ABSTRACT
This chapter uses data from the 2014–2019 US Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to estimate the current marital and partnership statuses of transgender individuals and to describe how marital/partnership status distributions vary by gender-identity subgroup and other sociodemographic characteristics. Overall, summing the percentage currently married, separated/divorced, and widowed, at least 56.9%, and possibly as many as 63.7% (depending on the prior marital status of the currently partnered), of transgender-identified persons have been married at least once. Marriage is less likely among non-binary-identified transgender persons (48.3%) than among female-to-male (FtM)- and male-to-female (MtF)-identified persons (59.7% and 59.1%, respectively). Multivariate multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal limited variation in marital/partnership statuses by gender-identity subgroup once sociodemographic differences are taken into account, but there is considerable variation in marital/partnership statuses by sociodemographic characteristics that is similar to what is observed in the cisgender population. While informative in various ways, it is unclear how much these results tell us about same-sex marriage per se given that information on both partners’ sex assignment at birth, current sex, gender identity, gender expression, and embodiment is unavailable. New data collection is necessary to advance our understanding of the sameness of sex, sexuality, and (trans)gender in marriage.
