I know, but how alone ARE we?

[Kerri]

I would say your estimate is way lower than the figures banded around on this side of the pond. maybe were just a queer bunch over here but the figure I always heard banded about was 10% when this was being discussed back in the eighties.

But it was more liberal over here in the eighties, things have maybe gone full circle and we are now less liberal and more conservative than we were then. The religous reformers seem to have a louder voice now.
IMHO.

Kerri

[Ann Stef]

REligious reformers my be putting down CD'ers on yourside of the pond for now. On this side, liberalism is setting in, and laws are being passed in areas to protect us. Ihope it doesn't swing back to conversatism again.

[Tekla]

I always hesitate to do this because, in fact, most people are math illiterate. Its like someone who knows how to pronounce a few words in Spanish, but does not know what they mean, or the syntax and grammar of the language - so in the broadest sense yes, they are speaking Spanish, but in reality, they are talking nonsense. Of course this is how - and why - so many people are fooled with numbers.

The 10% number comes from the highly flawed Kinsey studies, which took as their survey men in prison, who might not be exactly be an exact cross-section of the general population.

Still, it depends on how you define it. I know guys who wear nylon panties under their running shorts because of the friction issue. Are they CD? Or people who wear PH/tights under their ski pants?

On the academic side, 3.5% is considered a normal variation in any statical survey.

If you take a 10% number and the US population is 300 million, so half (we are talking men here, and in fact I think that men are only 48% of the population, but I'm making it easy on myself and you) that is 150 million, which would place a 10% figure at 15 million, which seems high.

That is more people than live in Illinois but a few less than live in Florida and three times the population of Colorado or Minnesota. 15 million is a bit less than twice the population of New York City (proper) and five times the population of LA (proper) - Taken as metro zone 15 million is only 3 million less than the entire New York Metro area, 2 million more than the LA metro, and 5 million more than the Chicago Metro. If it was that high there would be a HUGE market that someone would tap.

In fact, only 4 US states have a population of more than 15 million.

Or, put this way, evenly distributed every state would have 3 million CDs. About half the states have a population of more than 6 million. Somehow that does not compute. I don't see a 3 million number in California alone, and I bet Cali has a higher percentage or TG persons than Alabama. Population of England is more or less 60 million, so that is 6 million CDs in the Old Country? Again, that seems off.

Perhaps the best count we have is in SF, where the City's Health Department and Human Rights Commissions have each put the number of TG persons at around 18K or, about 0.2% of the total population, and SF has a high TG population that is largely out and can be counted to some degree.

So, lets play the Order of Magnitude Game. If 10% is high, then....

1% is still 1.5 million or the population of Maine, Idaho or Nebraska - or of Philadelphia or Phoenix. So that still sound high. I mean if we had 1.5 million we should all move to North Dakota, which only has about 1/2 a million people in the entire state,(and if we did this a lot of them would move) raise our pink lace jolly roger flag, and just take it over. (Every gas station would have a Victoria's Secret)

At .01% to .02% we are looking at 15 to 30,000 - that seems low if we have 18K in SF alone.

So, @ .1% to.2% we have 150K to 300K, that sounds more in the ball park, but I'm betting that at a high end its not more than 1 million, or .6%. I don't see a higher number than that - discounting auto-erotic stuff, which is not a true TG deal but a simple sex deal.

In the stats game, its all about order of magnitude, not actual numbers, so I'm putting the order of magnitude at .x, rather than x0.0, or x.0 with 0.0x being way too low.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U. ... population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Un ... population

on line calculator for percentages

http://www.onlineconversion.com/percentcalc.htm

Free bonus from Tekla.... the best source of statical data on the world is done by the deans of statical analysis, our very own Central Intel. Agency and they are published on-line (our tax dollars at work, as it were) This is most amazing to be sure, but don't blame me if you get addicted to looking up stuff at this site...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publication ... index.html

And again, don't blame me if you spend days at the CIA site.

As a point of reference:
ONE MILLION =
well it would take you 23 to 39 days (24/7) to count to a million at once a second (it gets harder as the numbers get bigger)

one million dots on a single page
http://www.vendian.org/envelope/dir2/lo ... _dots.html

[Absaroka]

Tekla is right about the math not always being clear at first glance. And also right about orders of magnitude and size of numbers.

Speaking just of the USA. 300 million people is a lot of people. Generally speaking 30,000 to 60.000 people are expected to die of the flue every year. That is 1 to 2 to the -4 power-the sort of number my calculator uses scientific notation for. It is .01 to .02 %. And it's a number we hardly pay attention to at all unless we work for the CDC or have someone we know die of the flu. But it is a lot of people. For example total American deaths in the Viet Nam war were a little under 60,000.


My point is even a small percent of the popluation of a country like ours turns into a large number.

Now think of all the people you've spoken to in your life. Lets say it was 2000 which is probably low. Eliminate half as being women. At 1% that means you've had contact with 10 CDers out of that thousand.

This nice to know since like some of us here I thought I was probably 1 in a million. Maybe I'm only 1 in 1000.


Absaroka

[Tekla]

Most flu deaths are people at risk, either very old, or very young, or already sick. Those 58,209 who died in Nam (8 were women) plus the 2,000 or so that went 'missing' were in the prime of their life, huge difference.

And that is but a fraction. South VN lost over a 1/4 million, North VN and the NLF (VC) over a million, add 2-5 million civilians, and it starts adding up to real numbers.

But even you you are one-in-a-million then there are 6,000 people just like you, more or less. And its scary when you meet one of them.

[Kerri]

Hi Tekla,

Your the kind of person I would like to have in my address book.
I cannot understand statistics etc yet in my job have to generate and graph them regularly.

I know its off the thread; but would you know the origin or the reason why some accident / incident frequency rates are calculated on a base of 100,000 hrs , some on 200,000 hours and now it seems based upon 1,000,000 hrs. It is the latter figure I am keen to trace to its origin. Since 100K is from UK, 200K is from OSHA & USA. Where is 1G from?

cheers
Kerri

[Absaroka]

Tekla no arguement from me about your numbers. I think total Vietnamese deaths came to several percent of their population, and that isn't counting the maimed. Additionally there is the fact that as you pointed out the the soldiers deaths were people with lives ahead of them. And there is the idea that war deaths are due to the failure of humanities leaders where as some disease deaths are an inevitable end of our lives.

The point was more about quantity and statistics and how we react to them. Your reply highlights the fact that statistics really have nothing to do sometimes with what is really happening.

Absaroka

[Tekla]

I think that is superbly exemplified by health stuff. People panic over stuff like Alar in apples (where the risk is minimal, first it effects only people who eat apples, and you would have to eat a ton to have any effect), but if anyone really looks at at statistics, the one thing you would never do if you cared about your life and health is go anywhere near a car. Cars are a leading source of non-natural death and crippling injury .

In fact, they are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 6 and 27. Number One Cause! So even if you don't care about yourself, you never let your kid into a car. After all, who would not want to eliminate the number one cause of death? Mom's run around like they are crazy trying to keep their kids safe from minor causes of death then pile them into the car.

Fact is we cherry pick out stats. And that's when we even begin to have a real clue as to what they are and what they mean. Often I hear something to the order of "The number of BLANK has risen/fallen XX% in the last year." Now I'm sure that people hearing that think "good,or bad" depending on what the blank is and if the stat is up or down. In reality, that stat is 100% pure trash. Its exact meaning is nothing.

Here is what I mean. Any number, taken in isolation says zip. You have to know the pattern, not an isolated example. Because any variation rises and falls as a natural consequence, and here and there spikes also happen. So you have to know what the number was in its sequence to see if it has any real meaning, and you have to know if there was some variation in events that might come to influence events. And you have to have enough statistics to be able to judge if its just one of those spikes. In isolation the number all by itself is nothing.

The second deal with most statistics, is a whole different version of the missing information above, which is the use of fact and figures not in evidence. For example, a bunch of my friends and me were camping. On the radio was some NPR news deal that gave out information on 'America's declining forests' and one of the figures they used had to deal with "board feet of lumber." Fine and dandy, but what exactly is a board foot of lumber? How does that translate into trees, or acres of trees. None of us knew, and between the 6 of us there were over 10 college degrees. One of us even grew up in Northern Wisconsin, in timber and logging country and was clueless. The point being, we had no frame of reference to be able to apply that number to.

That's why above I used the states and cities as population guides. Hoping that in some way the numbers in the millions might make sense. What's 12 million? How Much? Hard to imagine. But if I say, "its the population of the Greater New York Metro Area" then its a bit easier to comprehend. Anyone from the East Coast who has been through NYC and its suburbs knows that its a whole lot of people for sure. And if I say - There are more CDs in the US (the 10% number) then in NYC Metro, its a bit easier to look at it and say - "that seems off somehow."

A best selling analysis of how and why people misuse, and misunderstand statistics, with some mind bending examples (like how the legalization of abortion brought about a drop in the crime rate) check out this book:

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
by Steven D. Levitt, and Stephen J. Dubner

So popular that its devotees (and I'm one of them) and users of the theories in it simply call it "Freakco." It was my pick for my Xmas book (everyone on my list gets the same book, and something else, that way we can all talk about something) and it got high praises from everyone even though most have little to no formal training in economics.

[Absaroka]

I believe it was Mark Twain who said there are three types of lies, a lie, a damn lie, and statistics.

49.9999999999999999999999999999999999 % of the population is of below average intelligence. Which calls to mind the fact that we aren't even sure what intelligence is.


But we digress from the subject of how many of us there are.

Absaroka

[Tekla]

The National Transgender Advocacy Coalition website claims that between 2 and 3 percent of the American population is transgender and that about 10 percent of them are homosexual.

The National Center for Transgender Equality has a range of between 750K, to 3 million

1% according to the State of New Jersey, stats compiled (though I don't know how) when passing thier transgender protection act.

As with minority sexual orientation, the percentage of the population having gender dysphoria is in dispute, with estimates ranging between one in 39,000 individuals up to three percent of the general population. My experience leads me to feel that the higher figure (3%) is closer to the actual prevalence. -- Dr. Carl W. Bushong / Tampa Gender Identity Program
his web site:
http://www.transgendercare.com/guidance ... gender.htm

The GLBT market spends an estimated $464,000,000,000. The transgendered population of the United States is generally recognized to be 10% of the GLBT population of 16,000,000 and as such they spend roughly $46,000,000,000 annually.

http://gurlzsteppinout.blogspot.com/200 ... ender.html


NOTE: All of these people and or groups have a vested and economic interest in getting a high number which might skew it, but I would take even the 1.6 million. Still all fall within my order of magnitude estimate that the true figure would be a single digit percentage. The difference between 1% and 3% is not a huge margin of error, matter of fact, its dead on within the standard deviation for margins of error.

[JoAnnDallas]

Absaroka wrote

Now think of all the people you've spoken to in your life. Lets say it was 2000 which is probably low. Eliminate half as being women. At 1% that means you've had contact with 10 CDers out of that thousand.

Guess I must way above average. There were 20 CD's at my last Tri-Ess meeting.

[Tekla]

Problem with that is its a self selecting group so its a not a valid cross section. I teach reading in prisons, so if I did a survey there of who has been arrested for a felony I would get a number in the high 90%s, because I assume the guards haven't, and neither have I. But I doubt that 90% of the population are convicted felons. (Unconvicted perhaps... after all everything is legal in Cali as long as you don't get caught)

And there is a way to estimate the number of people you have talked to in your life, at least to an order of magnitude. Which is the same numbers game I played with TGs to come up with the roughly the same percentage figures that some of the leading TG organizations seem to have, and I have to assume that they came up with it in some method more scientific than guessing.

I used to drive my kids crazy (at least until they became as crazy as I was) by asking them questions like that on long car trips. ("We can play numbers games or I can put another full length Grateful Dead concert on???" "OK dad, ask the question.") So I would ask them to figure out how many times in their life they would hear their own name, or how many checks a person writes in their life, or how many piano tuners there are in the city of Chicago. Again, it was not getting to a real number, but rather using information you have to reach an order of magnitude (ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, ect.) through the use of math. The real reason was to get them to think in terms of numbers, so they could evaluate statements and find out if they are close (in the ballpark) or just total B.S.

So, how many people will I talk to in my life? How many per day? Are all days equal? Get a figure for how many a week, X 52, X 70 (average life). An internet bookkeeper might have a low number per week, only a few. I work in concerts, so I might have a bigger number, closer to 70-100 per day - I will hit 30 just from the crews, another 40-50 ushers, bar people, and security people I know and talk to as I do my rounds, and I'm at 80 without even talking to any members of the public, and I'm going to flirt with at least 5, answer questions for a few more - so say 100 is pretty close (and easier to work with than say 93). You could refine it by subtracting the first 5 years of your life where the number was very low perhaps only 1 or 2, and doing a different calculation for your school years - which would be a high figure. And during the 10 years I taught, do I count the people I lectured to? Some of those were in the hundreds at a time, well over a 1,000 a week. So you can work that out for yourself.

You might well be shocked as to how high that number really is. For example, if you talk to a steady 40 or so every day (say a sales person), you might well talk to a million in your life.

[Absaroka]

It's estimated that over 90 % of the adult populatin has committed at least one felony in their life. (I learned that back in criminology a long time ago) Yet the majority of them are not criminals. It has to be considered that felonys include drug charges, tax evasion and assault with a weapon which means if you hit another boy with a stick during a fist fight when you were 15 you committed a felony.

Likewise close to half the adult male population has had at least one homosexual experience. This includes stuff like a circle jerk or being molested as a child by another male. But most of these people are not homosexuals.

On to one of my favorites. The statistics about teenage drinking, which by the way I think can be and is a real problem. But the statistics when they are read lump together the teenager who occaisionally drinks wine at dinner like most of the Italian kids I knew growing up did with the teenage alcoholic.

As has been pointed out here numerous times our clothing preferences exist on a broad continuum, from the man who once dressed as a female on halloween to someone who enjoys solitary sex with someones underwear to someone who is involved in the theater to someone who really feels their body does not reflect their gender.

Here's another interesting statistical tidbit. Some years ago, around the last census, there was a movement for a new category of ethnicity, namely inter racial. I forget how it was resolved. But I do remember that their were some spokespeople, often but not always in the Black community, who disliked the idea. Since most Black people in the US are actually part African and part European ancestry it was feared that this accounting change would lead to a decrease in the number of officially Black people in the country and that it would further lead some inter racial people to distance themselves from the Black community. Which brings to mind Tekla's comment about statistics being compiled with an agenda of making a particular group look large.

As to the original question of how many of us are there does seem to be a consensus. There are a lot more of us than is generally thought. Which is also information available in a great many books on gender and sexuality, although it usually doesn't warrant more than a page or two.

Absaroka

[Tekla]

There may be more of us than some thought, though the 10% has been bandied about above, still in stat land 1-3% is considered "statistically irrelevant." Which is why our continuing support for, and from, the gay community is so critical.