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Those incidence numbers strike me as implausibly low. I happen to know two transpeople fairly well by completely random chance. One is good friend of my (now ad

Those incidence numbers strike me as implausibly low. I happen to know two transpeople fairly well by completely random chance. One is good friend of my (now adult) kids, whose parents are also friends of mine who I met through work, the other is an adult child of my girlfriend. Unless you hypothesize that for some reason I befriend people who have a vastly increased probability of having trans offspring, numbers like 1:10E4 give me a 1:200000 of being in this position. I would generously assume I know 25 people as well as I know these people, so the probability of finding two in that group who are trans would be 1E-4251E-4*24 = 0.000006. Tiny. Now, in a world with a few billion adults in it there are going to be a few tens of thousands of people like me, who know more then one transperson from completely unrelated means, but it would be interesting to know if anyone else here does. I'm pretty sure people in my situation are not as rare as those numbers would indicate.

Kalium 12y ago
I think it's worth considering that people with non-traditional sexual identities tend to concentrate in certain geographic areas. So perhaps your random selection is taking place over a highly self-sorted population.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
  Yeah, in general I think the HN commentariat is not remotely representative of society as a whole. Especially when it comes to the intersection of tech and sexuality.
ddingus 12y ago
I know a few, and my "know people well" metrics are similar to yours.
gwillen 12y ago
I know (at levels varying from 'friend' to 'acquaintance', so the field is more like 100-200 than your 25; but these are all people I have at least conversed with multiple times) two trans men and at least seven trans women (off the top of my head.) These are all people who are, at a minimum, currently taking prescribed hormones corresponding to their self-identified gender. But I understand that there may be a self-selection effect where a lot of trans women end up in technical fields, so my sample may well be biased.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
  Yeah, I think that trans women might be slightly more prevalent in Silicon Valley than they (we) really should be.

Kalium 12y ago

I think it's worth considering that people with non-traditional sexual identities tend to concentrate in certain geographic areas. So perhaps your random selection is taking place over a highly self-sorted population.

ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
Yeah, in general I think the HN commentariat is not remotely representative of society as a whole. Especially when it comes to the intersection of tech and sexuality.

ddingus 12y ago

I know a few, and my "know people well" metrics are similar to yours.

gwillen 12y ago

I know (at levels varying from 'friend' to 'acquaintance', so the field is more like 100-200 than your 25; but these are all people I have at least conversed with multiple times) two trans men and at least seven trans women (off the top of my head.) These are all people who are, at a minimum, currently taking prescribed hormones corresponding to their self-identified gender. But I understand that there may be a self-selection effect where a lot of trans women end up in technical fields, so my sample may well be biased.

ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
Yeah, I think that trans women might be slightly more prevalent in Silicon Valley than they (we) really should be.