Almost no teens only 0.1% are getting gender-affirming health care, according to a new peer-reviewed research letter published in JAMA Pediatrics.Conservatives have been increasingly attacking trans rights especially the rights of trans teens over the last four years. The premise for these attacks often includes the unevidenced notion that there has been a rapid increase in minors accessing gender-affirming care as theyre railroaded by profit-seeking doctors into a transition that they will later regret. Related 97% of trans youth dont regret transitioning, new study finds The study followed trans kids for a decade. Almost all of them had no regrets. The rhetoric was heightened in the presidential campaign when the GOP candidate claimed that schools were performing gender-affirming surgery on minor students without telling their parents. Never Miss a Beat Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights. Subscribe to our Newsletter today But the reality is very different. Using a dataset of private health insurance claims from 2018 to 2022, researchers at Harvard and Folx Health examined the medical care that over five million teens were getting. The total number of youth who had any diagnosis of gender dysphoria was less than 18,000, Harvard School of Public Health postdoctoral research fellow Landon Hughes, who worked on the study, told KUOW. Among those folks, there were less than 1,000 [youth] that accessed puberty blockers and less than 2,000 that ever had access to hormones.That works out to less than 0.1% of teens with private insurance getting access to gender-affirming care. The researchers also found that no one under the age of 12 had gotten gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy. Teens assigned male at birth were less likely to get puberty blockers prescribed than those assigned female at birth, but that could be explained by how people assigned female at birth undergo puberty at an earlier age. Our study found that, overall, very few TGD youth access gender-affirming care, which was surprisingly low, given that over 3% of high school youth identify as transgender, senior author Jae Corman, head of analytics and research at FOLX Health, told News-Medical. Among those that do, the timing of care aligns with the standards outlined by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.They were referring to the CDCs 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which found that 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender. Many trans people either dont want or cant access gender-affirming care, and the recent study shows that thats the case for the vast majority of trans youth.Hughes noted that, despite their small numbers, trans teens have been an outsized target for political attacks this past year. Its a very, very small number of people that has managed to eat up all of the oxygen in our political discourse over the last few months.Subscribe to theLGBTQ Nation newsletterand be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.