How Gender Expression Affects Income

There are an estimated two million Americans whose gender identity does not match the gender they were assigned at birth. For them, reaching income equality and stability can be a major struggle to living a dignified, comfortable, and fulfilling life.

Trans hatred and transphobia can make it harder for transgender individuals to be hired, remain employed, and get promoted—in short, to be paid as much as their equally qualified cisgender peers who aren’t subject to discrimination and harassment by coworkers, supervisors, and clients. In March 2024 the Trans Legislation Tracker found that there were 527 bills in 41 state legislatures targeting transgender people that would prevent them “from receiving basic healthcare, education, legal recognition, and the right to publicly exist.” Though down from 600 in all of 2023, the year was only in its third month.

Surveys of the LGBTQ community have reflected their experiences of harassment and discrimination. According to the SFLGBT Center in San Francisco, in 2019 half of trans people said they had been unfairly fired or denied employment, and three in four had been harassed at work. And a June 2020 survey by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that 53% of LGBTQ respondents said discrimination moderately or significantly affected their ability to get hired, while 47% said it affected their ability to remain employed.

The Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in June 2020 prohibited employers from discriminating against transgender individuals, and President Biden’s January 2021 nondiscrimination executive order bolstered it.

Still, workplace discrimination, despite being illegal, continues to interfere with LGBTQ+ people’s ability to do their best work, advance in their careers, and reach their earning potential. The ongoing evidence: A June 2022 CAP survey found that 70% of transgender individuals surveyed had experienced workplace discrimination or harassment in the past year. This article examines the ways in which the LGBTQ community is affected by these issues.

Housing Instability

Besides workplace harassment and discrimination, other aspects of being trans, queer, or gender-nonconforming can indirectly contribute to lower earnings. For example, teens or young adults who were thrown out of their conservative households because of their gender expression may not have completed high school or college.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in its June 2023 LGBTQIA2S+ Youth Experiencing Homelessness report said that 28% of all LGBTQ+ youth had experienced homelessness or housing instability at some point in their lives. This was often due to family rejection, with 40% being kicked out or abandoned. Homelessness rates increased to 39% of transgender boys, 38% of transgender girls/women, and 35% of nonbinary youth. Transgender high school students were 9.2 times more likely to be homeless than cisgender students.

Accessing homeless shelters and services can be risky due to further discrimination and harassment, according to a YouthToday.org 2023 report. Too often they are living in survival mode, which makes it difficult to plan for the future.

Education, Unemployment, and Poverty

A 2023 KFF/Washington Post Trans Survey found that 84% of transgender adults had less than a college degree, compared with 64% of non-transgender adults. This could in part account for the fact that the share of transgender adults who were unemployed (14%) was nearly double that of non-transgender adults (8%).

A study published in the journal ILR Review in 2020 found that compared with otherwise similar cisgender men, transgender individuals were less likely to be college-educated or employed and had lower household incomes and higher poverty rates.

Indeed, transgender people experience high rates of unemployment and poverty. A U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) conducted in the summer of 2015 found that survey respondents were unemployed at a rate of 15% compared with 5% for the general population—and the USTS sample only includes people 18 and up, versus 16 and up in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for the general population. Early insights (released in February 2024) from the most recent USTS, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2022, found that its respondents' unemployment rate had risen to 18%.

American Indian, Black, Latinx, and multiracial transgender people were all unemployed at two to three times the rate of cisgender people of the same race. Because identity is intersectional and many trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming people are also people of color, they can have two factors preventing them from earning as much as white cisgender people.

The survey also found that while 14% of the U.S. adult population was living in poverty, the segment of the adult transgender population living in poverty was 29%. Transgender respondents also reported substantially lower household incomes than the U.S. adult population. As the transgender population is different from the U.S. adult population in terms of age and educational attainment, the survey results were weighted to allow for more-accurate comparisons between the two groups.

Even with this weighting, the most common income range for transgender respondents was $10,000 to $24,999, and the most common income range for the U.S. adult population was $25,000 to $49,999. The biggest discrepancy is in the $1 to $9,999 income range, where 22% of transgender respondents reported their income compared with 15% of the U.S. adult population.

In the 2023 KFF/Washington Post survey, four in 10 transgender adults reported an income of under $40,000, suggesting some possible progress, even adjusted for inflation.

Transgender Wage Disparities

A small study published in 2008 and based on a survey conducted in 2004 and 2005 examined the differing experiences of male-to-female and female-to-male transgender individuals. The researchers estimated that female-to-male workers experienced a slight pay increase after transitioning, while male-to-female workers lost about one-third of their pay.

The study’s authors, Kristen Schilt and Matthew Wiswall, proposed that “the experience of a person who works both as a man and as a woman can illuminate the subtle ways that gender inequality is socially produced in the workplace. While transgender people have the same human capital and pre–labor market gender socialization after their gender transitions, their workplace experiences often change radically.”

A 2021 study from the Human Rights Campaign that looked at an LGBTQ+ pay gap with typical workers also showed a gender bias in pay between transgender men and women. The former earned 70 cents for every dollar earned by a typical U.S. worker, while the latter only earned 60 cents.

The Bottom Line

There simply isn’t as much research on the incomes and socioeconomic statuses of transgender, queer, and gender-nonconforming individuals as on cisgender individuals. What’s more, non-cisgender individuals aren’t always out, so it can be more difficult to speak with them for surveys or studies and to generate random samples of the population to study.

People’s gender presentations can also differ dramatically, creating another variable that makes it challenging to reach scientifically valid conclusions about the causes of income differences among groups. What seems to be clear from existing research—besides the fact that more research would be helpful—is that reducing discrimination and harassment of trans people could go a long way toward improving their financial circumstances.