EHERO Working Paper 2022-01
Ruut Veenhoven and Jos Veenhoven
ABSTRACT
Background: A considerable minority of humans does not feel comfortable with their assigned gender at birth and part of these people experience gender dysphoria. Today, transgender people have several options to live more in accordance with their experienced gender identity by a) changing their social self (gender expression), such as in changing their name and/or b) changing their body, using hormone therapy or gender affirming surgery. This faces them with the choice whether to use such options and in that context a question is whether it will make them happier or not.
Objectives: We seek answers to the following questions: 1) How happy are transgender people? 2) Are transgender people who made a change happier than the ones who did not? 3) How happy are transgender people who opted for particular ways for living in more accordance to their experienced gender identity, either medical or non-medical ways? 4) Did they become happier after the gender transition? 5) What kinds of people profit most and least from a gender transition happiness wise? 6) In what conditions are transgender people the most and least happy?
Method: We took stock of the available research and found 19 reports of studies on happiness in transgender people, which together yielded 51 findings. These findings were entered in an on-line ‘findings-archive’, the World Database of Happiness. Each finding is described in a standardized format on a separate ‘finding page’ with a unique internet address. We use links to these on-line finding pages, which allows us to summarize the findings in a few tabular schemes
Results: In contemporary western nations, the average happiness of trans people is just above neutral and 11% lower than among their compatriots. The spread around that mean is high, which means that some transgender people are quite happy and some quite unhappy. The happiness of transgender people who underwent a medical transition is close to the happiness of their compatriots, only about 3% lower on average.
There is almost no research on the effects on happiness of social gender-transitions only. Almost all the findings concern medical sex-reassignment, which is sought by a minority of transgender people.
The happiness of all transgender people depends much on social acceptance.
Keywords: transgender, sex-reassignment, gender affirming surgery, hormone replacement therapy, social transition, medical transition, happiness, research synthesis