys, according to the Williams Institute.

Tari Hanneman, the HRC Foundation's senior director of research and education, described this as introducing "significant gaps" in the country's understanding of itself. That is precise and careful language for something that is, in practice, a deliberate act of statistical erasure. You cannot advocate for a community's needs if you cannot demonstrate the community's size. You cannot challenge exclusionary policies if the data that would show who is being excluded has been quietly removed from the instrument. It will likely be years before another study can be conducted at this scale.

Counting people is not a neutral act, and neither is refusing to count them.

What becoming visible again actually means

There is something that feels significant about a study like this landing in this particular moment. Trans people have spent years being told their numbers are small, their concerns are niche, their presence is negligible. The HRC's findings say otherwise. 2.34% of US adults is not a rounding error. It is more than seven million people, each with a life, a family, a body, a future, a stake in whether the country they live in decides to treat them with basic dignity.

Visibility is not enough on its own. But invisibility has always been weaponised, used to justify inaction, to dismiss community, to pretend that the harm being done is limited in scale. These numbers make that pretence harder to sustain. They put a floor under the conversation that was not there before, and they do it with methodology that is genuinely hard to dismiss.

The HRC has published its methodology and full analysis publicly. That transparency is itself worth noting: this is not a figure produced to win an argument; it is an estimate built carefully, from an enormous sample, with the working shown. The honest acknowledgement that there is no "definitive count" of any stigmatised population is part of what makes the rest of it credible.

Twenty-five million people. Twice the number the conversation assumed. I hope the people who write the laws, design the policies, and run the campaigns are paying attention.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.