LGBTQ+ People Are Everywhere. Trump Is Cutting the Data That Shows It

This story originally appeared on The Advocate.A new Human Rights Campaign report estimates that 12 percent of U.S. adults are LGBTQ+, a higher share than several widely cited estimates. But the federal government is removing the questions the HRC report and similar research relied on.The consequences extend beyond knowing how many LGBTQ+ people there are.Andrew Flores, a distinguished visiting scholar at UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, has used federal data to document that transgender people experience higher rates of crime victimization than cisgender people. Without questions that identify transgender respondents, researchers lose a way to measure that disparity.Even if a future administration restores those questions, Flores told The Advocate that collecting enough new information for comparable research would take substantial time.“If you really count the numbers, it’s nearly a decade of information that’s being lost, based upon the federal government’s action,” he said.Related: LGBTQ+ Americans are going back in the closet under Donald Trump: reportWhy estimates of the LGBTQ+ population differHRC’s study uses U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey data collected from 2021 through 2024. It exceeds Gallup’s 2025 finding that 9 percent of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+ and the Williams Institute’s 2023 estimate that 5.5 percent of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+, based on 2020-2021 data. The HRC report estimates that about 2.3 percent of U.S. adults are transgender or gender-expansive. Gallup estimates 1.1 percent of adults identify as trans, while the Williams Institute’s 2025 estimate is 0.8 percent, based on 2021-2023 data. Charleigh Flohr, a senior statistician at the HRC Foundation, called Census Bureau data the “platinum standard,” citing the agency’s ability to select households through random sampling. Flohr said answering questions online may even allow more respondents to feel comfortable disclosing their sexual ori