Have 41% of transgender people attempted suicide?

Question

In Daniella Carter's TED talk "Walking in your truth as an LGBT youth", she mentioned:

I need it, they need it, we need the love, we need the liberation, we need the support, not only for the 2.5 million homeless LGBT youth but for the 41 percent of transgender people that attempt suicide.

However, she did not provide a source for this assertion. Have 41% of transgender people attempted suicide?

I'm also doubting that 2.5 million homeless LGBT youths number... — Ask About Monica, Feb 17 '20 at 15:33
@AskAboutMonica maybe you could ask a separate question about it? — Robert Columbia, Feb 17 '20 at 15:38
@AskAboutMonica Assume this is a number for the uSA. 300 million people. 60 million “youths”. 5% = 3 million LGBT youths. Over 80% homeless. Doesn’t seem quite right. — gnasher729, Feb 13 '24 at 00:09

score 31 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 15 '20 at 14:07

31

This number seems to come from here:

The prevalence of suicide attempts among respondents to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality, is 41 percent, which vastly exceeds the 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population who report a lifetime suicide attempt, and is also higher than the 10-20 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults who report ever attempting suicide.

Suicide Attempts among Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults

There have been other similar surveys done (which got results varying from 25-43%, as reported in the introduction) but this one is the largest, “with over 6,000 respondents”.

answered Feb 15 '20 at 14:07

Laurel

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it clarifies that "the NTDS questionnaire included only a single item about suicidal behavior that asked, “Have you ever attempted suicide?” with dichotomized responses of Yes/No. Researchers have found that using this question alone in surveys can inflate the percentage of affirmative responses..." – dandavis Feb 17 '20 at 21:29
Additionally, this data is nearly 10 years old - study was from 2015 data. Ideally, it would be critical to have this same sample of data taken from the same correspondents who've now lived their lives (accounting for those who did not survive, unfortunately) to understand how much has changed in nearly 10 years. I'm sad there aren't more studies around this to use better measuring statistics with the same sample set of individuals, or more recent data period. "In this report, we utilize data from the 2015 USTS ..." I wonder if more recent data has come since this post? – k1dfr0std Feb 17 '24 at 22:21

Have 41% of transgender people attempted suicide?

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