Food Insufficiency Among Transgender Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic
According to a new report from the Williams Institute at UCLA, transgender adults were three times as likely as cisgender people to experience food insecurity this year. Researchers analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey collected between June and October 2021, which indicated that more than 25 percent of transgender adults in the United States reported sometimes or often not having enough to eat, compared with just 8 percent of cisgender adults. Trans people of color were especially vulnerable, with nearly six times as many transgender people of color as cisgender White people (35.8 percent vs 6.0 percent) experiencing food insufficiency at some point during the summer or early fall of 2021. In addition, nearly a third (30.7 percent) of transgender adults were living at or below the federal poverty level (FPL), and nearly half (48.7 percent) reported difficulty paying for usual household expenses. Majorities of both transgender and cisgender adults reported that their inability to afford more food was the cause of insufficient food in their households. However, almost twice as many transgender people as cisgender people reported other barriers to accessing food, including that they could not get out to buy food (24.1 percent and 12.3 percent, respectively) and safety concerns (22.0 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively).