Just How Common are Trans People Anyway?

I've been wondering for some time just how many people 'like' me there are out there.  It seems every time I read a news article or here of something on the news or read an article online the numbers they site are completely different (by several orders of magnitude).

I usually heard something like there is about 1 transgender person in every 30,000 people.  But sometimes I would here that the prominence of transsexuals was 1 in every 30,000.  Again, the media confuses these terms a lot.

But then sometimes I would come across random sites that would say stuff like about 1 in every 1000 men has had a sex change.  Those numbers seemed completely absurd and unbelievable to me.  If 1 in ever 1000 men in the US has had a sex change then there must be a lot more than 1 in 1000 transgender people in the USA.

Anyway, after doing some digging I found this article How Frequently Does Transsexualism Occur? It's probably the best article I've found on the subject so far.  They estimate that the prevalence of MtF transsexuals is about 1 in 500.  Which means the prevalence of transgender people is higher than 1 in 500.

After reading this article I thought back to the one I read at that Christian website I talked about in a previous post.  Where they said "Experts believe there are about 400,000 transgendered persons, less than one-half of one percent of the population, in America."  And I wondered how these numbers matched up.  Well the way they are stated this seems like a pretty small number.

Well even with this figure if we take the population of the United States about 307,006,550 and divide it by 400,000 we get a prevalence of about 1 in every 768 people which is way greater than the 1 in every 30,000 that I usually hear.

Then I got to thinking how I could use my own experience to test these estimates.  Well, I first estimated the number of different people I have actually crossed paths with in my life and I'm pretty confident that that number is smaller than about 160,000.  Meaning that I have looked at no more than 160,000 different people's faces with my own eyes.  Of all the people I have encountered I have come across at least six people that I can remember that I knew were transgender (actually all of them were biological men living as women).  This was before I came out about being transgendered and I made absolutely no effort to seek these people out.  Which means that at least 1 in every 26,667 people I happened to see in my life was trans.  Which is already greater than the estimates of 1 in every 30,000.   But what about all the people I saw that I didn't know were transgender?

Supposedly the average person meets about 10,000 people in a lifetime.  Since I'm not that old let's assume that I've met about half the people I'm going to meet in my life which would be about 5,000 of all the people I have actually met (meaning that I talked to them in person) how many of them did I know were transgender?  Two.  So thats 1 in 2500 and both of them had already either started medically transitioning or they had completed the process.  Interestingly enough this exactly matches the upper estimate for the prevalence of transsexuals in the USA.  If the numbers were 1 in every 30,000 the chances that I would have actually encountered over six transsexuals so far in my life would be incredibly small.

This article also makes an interesting comparision to the prevalence of transsexualism to the prevalence of other long-term conditions: 

"By comparison, consider the prevalence of other long-term duration conditions that have profound impacts on people's lives. The approximate prevalence of muscular dystrophy is 1:5000, multiple sclerosis (MS) is 1:1000, cleft lip/palate is 1:1000, cerebral palsy is 1:500, blindness is 1:350, deafness is 1:250, self-reported epilepsy is 1:200, schizophrenia is about 1:100, and rheumatoid arthritis is about 1:100. All of these conditions are high on our society's radar screen and there is massive public empathy for those who suffer from them. There are large research funds available for studying and treating these conditions, and patients have welcome access to any existing medical treatments that might relieve such conditions.
 
Contrast those situations to intense transsexualism, which has an equally profound impact upon a person's life. This socially unpopular condition is totally off our society's radar screen, access to effective treatment is out of reach for the vast majority of sufferers, and the wider medical establishment and social welfare community are totally unaware of the relatively high prevalence (~1:500 to ~ 1:250 or more) and frequently tragic impact of the condition when simultaneously stigmatized and left untreated."

After reading this I thought of how many people I have personally encountered in my life that have had cleft lips--only two.  Yet I had personally encountered six transsexuals.  It seems clear to me that the prevalence of transsexuals in our society must be at least on the order of 1 in ever 1000.  Which means that the prominence of transgender people must be several factors greater than that.

So what I gather from this is that being transgendered is actually a fairly common issue.  It's just an issue that people don't want to talk about and making it seem more rare than it is is just another way to sweep it under the rug.

Another thing I've realize from this is that being transgendered really doesn't make us that 'special'--at least no more than a career choice.  Estimates say there are about 500,000 scientists in the USA which is about 1 in every 600 people thats really close to the number of transsexuals in the USA.  It's just one of the many aspects a person's life may entail. 

What we have to go through in life isn't what makes us special--what makes us special are the things that we do that we don't have to do.