In the Niagara region, there are approximately 1,350 community members who are transgender or non-binary; however, data is only as good as what is reported, so it is likely that there are still more transgender and non-binary people who did not feel comfortable identifying their gender or who did not have an opportunity to respond.

According to The Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces (2018), Canada is home to approximately one million GSD people. That’s approximately 4% of Canada’s population. In Niagara, that is approximately 18,000 community members.

In 2021, Canada became the first country to provide census data on transgender and non-binary people. Of the nearly 30.5 million people in Canada aged 15 and older living in a private household in May 2021, more than 100,000 people or 0.33% of the population were transgender or non-binary.

In 2018, the Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces (SSPPS)—a large-scale, nationally representative household survey—was conducted by Statistics Canada with the goal of advancing knowledge of gender-based violence in Canada. Results show that people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or of a sexual orientation other than heterosexual (LGB+) in Canada are more likely than heterosexual people to be physically and sexually assaulted or to sustain injuries as a result of aggression.

Excluding violence committed by an intimate partner, 59% LGB+ people in Canada had been physically or sexually assaulted at least once since age 15, a much larger proportion than the 37% heterosexual people who reported the same. In addition, LGB+ people with a disability living in Canada were more likely to report that they had been physically assaulted (55%) and sexually assaulted (46%) since age 15 than their counterparts who did not have a disability (36% and 29%, respectively).

Results from the 2018 SSPPS shows that transgender and non-binary people in Canada are more likely than cisgender people to have been sexually or physically assaulted at least once since the age of 15 (59% vs. 37%, respectively). Data also show that those who are transgender or non-binary in Canada were more likely to experience unwanted sexual behaviours in public and at work, as well as experience online harassment. For instance, 58% of transgender and non-binary people in Canada reported having experienced at least one form of unwanted sexual behaviours in public in the year preceding the survey compared with 23% of cisgender people. Unwanted sexual behaviours at work (69% vs. 23%) and online harassment (42% vs. 16%) were also more common among transgender and non-binary people than among cisgender people in Canada.