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The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) was conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) to examine the experiences of transgender adults in the United States. The USTS questionnaire was administered online and data were collected over a 34-day period in the summer of 2015, between August 19 and September 21. The final sample included respondents from all fifty states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and U.S. military bases overseas. The USTS Public Use Dataset (PUDS) features survey results from 27,715 respondents and details the experiences of transgender people across a wide range of areas, such as education, employment, family life, health, housing, and interactions with police and prisons.

The survey instrument had thirty-two sections that covered a broad array of topics, including questions related to the following topics (in alphabetical order): accessing restrooms; airport security; civic participation; counseling; family and peer support; health and health insurance; HIV; housing and homelessness; identity documents; immigration; intimate partner violence; military service; police and incarceration; policy priorities; public accommodations; sex work; sexual assault; substance use; suicidal thoughts and behaviors; unequal treatment, harassment, and physical attack; and voting.

Demographic information includes age, racial and ethnic identity, sex assigned at birth, gender and preferred pronouns, sexual orientation, language(s) spoken at home, education, employment, income, religion/spirituality, and marital status.

There are no publicly available data files for this study. The naming conventions were maintained from the original pre-ICPSR release and the PUDS file is restricted use along with the qualitative data (MS Excel) file.

Before applying for access to these data please refer to the Approved Requests for USTS Data. These abstracts describe work currently in progress, and we provide them to help reduce the risk of duplication of research efforts.

This study brings to light what is both patently obvious and far too often dismissed from the human rights agenda. Transgender and gender non-conforming people face injustice at every turn: in childhood homes, in school systems that promise to shelter and educate, in harsh and exclusionary workplaces, at the grocery store, the hotel front desk, in doctors' offices and emergency rooms, before judges and at the hands of landlords, police officers, health care workers and other service providers.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality are grateful to each of the 6,450 transgender and gender non-conforming study participants who took the time and energy to answer questions about the depth and breadth of injustice in their lives. A diverse set of people, from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, completed online or paper surveys. This tremendous gift has created the first 360-degree picture of discrimination against transgender and gender non-conforming people in the U.S. and provides critical data points for policymakers, community activists and legal advocates to confront the appalling realities documented here and press the case for equity and justice.

These data provide information on discrimination in every major area of life, including housing, employment, health and health care, education, public accommodation, family life, criminal justice and government identity documents, and demographic information such as citizenship, race, ethnicity, employment, and income. In virtually every setting, the data underscores the urgent need for policymakers and community leaders to change their business-as-usual approach and confront the devastating consequences of anti-transgender bias.

Demographic information includes race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, education, income, U.S citizenship, household size, and relationship status.

The public-use dataset was created in an earlier version of Stata that truncated write-in responses after 244 characters. The non-truncated write-in responses, plus Q10 zip codes and the essay responses to Q70, are included in the restricted-use dataset.