You logically guess that San Francisco, with its queer life centered around the Castro, is the gayest place in the United States. Or that the world below 14th street in rainbow flag-waving New York City is the most trans place in the 50 states.
But the gayest and most trans place in America is neither a city nor a state. It’s Washington, D.C.
According to perhaps the most definitive study on such matters, Washington, D.C., has more LGBTQ residents by percentage of its total population than all other famously progressive U.S. territories, including California, Oregon or Hawaii.
The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimates that 10.8% of D.C. residents identify as LGBT in some way. That makes the District almost twice as gay, queer, bi, or lesbian as the next state or territory (Vermont at 5.8%) and almost three times the Institute’s estimated national average of 3.8%. A Gallup poll seems to support these findings.
But as gay, bi, queer, and lesbian as D.C. is, it’s even more trans. A separate study by the Institute confirms that, yes, it also has a higher percentage of transgender people than any other state. Researchers at Williams estimate that 2.77% of the over 672,228 people that live in D.C. identify as transgender. For a bit of perspective, consider that the state with the next largest percentage of transgender residents is Hawaii, where only .78% of the population are trans. The national average, according to the Institute, is .58%.
None of this means, however, that Washington, D.C., hosts the largest amount of LGBT people in the United States. California, where an estimated 4.6% of all residents identify as LGBT according to the Williams Institute, is home to approximately 1.8 million gay, lesbian, bi, or trans individuals—that’s over twice the total population of Washington, D.C., In terms of metropolitan centers, The New York Times used recent Gallup survey numbers to estimate that New York City has the largest LGBT population in America, at somewhere around 756,000.
Also, Washington, D.C., does not have the highest percentage of same-sex couples, LGBT-owned businesses, or most pro-LGBT legislative history. All of those honors go to San Francisco. Yet, if you want to talk about raw numbers and raw percentages, Washington D.C. still has the gayest, most trans population with the City by the Bay coming in a far second.