For years the media trots out the 2011 Williams Institute figure of “700,000 transgender people in the U.S.” (2011 Williams Institute LGBT Report). They came up with this number based on two primary sources: a survey in Massachusetts, estimated from data collected in 2007 and 2009—and a 2003 study of California smokers.
Despite the Williams Institute claim that “0.3% are transgender”, the 700,000 figure remains fixed—despite the fact that the population has increased by nearly 15 million since 2011, and by 34 million since 2003! And not one of those millions is transgender?
On the other hand, a 2014 study done of 8.000 New Zealand high school children (The Health and Well-Being of Transgender High School Students) yielded figures showing that 1.2% declared themselves to be transgender, with 2.5% as “not sure of their gender”—which could add to the 1.2% once a percentage of the individuals declare themselves.
Note that this study dealt with high school teenagers. Currently, there are approximately 15 million high school students in the US (National Center for Education Statistics). Applying the New Zealand study percentage means that there are at least 180,000 transgender high school youth in the U.S. This is a significantly greater number than the few “restroom lawsuits” that have come to national attention.
It also means that there are as many transgender high school students as the entire population of Fort Lauderdale, or Springfield, Missouri, or Chattanooga, Tennessee … and the list goes on.
It is possible that the New Zealand teens are more open about their gender identity than Americans, which doesn’t mean the percentage is inflated—it means they might actually be more truthful. There is still the social stigma attached to being transgender, so it’s likely that there were transgender youth that chose not to declare themselves on the study. It’s also possible that teens of any country are more open about their gender identity in 2016 due to the recent publicity and internet saturation of successful transgender people, such as Andreja Pejić, Jazz Jennings, and others.
But assuming that humans are the same the world over, and that at least 1.2% of the population is transgender, add to the percentage the number of people that are transgender but were afraid to declare themselves. And if even a quarter of the “not sure” percentage later declared themselves transgender, then we’re looking at possibly 2% or more of any given population being transgender. This yields a range showing that 3,840,000 to 6.400,000 Americans are transgender… and that completely invalidates the unchanging 700,000 figure.
A U.S. transgender population of 1.2% to 2% means that there are about as many transgender people as there are Americans with red hair.
It means there are more than twice as many transgender people as there are dentists in the U.S.
And it means that transgender people outnumber all U.S. state and federal legislators by 500 times!
Karin
Comments
The curse of headlines and statistics
Karin,
The problem with the numbers quoted is that the original medical definitions are often ignored in the search for headlines.
In many cases I think this may well be because there has been a failure to distinguish between gender dysphoria/transgenderism (a degree of discomfort between innate gender identity and visible sex characteristics) and transsexualism (where an individuals gender dysphoria is so severe they have to deal with it by transitioning).
The New Zealand research needs to be considered in the light that the children used in the sample were asked to self identify with no validation of the data in terms of comparison with medical referrals. A summary of the NZ research may be found here.
Further (and perhaps more significantly) current research about incidence of transsexualism in children indicates that up to 80% of those who initially transition will de-transition later in life. I don't have the links to the peer reviewed research to hand but will try and find them if anyone is interested.
Taking the NZ research further one should also consider this report into applications for passport gender changes following the NZ government's introduction of the 'X' marker as an option in addition to 'M' and 'F'.
Another useful resource is this link that collates and compares much of the research on incidence globally.
And finally (if you can still keep your eyes open :)) There is a pretty good report funded by the UK Home Office and used as a research tool to support the formulation of government policy and funding which can be found here
If anyone is still suffering from insomnia having got this far please let your physician know!
Persephone
Non sum qualis eram
Yes, but ...
While it is true that the NZ children self-identified with no medical referrals, how is that different from the Williams Institute or Massachusetts surveys or any of the others in which the respondents self-identify? This is no different than self-identifying as Republican or Lutheran without corroborating third-party evidence, medical or otherwise. (In terms of a response to a survey)
I won't address the terms 'transgenderism' or 'transsexualism'--these are murky linguistic waters, dangerously treacherous, and not the focus of my response at this time. Well, other than to say that, yes, there is a failure to distinguish. But it's only a few years since "transgender" climbed out of the mental disorder ghetto of the DSM.
As to the 80% of those who allegedly de-transition later in life, I would be very interested in a valid peer-reviewed study, as opposed to anecdotal articles in the Daily Mail or on FoxNews; they splash the "I Changed My Mind!!" headline and consider their job done. I am also suspect of any human condition reported to be in the eightieth percentile--outside of mortality statistics, perhaps. Okay; right-handedness, maybe. But in psychological matters, there is too much variety in homo sapiens for such a high figure.
Also, what is the definition of "de-transitioning"--cutting one's hair or a double mastectomy? Changing all documentation back to the birth sex (never mind the internal gender) if it had been changed? I'm sure there are degrees, along the spectrum of male and female.
There is also a difference between de-transitioning and regret; For instance, the "regret" percentage for rhinoplasty has been reported as high as 64%. However, there is no comprehensive psychological screening before the procedure, so patients may regret that after the nose job they didn't become super-models, the cute guy still didn't pay attention to them, and so on. And "regret" ... do they regret how they look, or how much pain they experienced, or how much it cost? Any of which would cause them to report "I regret my rhinoplasty" on a survey.
A key factor is family and friends supporting the individual, as well as a thorough psychological analysis to truly diagnose the patient. Doctors report it common that in therapy, some patients have unrealistic expectations. Transitioning will not fix everything; there are factors that have nothing to do with gender identity. There is also the possibility that the patient experiences significantly more transphobia than expected. These are just some of the reported reasons for regret.
Reinforcing the importance of family support is the recent research at the University of Washington: Transgender children supported in their identities show positive mental health
Researchers are beginning to reporting that with a proper diagnosis and familial support, there is a significantly increased likelihood of successful societal integration in the proper gender.
Whew! Too many syllables!
Karin
Redheads
... aren't nearly as persecuted.
Portia
Which was...
Which was, I think, the point she was making. Yes, we're a minority, but we're really a minority more in line statistically with many other minorities, any of which aren't treated near so badly. And part of why people feel so free in persecuting us is that there is that false image in their head that there's not nearly enough of us to matter. That we're so few and soooo many of us change our minds anyways that we're just fucked up.
Abigail Drew.
your claim on being open or truthful
is something i have been saying for some time now, more on the suicide rates. of KNOWN trans, it is 40+% suicide rate, but that DOESNT include the ones who were not out, or where the family didnt disclose their childs "deviate" status, or no one KNEW they were because they were too afraid to say anything.
Teresa L.
Thank You
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. If the actual number is close to 2% that would be quite startling for me. For the first twenty years of my life I thought I was the only one. Then I started to become aware of a small number of others like me, but they were identified as having a mental disorder.
I think one of the reasons we're so persecuted is that we're thrown into a class of people who will do ANYTHING for attention. You and I know that most of us would prefer not to be noticed, but people tend to fixate on the exhibitionist among us.
People tend to say hurtful things like:
1.) You could get over it if you really wanted to.
2.) You just want to create conversation so you can throw a hissy fit when people say the wrong thing.
3.) Whenever it's convenient you pull out your problem as the reason everything in your life is a mess.
4.) Isn't it silly to spend time on something so inconsequential?
5.) Think of someone else besides yourself for once!
All that's really needed is a bit of compassion and kindness. Unfortunately the compassion and kindness meter is currently registering "We don't have time for that."
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Your #5...
I hate that one the most! Since it's really the exact opposite for me, where, for once, I actually AM thinking of myself for a change! Normally I put everyone else way ahead of my own needs, so why am I getting an inordinate amount of hate for JUST ONCE putting my own needs first?
Abigail Drew.
The Real World
Angela,
I think that one thing we (humans) tend to do, is we demand immediate attention to our own needs while we disregard the needs of others.
Putting aside the hurtful things that people say (which I know is hard to do), I think that we cannot feel or understand the way they feel and it is so foreign to our own world-view that we oversimplify it. How can I ever truly understand what is going on in the mind of a suicidal teen, an angry bigot, a budding sociopath, or an ignorant fool? I have enough trouble trying to understand my own mind.
It is a good idea to look for root causes of any condition, but that is a long-term overall goal. In dealing with a person who suffers from any form of social stigma or psychological trauma, or physiological anomaly, or emotional disruption requires dealing with the real world situation in the here and now.
I am bisexual and very nearly a full lesbian, I can only relate to people as I see them and as they present to me. I can understand the desire to study the root causes of my bisexuality, but not at the expense of dealing with ME. People need to understand that you cannot marginalize feelings, no matter what you may think is the root cause.
Let's study the feasibility of helmet laws after we repair my traumatic brain injury.
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
What about 'mere' crossdressers .....
Anecdata makes me believe / feel / guess that there are a lot more people who cross-dress. And figures for that particular habit are just as hard to obtain. And there's those who go out dressed versus the (likely) larger number who enjoy wearing panties or stockings under their ordinary male clothes.
Somehow, the anecdata doesn't make me feel that at least 1 person in every crowded pub is eager to transition - or 2 or 3 people in a busy supermarket. There's a lot - but I don't really go with the numbers supplied by either the Pro or the Anti brigade as they both have extraordinary needs to exaggerate.
Whatever my feelings about the numbers, it is really important to keep pushing for recognition and to push for getting good statistics.
Thanks everybody
Alys P
PRIORITIES !!!!
Karin,
You have too much to do to waste time talking about all the stupid games that people play with statistics. Please, on behalf of all of your loyal readers, PLEASE finish Port of Arrival as soon as humanly possible. The very moment that task is completed, it is imperative that you get on a 5th installment of the amazing On the Road series. We are all suffering (apparently not in silence) as we wait with bated breath to read them both.
OK....whew....I need a drink of water....
Seriously, media pundits are among the laziest creatures on earth. They regurgitate information with no real effort to verify its accuracy. They pull numbers out of thin air and preach it as gospel. They are almost as low in the life-form hierarchy as politicians.
Unfortunately, newspapers have become obsolete and we live in a world where I can make up something today, tweet it to a thousand people, and in an hour, it is being reported as fact on every major news outlet.
Welcome to the brave new world.
waif the witless
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
Having lived in Massachusetts 60yrs, those #'s are wrong.
There are probably 180,000 high school students just in MA, and over 700,000 people who are 'transgender people' in New England alone.
I'll bet only 20% of crossdressers go out in public, how do you count those who dress only in private? or as you say, wear hose or panties under
gender-correct clothing.?
Karen
As we the so called sufferers can't agree
on definitions, then I'm not surprised that researchers have their own criteria for what transgender actually means. I don't like the term, but then I like the term trans, even less. Umbrella terms are often misleading and in this case it appears to mean that the individual is associating themselves with something of the opposite gender/sex. In some cases that means clothing or trappings in others it means their whole being. It's used to generate the spectrum approach which I used to support but now think is wrong. I don't think that the difference between someone who wears his wife's knickers for a sexual buzz has anything in common with someone like me, who only wears knickers because they see themselves as female and they have a gusset in the right place once you've had surgery. We are completely different animals and until this is understood, the same mistake is going to be made.
It now seems a free for all; be whatever you want. Fine, but leave me out. I don't believe that anyone can consider themselves female if they still possess their dangly bits unless SRS was inappropriate for medical or other definite reasons. Call me old fashioned, even intolerant, but I feel, chicks with dicks aren't female except for the reasons I mentioned above.
It isn't a question of degree, it's a completely different phenomenon. It doesn't make anyone superior or inferior to anyone else, just different. I also believe the numbers of transsexuals are relatively small. What the rest of the so called transgender people are, I don't know.
Angharad
Not all of us
Can afford surgery. Once we can. it's done overseas. Even to get corrective surgery, I had to travel overseas and it cost a bomb.
You statement " I don't believe that anyone can consider themselves female if they still possess their dangly bits" smacks of intolerance.
Joanna
Intolerance...and dangly bits...
Grim,
I think that was an opinion, and we all have them. To say "I don't believe that anyone can consider themselves female if they still possess their dangly bits" is not intolerance. It is when you demand that other people bend to your own opinion that it becomes intolerant. Saying I don't believe leaves the possibility that I am willing to listen to arguments for both sides. It means we still have a middle ground for dialogue.
For example, I am bisexual/lesbian. I am not Transgender and cannot know everything that a transgender person feels and experiences. I am also not a man, so I cannot possibly know the same about what a man feels and experiences, I am not black ( I didn't use African-American as the viewers here are multi-national), etc.
I cannot speak for how tolerant anyone's opinions are, I can only speak to how intolerant their actions are. If you (talking to all people, or the universal you, not specifically you) are a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a homophobe, whatever in your heart, I can only judge your actions and how what is in your heart causes you to act toward people.
Actions speak louder than words, but words speak louder than thoughts.
waif
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.
Sex versus gender.
Female? Perhaps you have a point... but would you not still consider them a woman?
The state of one's body has nothing to do with WHO you are, and I would be saddened to learn that in the eyes of one of the site's authors I respect most the current state of my body equates me firmly with a section of the populace I simply can't identify with. Taking that into account, you have to debate less what someone has a right to call themselves -- trans, T*, TV, CD, TS, TG, whatever -- and more in what ways the limited definitions society/government are willing to work with apply to those individuals. The government of the US tends to use sex definitions rather than gender ones for ID, so does someone whose sex and gender are misaligned deserve to have the sex of the ID changed to match the gender (within reason, obviously,) or by your definition is that sex marker on their ID, and all the stipulations that go with it, something that is immutable until they fit the external definition of said sex to as close a degree as possible?
I fully intend to transition fully, hopefully as soon as possible. That said, there are plenty of things that I ALSO hope to do, and AS THE WOMAN I AM, that would necessitate proper identification as such. Should I, in theory, wish to cross international borders, even just as far as Mexico or Canada, and I am clearly presenting as ME, is is fair that I should have to let a curious border guard see an M on my ID rather than the F that fits who I am regardless of a couple of extra pieces of flesh? Even Maddy has played off some of the dangers of this, albeit with a crossdresser only, in some of her stories.
Me? I think that bringing sex into the conversation with anyone -- sex, rather than gender and their perception and presentation of who they are -- is a fallacy for all but the most extreme cases. If an accident of birth is all that it took to define who someone was, I would be a 90 IQ country-music-lovin' truck-drivin' bible-thumpin' Klan member, because that's what a lot of my family is and that's at least part of what I was raised to expect to be. But that isn't who I am, any more than I'm a guy because my body has 'those bits.' There is far more that makes a person than circumstance, whether that circumstance be physical, situational, or monetary, so placing any relevance on those circumstances seems, at least to me, untenable.
Back to the matter at hand....
As much as I would argue for freedom of expression in terms of gender, society as a whole still tends to view things based on sex instead, no matter how incongruous the two may be. In your opinion, Miss Ang, where would the line be between "society should treat this person as who they are" and "this person should interact with society based on their genitalia?" Because that's really the issue here: when society defines who you are by the latter, what allowances can and should be made because of the former?
Melanie E.
Perhaps it's time I left here
I'm getting old and grumpy.
Angharad
You aren't the only old and grumpy one 'round here :D
And without your take on matters -- not to mention your wonderful stories! -- the site would be a far more boring place.
Different opinions and feelings abound, and all deserve to be considered. Otherwise, we'd end up with a homogenous site full of nothing but yes (wo)men all patting each others' backs and never questioning or learning anything.
Melanie E.
Even though Ang still hasn't shared her opinion...
My opinion is fuck the line. Society should NEVER be telling someone who they should be allowed to be. Okay, I suppose there should be a line where someone actually directly causes harm to others they certainly shouldn't be allowed to hide behind an excuse of any sort. But even people who other people would consider to be inflicting self-harm in their expression of self should mainly be allowed to do so. It's only themselves they're hurting if they are in fact even hurting themselves. Most of present society thinks transgender is nothing BUT self-harm you know. Which is only ever the case in the unfortunate many incidences where the depression due to how society treats us getting so bad that we actually do resort to self-harm. Society, however, takes the view that as soon as we put on women's panties the very first time, we've self-harmed.
Abigail Drew.
Statistics and terminology
The 2009 UK study mentioned in an earlier comment illustrates one of the problems with trying to determine the incidence rate of TG / TS individuals, in that the numbers of those presenting themselves for medical treatment are doubling around every five years - so either the incidence rate truly is increasing (doubtful) or increasing numbers of gender nonconformists feel confident enough to seek medical attention.
As others have pointed out, there's also the problems in terminology - who do we count in each category and how do we verify they belong in that category (since the Powers That Be are likely to require some form of verification - even if it's non-medical and in the form of testimony from family and friends - rather than pure self-identification - at least partially to guard against media accusations that certain individuals will take any opportunity afforded to them to spy on other people in a state of undress)?
Even as we've seen here, even gender nonconformists themselves can't agree on common definitions of terminology (I'm personally wary of those who use the term "transgender" [or "transgender umbrella"] to cover anyone who isn't 100% secure in their assigned gender 100% of the time, or at the opposite end of the scale, "transsexual" used only for those who've had full castration and genital reconfiguration - while the less said about RHPS the better...), so how do we educate the wider public, many of whom are probably still in the AMAB = male forever, AFAB = female forever mould and may even think there's something impure / freakish / perverted about not conforming to society's stereotypes of your assigned gender, with negative feelings intensifying when they're confronted with hearing about those who've transitioned or even enbys (who generally don't occupy a single, fixed, invariant point on the various single axis gender scales / spectrums).
At a biological level, gender's just as complicated as the rest of who we are, and encompasses a lot more than whether you supply the 'tadpoles' or 'eggs' at procreation. At a purely biological level, you've got karyotype, genotype, phenotype and biochemistry, then things branch out into more social factors such as preferred hairstyle (cut, colour, length, style), clothing, preferred areas of learning / work / hobbies / interests / activities, poise, mannerisms and probably several dozen other broad factors I can't think of at the moment...
So if gender is a spectrum, it's not just a single scale but at least half a dozen different ones, and you can occupy multiple points on each scale - so a cloud of points in n-dimensional space. Some of which are likely to vary over time - either in one direction or back and forth.
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Such a Broad Spectrum
Sexual Orientation and Sexual Identity each contains such a broad spectrum that it is impossible to put either into a nice, neat little box. That is the beauty of a forum like this. It is ridiculous for anyone to have to justify their place in some arbitrary socio-religious hierarchy.
We exist.
We interact.
We define ourselves.
We are defined by others.
We act upon both definitions.
We struggle with the dichotomy between them.
We ultimately hold within ourselves the responsibility for our own truth.
So many of us are struggling to discover our own truth. I would not want to stifle anyone's opportunity to find theirs.
waif
Be kind to those who are unkind, tolerant toward those who treat you with intolerance, loving to those who withhold their love, and always smile through the pains of life.