How common is ->-bleeped-<-?

[Cody Jensen]

Hi all, I'm a trans guy struggling to come out to my family about it. I'm just curious: how common is ->-bleeped-<-? I know a kid in my school who was trans and got the top surgery so I figured it can't be that uncommon. Should I come out now or live a bit longer as a girl? I'm just scared because I really can't say if my family will leave me or not. And I'm scared that I might regret it for some reason. Any advice?

PS- I'm sorry if I offend you in any way...

[Nathan.]

In the UK I think 1 in 4000 is transsexual not sure if it's any different anywhere else.

Come out when you feel comfortable to. I came out pretty much as soon as I realised I was trans but I knew that most people would accept it.

[Bird]

The medicine books I have read point that for biological males its 1 for 40.000 people, among biological females it's 1 in 100.000.

[meh]

 The latest estimates for ->-bleeped-<- are "in the range of 1:500 to 1:250. This is roughly 100 times the number (1:30,000) published by the APA in the DSM-IV-TR Therefore, the DSM-IV prevalence numbers are wrong by more than two orders of magnitude*."

- http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TS-II.html#anchor635615

These numbers are for MtFs only, not too sure about FtMs. I'm thinking it's about the same though.

[Bird]

The article you link to points its 1:2500 not 1:250. Anyway, I can point off the bat that the prevalence they mention of schizophrenia is completely off. In addition, they don't mention exactly where they got all their information from. I mean, it doesn't follows any standards set by the medical community for scientific articles or info.

Of course, everyone is entitled to believe in what they want. I don't want to start a argument over this, but merely wanted to point a different view.

[Izumi]

Hi all, I'm a trans guy struggling to come out to my family about it. I'm just curious: how common is ->-bleeped-<-? I know a kid in my school who was trans and got the top surgery so I figured it can't be that uncommon. Should I come out now or live a bit longer as a girl? I'm just scared because I really can't say if my family will leave me or not. And I'm scared that I might regret it for some reason. Any advice?

PS- I'm sorry if I offend you in any way...

TS is uncommon, like you mentioned 1 in your whole school, but a lot of people wait to transition so their maybe more but are afraid to.  my advice to you, if you are TS deal with it as quick as you can, DO NOT PUT IT OFF, you will only regret it.  I transitioned at 32, and wish everyday that i  had done it before my teens because the quality of life for me is so much better, but it is a lot of hard work to get through it.

Also dont do the mistake of saying, mom, dad,  i want to be a girl.  They will think your crazy and made it up or its a phase.  If you have felt this way a long time or since you could remember use that.  Sit your parents down, and go through your life with them, year by year, explain things they saw and things they didnt see.  Things like... Remember when i this happened and that happened... Show them your life and make them realize this is something you had for a long time.  At the end say you have to see a therapist, if the therapist says you are TS then tell your parents the situation.  TS is theorized to be caused by genetics, more and more proof is coming out to support that.  You were born like this, and it is impossible for you to run from it, eventually you have to face it.  Also let them know its common for TS people to have normal lives like everyone else.  Heck i have a pretty normal one, in 5 years i will be a housewife even.  I could be your mom's friend and she might not even know it... thats how normal.. 

Anyway, do some research provide facts to your parents, give them the shocker once you have all the materials together and your therapist confirms it, it will go a lot smoother.

[K8]

When I came out to my brother, he asked that question (how often does it occur?).  I told him the figures I had at the time: somewhere between 1 in 500 and 1 in 20,000 births.  He dismissed it because of the huge range.  If you look at how they come up with the estimates, it looks to be more like 1 in 2,500 or so - uncommon but far more common than other conditions people can be born with.

Josh, can you get some counseling?  If you are still living in your parents' house you should consider their probable reaciton before coming out to them.  Is there someone else you can come out to first?  Or at least talk to about whether you may or may not be trans?

Yes, the earlier you begin transition the better physical results you will get.  But you need to do it when you are ready and not before.  People who rush into it often have problems.  There is no deadline (like, if you don't do it before age XX you will fail).  There is far more to it than the physical aspects.  Do it at your own pace and when you are ready.

- Kate

[Lacey Lynne]

My advice to you, if you are TS deal with it as quick as you can, DO NOT PUT IT OFF, you will only regret it.  I transitioned at 32, and wish everyday that i  had done it before my teens because the quality of life for me is so much better, but it is a lot of hard work to get through it.

TS is theorized to be caused by genetics, more and more proof is coming out to support that.  You were born like this, and it is impossible for you to run from it, eventually you have to face it.  Also let them know its common for TS people to have normal lives like everyone else.  Heck i have a pretty normal one, in 5 years i will be a housewife even.  I could be your mom's friend and she might not even know it... thats how normal.. 

Izumi is spot-on right.  Young ones, listen to her.  She knows exactly what she's talking about.

Feel free to consider me an example of what NOT to do.  Don't waste the best years of your true life by missing out on them.  Don't seek transition in a frenzied last-ditch effort of desperation to finally transition before it's too late.  I'm telling you:  It's a stone-cold drag.  We older T-girls rationalize our late transitions and put great spin on them.  Well, often times, I think we're kidding ourselves.  Maybe I'm only speaking for myself here.  Way deep down inside, in the wee hours of the morning when we're alone with our thoughts ... we realize we've blown it.   All the REALLY good girl stuff?  Ain't NEVER gonna have it.       At least, that's what I do.  Again, I cannot speak for the other older T-girls here. 

The stark-naked truth in my case is:

I WISH I HAD TRANSITIONED IN MY MID-TEENS!

No, it couldn't be done in the mid-to-late-1960s in my particular circumstances.  Impossible.  Believe me, things were VERY different then.  I'll stop now.  Don't want to go on and on and bore you.

Izumi's totally right:  TRANSITION AS EARLY AS YOU CAN ... if transitioning is what you want.

[spacial]

Have to agree with Lacey Lynne.

We have a lot in common, similar ages, similar social experiences.

I don't like looking back with regrets, but I could have done so much mroe if I hadn't had to spend my time pretending to be a man.

[Teknoir]

More common than you'd think. We're everywhere

I've heard ranges for FTMs anywhere between 1:2500 and 1:100000

But really, do the numbers even really matter that much?

Personally, I don't think it's important. What's important is you. How you feel. It's doesn't really matter if you're the one in 2500 or 100000... or even a million. You should live your life how you want to live it, even if it's a relatively uncommon way to go about it.

I was put off by statistics many years ago. For a long time, I couldn't or didn't seriously believe I could possibly be trans because there was no way I could be that "special". I thought that perhaps I was just looking for a way to be different - and that my chances of really being that "one in very large number" were so remote, I was most likely mistaken about myself.

You are who you are. Statistics are just statistics - a curious distraction, but never take them to heart.

Regarding the number ranges - perhaps there is a difference in what different researchers count as "transgendered"?

Perhaps some are counting self reports, some are counting legal document gender marker changes, some counting those undergoing HRT, and others counting full bottom surgery only?

Just a thought .

[Pippa]

I think it is definitely more common than most people realise.   It is not the researchers fault as they can only survey what they see.   Too many transgender people live in a state of fear and do not want to open out to the world about their status.   It took me 30 years to reduce the fear to a level where I was cofident enough to come out.  I am sure that my case is not unusual.   

There is such a wide limit of error to make many surveys pointless.

[spacial]

Pippa makes a really good point.

[justmeinoz]

Pippa makes a good point, it is more common than people realise.

How common, when the person involved is the only one who diagnoses it, is hard to say.  For those who have been diagnosed however, the probability is 100%. 

As Izumi rightly points out, it is better to act sooner rather than wait, in my case for another 40+ years, but then again in the 1960's in Australia, transition was virtually non-existent. ( The first SRS procedure wasn't performed here until 1972 as far as I know.) 

As  a parent, I would caution against  blurting out , "Mum I want to be a girl" too.  Far better to take the path of asking their help with finding a therapist regarding issues of gender and identity, especially if you think you may be suffering form depresion too. 

If you can stress that it is more than the usual teenag angst,  they hopefully will want to help you sort things out. If the therapist says you have GID it will carry more authority.  If you father is like most men, once he recognises it as a problem , he will be oriented to finding a way to fix it.  Your mother on the other hand will probably react more emotionally. 

Hope things work out , Sandra.

[Bird]

When I was a teen, one of my biggest psychological conflicts was if I should study music or study medicine.

On one hand, I was (and am) fairly talented, on another, if I went to music I would never be able to develop my wishes to be a doctor, where, if I studie medicine, I would not lose my talent for music. One day, I came up with this to the mother of a friend. She was the owner of a music school and her daughter was studying to become a professional pianist.

She told me to just calm down and think it over, because each person has their own history.

So, we all could have transitioned mid-teens but didn't for oh so many reasons, but its how things went. I didn't have maturity to face my parents back then, now I have. I figure it is better to have a bit less hip than be psychologicaly broken for life.

But yea, its better to do it as soon as possible, I agree with everyone on this. Don't let anything stand on your way.

[meh]

The article you link to points its 1:2500 not 1:250. Anyway, I can point off the bat that the prevalence they mention of schizophrenia is completely off. In addition, they don't mention exactly where they got all their information from. I mean, it doesn't follows any standards set by the medical community for scientific articles or info.

Of course, everyone is entitled to believe in what they want. I don't want to start a argument over this, but merely wanted to point a different view.

I copied it directly from the page further down. "These studies begin to triangulate on a likely prevalence of intense MtF transsexualism in the range of 1:500 to 1:250. This is roughly 100 times the number (1:30,000) published by the APA in the DSM-IV-TR! Therefore, the DSM-IV prevalence numbers are wrong by more than two orders of magnitude*."

And this is where they got their numbers:

"In this investigative report we calculate an approximate value of the lower bound of the prevalence of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism in the United States, based on estimates of the numbers of sex reassignment surgeries performed on U.S. residents during the past four decades. We find that the prevalence of SRS is at least on the order of 1:2500, and may be twice that value. We thus find that the intrinsic prevalence of MtF transsexualism must be on the order of ~1:500 and may be even larger than that. We show that these results are consistent with studies of TS prevalence emerging in recent studies in other countries. Our results stand is sharp contrast to the value of prevalence (1:30,000) so oft-quoted by "expert authorities" in the U.S. psychiatric community to whom the media turns for such information. We ponder why that community might persist in quoting values of prevalence that are roughly two full orders-of-magnitude (a factor of ~100) too small. Finally, we discuss the challenge that our much larger and more realistic numbers present to the medical community, public health community, social welfare community and government bureaucracies."   

"We can do a quick sanity check of these results by calculating postop prevalence in a totally different way. Here we will calculating is "incrementally". We can do this by dividing the ongoing incidence of SRS each year by the incidence of male births in the U.S. each year. Since there are now about 1500 to 2000 SRS's per year and about 2,000,000 male births each year in the U.S, we find an incremental value for prevalence of between 1500/2,000,000 = 1:1333 and 2000/2,000,000 = 1:1000.

"This result is actually more than twice that of the value calculated above ( 1:2500), because the (annual) incidence of SRS has risen over the past decades while the (annual) incidence of male births has remained fairly stable. This value is therefore somewhat closer to the intrinsic prevalence than earlier incremental values decades ago, because of more widespread knowledge of and access to treatments and a reduction in the stigmatization of transsexual people in recent years. This incrementally-determined value of recent SRS prevalence strongly supports a value of intrinsic TS prevalence of 1:500, and suggests that it is perhaps as high as 1:250."

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html

[Arch]

Depending on one's definition, ->-bleeped-<- is fairly common. It's transsexualism that is fairly uncommon.

[K8]

Why are the calculations tied to births in a given year instead of total male/female population for that year?

Is it because the total number of people who completed SRS in the U.S. would be needed, which is unknown?

I thought that it was just how they describe it.  1 in 10,000 births is easier to picture than 0.01%, which is the same frequency.  It also points out that this is something one is born with.  Birth defects are usually stated as occurring in 1 out of so many births.

- Kate

[My Name Is Ellie]

I will never agree with any extrapolated tests like that for one reason: I have never been asked. How many people did they ask? How many did they not? Where did they find these people - were they chosen randomly? If so, as randomly as possible - or all nearby? Could environmental factors such as the public view of GID, public education, or knowing there are others in the area who are out, affect people's results there in any way? Is it a liberal country where the tests were taken? Etc.

And by the fact I haven't been asked I know there is at least one result missing - and you can't extrapolate to say "oh well by this you're probably x or probably not y" because it doesn't work like that.

Sorry statistical rant there, I've been reading Ben Goldacre.

---

Regardless, I think the answer is: more than a lot of people think.

[K8]

One set of figures I saw was based on the number of surgeries in a year, which of course ignores non-ops and people who go out-of-country for their surgery.  All methods are flawed to some extent, some more than others - that's why you have to read how they came up with the number. 

Unless it was a census question, I'm not sure how they could ever get an accurate number.  But I don't think accuracy is necessary.  The question isn't so much how many are there exactly, but how often does this phenomenon occur?  1 in 10?  1 in 100?  1 in 1,000?  etc.

Look at the numbers for homosexuality.  The usual number used is 10% (or 1 in 10).  I've seen some studies that suggest it could be more like 6 or 7%, but most people have settled on 10% as a nice round ballpark number.

- Kate

[Bird]

It is not possible to ask everyone unless you do a country wide census.

When they do that kind of research, there is a mathematical way of finding out what population amount they can extrapolate to.

So, say, you want to figure out the disease frequency in a certain populace, you survey N amount of people of that populace and find out what the frequency in that N population is. Based on this formula you can come up also with the chance of statical error and thus the number you found can be calculated to range from say... 1% to 4% or whatever.

If you don't survey enough people to come up with a decent sized N, your study is worthless because there is a huge chance that in the population you surveyed there were a lot more, or a lot less people, with the condition you were studying than in the population as a whole.