Analysis and statistics

[Nina Femrite]

Not long ago, I heard an interview on the radio (I don't remember any of the names). The person being interviewed was saying that she sees gender as a scale. She said, imagine that there's a scale, from 1 to 10, with 1 being purely masculine and 10 being purely feminine. Everyone would be somewhere along that scale, but no one would likely be either a 1 or a 10. Even the most masculine male has some feminine tendencies and the same is true for virtually all women. This isn't something we necessarily choose. Of course, western society has traditional limits of acceptance but the bottom line is that we arbitralily fall somewhere on that scale. We might try to hide where we fall on the scale, for obvious reasons, but a person's sex can, from time to time, have little to do with their gender. For the most part, we reflect the gender of the sex we were born with but crossdressers are testimony that there are no rules.

One question is: How many are born with a sex but have the gender of the opposite? Maybe this is a good question and maybe not. I've heard various statistics that range anywhere from 1% to 10% of men are crossdressers. Personally, I don't believe that it's as high as 10% nor do I believe it's as low as 1%. But, just for arguments sake, let's make the assumption that 1% of all men are crossdressers and take the city of Los Angeles, which is close to where I live, as an example. There are approximately 7 million people living in that city. If we assume that about half that number are genetic males, that gives us a male population of 3.5 million. One per cent of that number is 35,000. In my mind that's a fairly significant number. Even if you were to say only one tenth of one per cent of men in Los Angeles crossdress, you'd still have 3,500 crossdressers in that one city alone.

What do these statistics mean? Absolutely nothing. As a crossdresser I go to great lengths to keep my feminine side a closely guarded secret. However, I do take some small comfort in knowing that I'm not completely alone.

[Elizabeth]

Hi Nina,

Greater Los Angeles, or the Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA, a standard U.S. Census Bureau designation), includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties. In 2000 the Los Angeles CMSA was the second-largest CMSA in the United States (after the greater New York CMSA) in terms of population, with 16,373,645 people.

I have also considered this, except on the scale of the Greater Los Angeles area with 16 million people. I personally beleive the figure is somewhere between 3-4%. But that means there are 320,000-640.000 crossdressers, most of which are closeted to the public.

I live just north of Los Angeles and have only seen a handful of crossdressers since I have lived here. Very intersting to think about when one applies this to the national population.

Psychiatrists report that ½ of 1% of all thier transgendered patients transition. There are 30,000 SRS's done in this country a year, with thousands more going to Thailand and other places to get SRS. 30,000 is ½ pf 1% of 6,000,000. That means that roughly 6,000,000 people sought treatment for issues surrounding gender identification. But we know that that figure must only be a fraction of the crossdressers out there since most are closeted and do not seek therapy. So? conservatively 10-12 million crossdressers in the US. That would be 5-6% of the adult population. Factor in that a majority of crossdressers are men, and it begins to look as if 7-8% of adult males crossdress to some degree.

There are lots of ways to play with the numbers, but in truth there is no reliable information to know just how many crossdressers there actually are. Most likely because of the secretive nature of crossdressing, we will never know just how many of us there are, but memberships in crossdressing forums and chat rooms indicates it is a significant number.

Nice thread.

Love always,
Elizabeth

[Absaroka]

Some day maybe they will do another confidential survey a la Kinsay and get some rough numbers. It would certainly be interesting to know.

A probelm with the statistics is they don't tell the whole story. Depending on how questions are worded crossdresser can mean an awful lot of things, from the guy who gets a faint thrill dressing up on Halloween but that's all, to someone who does it strictly as a sexual aid, to someone like me when I was younger who wore a lot of his girlfriends clothes openly but managed to stay unisex (she wore jeans and flannel shirts and it was affection more than anything else) to the person who wants to go out publicly as a woman and a million things in between. So if we say 1% of men are crossdressers we still haven't even defined what we are talking about really.

To cite another example I remember reading somewhere that according to similar research about 40% of men have had a homosexual experience. But that included stuff like a circle jerk or confused sex play at age 13 which didn't lead to anything later. Supposedly about 10% of the male population is gay or bi. however my wife and I are very open and accepting about this sort of thing and our experience is that it is less. On the other hand in some of our circles of friendship being gay is almost the norm while in others it is rare. Hard to know whats really happening.

For several years I worked in a mental hospital as an aide. You get to know a great deal about people in that situation. The number of gay people seemed very miniscule which leads me to think that even in that setting people worked hard at their secrecy. And I only remember one crossdresser although we had two trans sexuals with full SRS.

About the only thing that seems consistent here is that it is far more common than generally known.

Absaroka

[Bernice]

One more thing seems consistent: We almost universally hide our failure to conform to the expected norm. This frustrates me. I admire Elizabeth so much, and envy her new lifestyle. Why don't I dare to live as she does? (I know, actually it is much more complicated than I make it sound.)

If there really are 12 Million CDrs in the US, why can't we have a 12 million CD march on Washington and get the respect we deserve?

Then again, I haven't even got the courage to write my own homophobic congressman and ask for reasonable inclusions in the GLBT anti-hate legislation.

The statistics indicate that we have an opportunity to gain some level of public acceptance, and at the same time, that we lack the courage to overcome the inertia. How terribly ironic.

As smart as we are (collectively), have we no solution to this dilemma?

Hugs,

Bernice