Correlation isn't causation, and all that jazz, and I'm not sure how you'd go about testing this: I am not surprised that the share of people self-identifying as trans (especially on a survey; "Where is this information going and who is tracking it?") is in decline given the increasing levels of fear I hear in the trans community as a result of our current political environment.
Just a quick acknowledgment of a previous comment I deleted, in which I got confused on dates and timeline (been a busy morning). Yes, this decline starts before Trump returns to office. However: I did not mention any specific candidate, but only the political environment. The attacks on trans communities has been steadily growing over several years.
Those attacks were largely without backing during Biden's term,-- indeed, Biden and his people were supportive. At that point there's "trangressive" cred in being trans. Yet the identity still declines.
Burge states but does not elaborate on the possibility that the true outlier year was 2020 and the Pandemic was somehow responsible for an excessive number of people claiming that identity, which then fell back to the baseline as things normalized again.
I think there are lots of possibilities here, and I am not doubting Burge's assessment that 2020 may be an outlier, just as he does not completely dismiss the possibility of my suggestion. The increasing antagonism toward trans people may not have been "backed" at a federal level, but we live in a large and complex society; perhaps Biden supported trans people, but that does not mean local or state lawmakers and politicians, as well as other societal leaders and shapers, did. I only have anecdotal evidence from the trans community members I know and from the stories I have heard over the past decade as trans issues — and backlash — have risen to more and more public conversation. I do wonder why you are so intent on flatly dismissing this possibility.
Re: I do wonder why you are so intent on flatly dismissing this possibility.
Probably because I have lived in places-- Baltimore, beach resort Delaware and now St Pete FL-- where there has been little to none of that hostility. I would expect "trans" people to move to such places if they found their own locality too unfriendly,. That's how assorted gay people lived for years before social acceptance became general.
And as a general rule I see politics as being derivative of culture, not the other way around.
This is really, wildly silly reasoning. *Some* gay people moved to those places when the country was more hostile to gay people; *most* simply remained closeted or mostly closeted. And, certainly, as societal acceptance of LGB people has grown, so, too, has the number of LGB people living openly all over the country. Additionally, your use of quotation marks around the word trans is very telling. This no longer seems like a rational, well-informed, and logical conversation, so I'll move on, but I hope you have a great day!
Of course it's impossible to talk about the "why" of any quantitative research without solid, well-conducted qualitative follow-up. But we get to possibilities by first looking at trends.
I'm very interested in this conversation because I was a proponent of inclusion of gay humans in Christian communities in the 1980s (when it could end your own inclusion to be so). Back then there was a study that created relatively safe ways for people to report on sexuality in far-ranging parts of the world, with important results: roughly 9% of every population self-reported some form of "sexual minority" status.
I suspect that today the study would be limited in that we had no terms for aros or polys back then, and language helps people determine their identities.
That leads me to wonder about the spike in U.S. folks identifying as transgender - are they in more clearly-defined groups today then people were aware of back in 2020? Ryan seems to find this with "non-binary" and "other" categories, to an extent. Also, we know that for a large percentage of people, healthy sexual development can include times of uncertainty and questioning of their own sexuality (why anti-gay groups are always destructive, not to mention some who seem to base their identities on gay advocacy). Did awareness and support for transgender persons lead those who felt unsettled in their sexuality to claim transgender identity?
Good research isn't judged by the solidity of its conclusions, but by the complexity of the questions it raises. Thank you for this, Ryan.
I think this might just be real-world difficulty in measuring small portions of a large population. Similar to the smaller Christian Sects that pop up in the religion data, it's hard to get an accurate count and measurement from minority populations.
This is the rub with all the work that I do on these small groups. And even if I had an unlimited research budget, I'm not sure I could even do a much better job at providing estimates.
In the trans community most people's biggest goal is to pass, i.e. look like a cis person, and after they most people go stealth. They don't tell people their status and live their life like any other normal person of their sex. On of the criteria to allow people to transition was would they be able to go pass after transition. The reason for this secrecy is safety. Around 50% of trans people experience sexual violence and they are 4x more likely to report experiencing violence to the police. Transgender youth are about 10x more likely to experience homelessness, usually because they have been thrown out of their homes by unaccepting families.
So on the data, as Ryan pointed in 2021 the Republican party targeted trans people and Republican trans people disappeared. For a small movement it appeared that it might be safe to be trans in America, but that moment passed quickly and people started takent not of the laws being passed against us and started going back into hiding. As of mid 2022 people were already asking. "I live in x state, should I flee/transition/come out?" (https://x.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1549162866141528064) and had been tracking anti-trans legislation and posting risk assement maps (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FX-527NX0AAocbd?format=jpg&name=4096x4096). Today it is much worse, the national environment has affected almost everyone, people talk about contingency plans. Many people have already left. And the risk assessment maps are dire (https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/anti-trans-national-legal-risk-assessment).
With Indiana and Texas making lists of their trans people, and Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas seeking information on their trans residents, I am surprised that anyone is still answering yes on a survey that they are trans. It is a big risk with no upside. You can see that in the data, the people who are trans and Republican would be taking the biggest risk so they are least likely to out themselves.
Such small changes, percentage wise, in such a small population, makes it hard to derive anything meaningful.
Out of curiosity, I poked around the U.S. trans survery (https://ustranssurvey.org/) and it doesn't appear to have asked any questions about religion at all, even for demographic purposes, which might've produced some interesting results for a blog like this one. Getting substantive data on 1% of the population is really tough!
From my experience, there was a brief period where biological males who dated biological females but who painted their fingernails black, called themselves transgender. Now it's just a guy who paints his nails.
Correlation isn't causation, and all that jazz, and I'm not sure how you'd go about testing this: I am not surprised that the share of people self-identifying as trans (especially on a survey; "Where is this information going and who is tracking it?") is in decline given the increasing levels of fear I hear in the trans community as a result of our current political environment.
Acknowledging this possibility and also acknowledging that there's really no way to mitigate this concern.
"I know you said you weren't trans, but is that really because you are just afraid that identifying as trans will cause you harm?"
Online surveys mitigate this a bit, but I'm sure it doesn't alleviate all of it.
The decline began before Trump returned to office.
Just a quick acknowledgment of a previous comment I deleted, in which I got confused on dates and timeline (been a busy morning). Yes, this decline starts before Trump returns to office. However: I did not mention any specific candidate, but only the political environment. The attacks on trans communities has been steadily growing over several years.
Those attacks were largely without backing during Biden's term,-- indeed, Biden and his people were supportive. At that point there's "trangressive" cred in being trans. Yet the identity still declines.
Burge states but does not elaborate on the possibility that the true outlier year was 2020 and the Pandemic was somehow responsible for an excessive number of people claiming that identity, which then fell back to the baseline as things normalized again.
I think there are lots of possibilities here, and I am not doubting Burge's assessment that 2020 may be an outlier, just as he does not completely dismiss the possibility of my suggestion. The increasing antagonism toward trans people may not have been "backed" at a federal level, but we live in a large and complex society; perhaps Biden supported trans people, but that does not mean local or state lawmakers and politicians, as well as other societal leaders and shapers, did. I only have anecdotal evidence from the trans community members I know and from the stories I have heard over the past decade as trans issues — and backlash — have risen to more and more public conversation. I do wonder why you are so intent on flatly dismissing this possibility.
Re: I do wonder why you are so intent on flatly dismissing this possibility.
Probably because I have lived in places-- Baltimore, beach resort Delaware and now St Pete FL-- where there has been little to none of that hostility. I would expect "trans" people to move to such places if they found their own locality too unfriendly,. That's how assorted gay people lived for years before social acceptance became general.
And as a general rule I see politics as being derivative of culture, not the other way around.
This is really, wildly silly reasoning. *Some* gay people moved to those places when the country was more hostile to gay people; *most* simply remained closeted or mostly closeted. And, certainly, as societal acceptance of LGB people has grown, so, too, has the number of LGB people living openly all over the country. Additionally, your use of quotation marks around the word trans is very telling. This no longer seems like a rational, well-informed, and logical conversation, so I'll move on, but I hope you have a great day!
The attacks started well before Trump returned to office. And the trans community started returning back into hiding before Trump returned to office.
Of course it's impossible to talk about the "why" of any quantitative research without solid, well-conducted qualitative follow-up. But we get to possibilities by first looking at trends.
I'm very interested in this conversation because I was a proponent of inclusion of gay humans in Christian communities in the 1980s (when it could end your own inclusion to be so). Back then there was a study that created relatively safe ways for people to report on sexuality in far-ranging parts of the world, with important results: roughly 9% of every population self-reported some form of "sexual minority" status.
I suspect that today the study would be limited in that we had no terms for aros or polys back then, and language helps people determine their identities.
That leads me to wonder about the spike in U.S. folks identifying as transgender - are they in more clearly-defined groups today then people were aware of back in 2020? Ryan seems to find this with "non-binary" and "other" categories, to an extent. Also, we know that for a large percentage of people, healthy sexual development can include times of uncertainty and questioning of their own sexuality (why anti-gay groups are always destructive, not to mention some who seem to base their identities on gay advocacy). Did awareness and support for transgender persons lead those who felt unsettled in their sexuality to claim transgender identity?
Good research isn't judged by the solidity of its conclusions, but by the complexity of the questions it raises. Thank you for this, Ryan.
I think this might just be real-world difficulty in measuring small portions of a large population. Similar to the smaller Christian Sects that pop up in the religion data, it's hard to get an accurate count and measurement from minority populations.
This is the rub with all the work that I do on these small groups. And even if I had an unlimited research budget, I'm not sure I could even do a much better job at providing estimates.
In the trans community most people's biggest goal is to pass, i.e. look like a cis person, and after they most people go stealth. They don't tell people their status and live their life like any other normal person of their sex. On of the criteria to allow people to transition was would they be able to go pass after transition. The reason for this secrecy is safety. Around 50% of trans people experience sexual violence and they are 4x more likely to report experiencing violence to the police. Transgender youth are about 10x more likely to experience homelessness, usually because they have been thrown out of their homes by unaccepting families.
So on the data, as Ryan pointed in 2021 the Republican party targeted trans people and Republican trans people disappeared. For a small movement it appeared that it might be safe to be trans in America, but that moment passed quickly and people started takent not of the laws being passed against us and started going back into hiding. As of mid 2022 people were already asking. "I live in x state, should I flee/transition/come out?" (https://x.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1549162866141528064) and had been tracking anti-trans legislation and posting risk assement maps (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FX-527NX0AAocbd?format=jpg&name=4096x4096). Today it is much worse, the national environment has affected almost everyone, people talk about contingency plans. Many people have already left. And the risk assessment maps are dire (https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/anti-trans-national-legal-risk-assessment).
With Indiana and Texas making lists of their trans people, and Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas seeking information on their trans residents, I am surprised that anyone is still answering yes on a survey that they are trans. It is a big risk with no upside. You can see that in the data, the people who are trans and Republican would be taking the biggest risk so they are least likely to out themselves.
Such small changes, percentage wise, in such a small population, makes it hard to derive anything meaningful.
Out of curiosity, I poked around the U.S. trans survery (https://ustranssurvey.org/) and it doesn't appear to have asked any questions about religion at all, even for demographic purposes, which might've produced some interesting results for a blog like this one. Getting substantive data on 1% of the population is really tough!
From my experience, there was a brief period where biological males who dated biological females but who painted their fingernails black, called themselves transgender. Now it's just a guy who paints his nails.
Evidently repression still works?