There’s more data for trans people with HIV than any other disease — but it’s still flawed
Transgender people are at higher-than-average risk of contracting HIV. And yet, when epidemiologist Diana Tordoff set out to analyze how transmission of the virus might change in the U.S. over the next 10 years with increased testing and preventative PrEP medication, she found there wasn’t enough existing data on trans and nonbinary people to answer the question for those populations.
“At the bare minimum, you need prevalence data,” Tordoff said: How many trans men in the U.S. have HIV? How many nonbinary people? The Centers for Disease Control has recently published some data on HIV prevalence among trans people based on public health surveillance data, but gender identity data is not collected consistently across local jurisdictions. This means people are almost certainly being misclassified as the data is aggregated nationally, Tordoff said.
