Keep this in mind as the madness continues to gather steam.
Via NYT:
When Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce Jenner, unveiled her new name, appearance and TV show last week, it shined a light on transgender Americans. But much about the community, such as its size, remains opaque.
The main reason is that the United States Census Bureau and other keepers of official records do not ask about gender identity. Also, gender identity can be fluid and hard to define in a multiple-choice list. There are now more than 50 gender options on Facebook, for instance.
Some researchers are also concerned that the number is undercounted because of a reluctance among some transgender people to discuss it with survey takers or signify it on a government form. In a study by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 71 percent of transgender people said they hid their gender or gender transition to try to avoid discrimination. […]
Before Mr. Harris’s paper, researchers studied the transgender population using surveys. Administrative data from government records provides a different look, because surveys must be very large to accurately quantify such a small population, and respondents to gender identity surveys have generally been disproportionately younger, white and educated.
Mr. Harris said the techniques he used could provide information on transgender people’s earnings and employment, marriage and divorce, household characteristics, access to health care or incarceration rates.
He cautioned that the Social Security data does not represent everyone who is transgender. It excludes people who have not changed their names, who have not notified the Social Security Administration, who transitioned before they were 16 or who do not have a Social Security number. (The use of Social Security numbers as a universal identifier began in the 1970s, and newborns were not routinely assigned numbers until the 1980s.)
Another paper, published in 2011 by the Williams Institute, used survey data to attempt to count the transgender population. It estimated that 0.3 percent of the population, or 700,000 adults, identified that way.
It used data from two surveys. One was a statewide health survey in Massachusetts that asked people if they were transgender and found that 0.5 percent of people said they were. Another was a California survey about tobacco use among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Just over 3 percent identified as transgender, implying that 0.1 percent of adults in California were transgender, based on the Williams Institute’s estimate of the percentage of the total population that is L.G.B.T. (3.5 percent).
Mr. Gates of the Williams Institute, who wrote the paper, says his conclusion that 0.3 percent of the total population is transgender is only a rough estimate. The institute announced in March that it was part of a group undertaking a survey of 350,000 people, conducted by Gallup, to study the transgender population.