Transgender media coverage has surged in recent years for a wide range of reasons. While there are more transgender television characters than ever before, hundreds of bills are targeting transgender people’s access to medical care, sports teams, gender-specific public spaces, and other institutions.

Despite the increase in conversation about the transgender community, public confusion around transgender identity remains.

Read on to learn more about what it means to be transgender and understand challenges transgender people may face.

What does it mean to be transgender?

Transgender—or “trans”—is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity or gender expression does not conform to their sex assigned at birth. People can discover they are trans at any age.

Gender identity refers to a person’s inner sense of being a woman, a man, neither, both, or something else entirely. Trans people who don’t feel like women or men might describe themselves as nonbinary, agender, genderqueer, or two-spirit, among other terms.

Gender expression describes the way a person communicates their gender through their appearance—such as their clothing or hairstyle—and behavior.

A person whose gender expression doesn’t conform to the expectations of their assigned sex may not identify as trans. The only way to know for sure if someone is trans is if they tell you.

Cisgender—or “cis”—describes people whose gender identities match the sex they were assigned at birth.

How long have transgender people existed?

Being trans isn’t new. Although the word “transgender” only dates back to the 1960s, people whose identities defy traditional gender expectations have existed across cultures throughout recorded history.

How many people are transgender?

A 2022 Williams Institute study estimates that 1.6 million people over the age of 13 identify as transgender in the United States.

Is being transgender a mental health condition?

No. Conveying and communicating about your gender in a way that feels authentic to you is a normal and necessary part of self-expression.

Social and legal stigma, bullying, discrimination, harassment, negative media messages, and barriers to gender-affirming medical care can cause psychological distress for trans people. This is especially true for trans people of color, who face significantly higher rates of violence, poverty, housing instability, and incarceration—but trans identity itself is not a mental health condition.

What is gender dysphoria?

Gender dysphoria describes a feeling of unease that some trans people experience when their perceived gender doesn’t match their gender identity, or their internal sense of gender. A 2021 study of trans adults pursuing gender-affirming medical care found that most participants started experiencing gender dysphoria by the time they were 7.

When trans people don’t receive the support they need to manage gender dysphoria, they may experience depression, anxiety, social isolation, suicidal ideation, substance use disorder, eating disorders, and self-injury.

How do trans people manage gender dysphoria?

Every trans person’s experience with gender dysphoria is unique. Some trans people may alleviate dysphoria by wearing gender-affirming clothing or by asking others to refer to them by a new name and use pronouns that accurately reflect their gender identity. The 2022 U.S. Trans Survey found that nearly all trans participants who lived as a different gender than the sex they were assigned at birth reported that they were more satisfied with their lives.

Some trans people may also manage dysphoria by pursuing medical transition, which may involve taking hormones and getting gender-affirming surgery.

Access to gender-affirming medical care has been shown to reduce the risk of depression and suicide among trans youth and adults.

To learn more about the trans community, visit resources from the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Trevor Project, PFLAG, and Planned Parenthood.

If you or anyone you know is considering suicide or self-harm or is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741. For international resources, here is a good place to begin.

This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Updated COVID-19 vaccines are now available: They’re meant to give you the best protection against the strain of the virus that is making people severely sick and also causing deaths. 

Many people were infected during the persistent summer wave, which may leave you wondering when you should get the updated vaccine. The short answer is that it depends on when you last got infected or vaccinated and on your particular level of risk. 

We heard from six experts—including medical doctors and epidemiologists—about when they recommend getting an updated vaccine. Read on to learn what they said. And to make it easy, check out the flowchart below.

If I was infected with COVID-19 this summer, when should I get the updated vaccine?

All the experts we spoke to agreed that if you were infected this summer, you should wait at least three months since you were infected to get vaccinated. 

“Generally, an infection may be protective for about three months,” Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System, tells PGN. “If they got infected three or more months ago, it is a good idea to get vaccinated sooner than later.”

This three-month rule applies if you got vaccinated over the summer, which may be the case for some immunocompromised people, adds Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. 

If I didn’t get infected with COVID-19 this summer, when should I get vaccinated?

Most of the experts we talked to say that if you didn’t get infected with COVID-19 this summer, you should get the vaccine as soon as possible. Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, emphasizes that if this applies to you, you should get vaccinated as soon as possible, especially given the current COVID-19 surge.

Al-Aly agrees. “Vaccine-derived immunity lasts for several months, and it should cover the winter season. Plus, the current vaccine is a KP.2-adapted vaccine, so it will work most optimally against KP.2 and related subvariants [such as] KP.3 that are circulating now,” Al-Aly says. “We don’t know when the virus will mutate to a variant that is not compatible with the KP.2 vaccine.” 

Al-Aly adds that if you’d rather take the protection you can get right now, “It may make more sense to get vaccinated sooner than later.”

This especially applies if you’re over 65 or immunocompromised and you haven’t received a COVID-19 vaccine in a year or more because, as Chin-Hong adds, “that is the group that is being hospitalized and disproportionately dying now.”

Some experts—including epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, author of newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist—also say that if you’re younger than 65 and not immunocompromised, you can consider waiting and aiming to get vaccinated before Halloween to get the best protection in the winter, when we’re likely to experience another wave because of the colder weather, gathering indoors, and the holidays. 

“I am more worried about the winter than the summer, so I would think of October (some time before Halloween) as the ‘Goldilocks moment’—not too early, not too late, but just right,” Chin-Hong adds. Time it “such that your antibodies peak during the winter when COVID-19 cases are expected to exceed what we are seeing this summer.”

My children are starting school—should I get them vaccinated now? 

According to most experts we spoke to, now is a good time to get your children vaccinated. 

Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, adds that “with COVID-19 infection levels as high as they are and increased exposures in school,” now is a particularly good time to get an updated vaccine if people haven’t gotten COVID-19 recently. 

Additionally, respiratory viruses spike when kids are back in school, so “doing everything you can to reduce your child’s risk of infection can help protect families and communities,” says epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera, science communications advisor at the de Beaumont Foundation.

For more information, talk to your health care provider.

(Disclosure: The de Beaumont Foundation is a partner of The Public Good Projects, the organization that owns Public Good News.)

This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.