Learning plotly.py by visualising some percentage data taken from the 2015 and 2022 US Transgender Surveys.
The sample group was significantly larger (more than tripling from 27,715 in 2015 to 92,329 in 2022) in the 2022 survey, yet the percentages largely remained similar.
Trans women are still more common than trans men, in spite of lower overall amab numbers, while afab nonbinaries still vastly outnumber amab ones. Crossdressers remain in the vast minority as well.
Trans women's lead over trans men's numbers has increased noticeably.
Overall, we still have an afab majority among the general trans population, although this has slightly improved (likely due to the increase in trans women's/decrease in trans men's percentages).
Supposing that an equal amount of either birthsex is (medically speaking) transgender, and in the knowledge that detransitioners who detransition due to legitimately not being trans after all are a dismissibly small minority,
2015 USTS Chapter 7 Section C on detransition outlines that only 8% of respondants reported ever having detransitionned, of which only 5% (that is 0.4% of total respondants) reported that their reason for detransition was that "They realized that gender transition was not for them" (while 62% (about 5 out of those 8%) reported that they were currently living in a gender role other than their birth-assigned one).
it seems unlikely that it would be cis women mistakenly labelling themselves as transmascs causing this discrepency.
Therefore we can instead suppose that amab trans people still feel less able to come out as trans and seek the transition (social and medical) they need than afab ones.
Among the nonbinary participants, afab nonbinaries remain in the vast majority, making up roughly 4/5 of the community.
Around the time of the first survey, the reigning theory in the community (source: me, who came out as NB in 2014) for why there were less amab nonbinaries than afab ones was that it was due to lack of nonbinary awareness among amab people. That -given time and awareness raising for nonbinary as a concept in wider society- that number would balance out eventually and we would have a roughly equal amount of amab and afab NBs, the same as trans men and women were roughly balanced.
TURNS OUT THIS WAS INCORRECT.
Despite an increase in the community's numbers at large due to more awareness and the pandemic forcing people to sit with themselves (= current reigning theories in the community) (source: me, who (as just one example) attended Trans Pride Brighton in 2019 and 2022 and can attest to a significant increase in attendance between the two events.) as well as in the sample size of the 2022 survey, the percentage of amab nonbinaries has remained almost stagnant in these 7 years of trans and nb awareness raising.
What change there has been has been a slight increase to all identities other than trans men and crossdressers, who lost percentages, trans men's percentage being hit the hardest with a 4 percent point drop.
Supposing that inherent reasons for transgenderism of any label and direction are equally balanced in the population between birth assignments, these stark discrepencies must have other explanations.
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More people coming from the female gender role feel able to come out as trans, but less than half of them currently claim the male gender role instead. This points to more freedom to (at least in label) leave the female gender role's domain, but more pressure not to join the male one.
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Less people coming from the male gender role feel able to come out as trans, but the vast majority of those who do claim the female gender role instead. This points to more pressure to (at least in label) stick to the male gender role, but more incentive to join the female one once you've left it.
This is likely the consequence of the past century of feminism improving the female gender role and stigmatising the male one by promoting manhate and misandry.
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The male gender role has not been liberated, leading to narrower standards and more pressure, and girls are indoctrinated to hate men, disincentivising transmascs from claiming the male label, even if they're literally accessing masculinising medical treatment. By keeping the nonbinary label they can exist outside of the female gender role without having to commit to the male gender role and all its downsides.
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Meanwhile the female gender role brings perks like empathy, aesthetics, desirability, as well as all the perks previously reserved for the male gender role, like jobs, bank accounts, pants, etc, leaving little merit in keeping the nonbinary label for transfemmes. Boys are taught to be allies to feminism lest they would be a horrible person, so transfemmes will also be significantly less prejudiced against the female gender role than transmascs against the male one.
Their bodies developped differently from their cis peers in first puberty, and no matter how much medical transition one undergoes, certain things are harder to change than others and bones for example can't be changed at all (with the exception of some facial bones (which is prohibitively expensive and nearly unprecedented for transmascs (source: me, who's had FMS))) after finishing first puberty.
- Estrogen holds back a lot of features while testosterone overgrows them, leading to a lot of transmascs struggling to pass as the correct age even if they pass as male. (source: have some ND Stevenson comics: like this one, or this one)
Furthermore women and afab people wearing men's clothes is more normalised than men and amab people wearing women's clothes, leading to transfemmes being more easily identified as not cis than transmascs.
This means that transfemmes have an easier time passing as adult women sooner in their transition, than transmascs do passing as adult men. (source: me, who it took literally a decade, 5+ years of HRT, several surgeries, and finally a complete and utter commitment to masc presentation to pass as male about 95% of the time (still not always 🙃).)
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I can't speak for every last transmasc, but at least for me that was one of the main reasons to stick to the nonbinary label for as long as I did.
Passing as what I wanted (the adult non-woman I am) was not an option, so I chose to present in a way that would get me misgendered as an adult woman who would at least be respected as such, rather than misaged as a child and not be treated as an adult (and still risk misgendering anyway).
And in absence of the physical reality necessary to call myself a man without feeling like it was a demonstrable lie, nonbinary was the only option for me to be able to cope and access the medical treatment I needed.
I suspect there are many others in similar positions.
Finally due to their different directions & circumstances, there are cultural differences between genderqueer amab & afab people.
I believe that crossdressing in the widest sense (drag, fetish crossdressing, crossdressing in private, theatrical crossdressing, femboys, crossplay (cosplay version), crossplay (video game/digital version)) fulfills a similar exploratory role for amab people that claiming the nonbinary, or other queer labels and exploring gnc expression plays for afab ones. (source: transfemme drag queens (like Gigi Goode or Bosco), well-known trans women talking about crossdressing before coming out as trans (like most recently Harper Steele in the documentary "Will & Harper" (2024)), the prevalence of anime girl avatars in VRchat, femboys who end up coming out as transfemme/accessing medical transition, etc - it is a very well-known phenomenon in relation to the transfemme community at large)
- This is obviously not to say that every crossdressing amab person will end up being transfemme (in a transitional or medical sense), just like not every genderqueer afab person ends up being transmasc (we support our cis gnc siblings in this house), but just as with genderqueer afab people, these exploratory practices end up being an important first stop on the trans journey of a decent portion of them.
However, in spite of its inclusion in this survey, crossdressing is colloquially generally not considered part of the trans community in the same way nonbinary labels are, meaning crossdressers would've been less likely to respond to a survey aimed specifically at the transgender community.
A lot of crossdressing is also treated less as an identity/something to come out as than nonbinary labels, or happens in private to begin with, unlike afab gnc expression, so less crossdressers would be "out as" such or consider it a core part of their everyday gender identity as opposed to more of a practice/hobby/preference/etc.
I believe this has led to their numbers being vastly underrepresented in this dataset.
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I do not think that genderqueer amab people are actually that much less likely to explore and transgress gender than afab ones, I believe it's merely that they are less able to do so publicly and less likely to consider it an identity in its own right/claim explicit labels for it the way butch and nonbinary afab people do.
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If we look at crossdresser communities like drag etc, we see a similarly (if not more due to the inclusion of their cis population) unbalanced ratio between high numbers of amab people and low numbers of afab people as we do the other way around in our nonbinary numbers.
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Between RuPaul's Drag Race and Dragula, we've (to my understanding) only seen 2 afab performers (one of which was a hyperqueen -> not doing crossdressing drag) on the latter, with the entire rest of the cast across 16+ seasons of drag race and 5 seasons of dragula being amab.
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Also a lot more drag kings are transmasc rather than cis women, while transfemmes among the drag queens, while more prevalent in drag than elsewhere, are still generally in the minority compared to their cis-male peers. -> Drag does not seem to function as as much of an exploratory space for afab folks as it does for amab ones.
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-> I believe this is where our missing transfemme "nonbinaries" are hanging out.
I believe that, between the prevalence of misaging and misgendering for transmascs, internalised misandry and the stigma and limitations of the male gender role, a lot of trans men/strongly trans-male-aligned people are currently still labelling themselves as nonbinary instead of claiming the male label, and that, between gender role pressures, limited opportunity for exploration for amab people, and the underrepresentation in this particular dataset of the crossdressing communities fulfilling that role, we are still missing a lot more transfemmes that have yet to come out and/or label their genderqueer identity as such.
As gender lib progress happens and people progress in their exploration and transitions, I hope to see these numbers balance out, including nonbinary afab numbers finally decreasing, instead joining the trans male block, and amab overall numbers continuing to increase.
One thing to keep in mind with this community is that it is defined by change. Not merely in the sense of transition, but across the board. Our labels, attitudes, choices and needs can change over time. We learn things about ourselves, we conceptualise ourselves differently, and the world sees us differently.
Even the most binary of transitions is not a binary switch like that wording may imply, it is an arduous, messy, time-consuming process. Genderqueer spaces like crossdressing or the nonbinary label are means for people to cope with that.
Studies like these, while incredibly insightful, can only ever track the current usage of labels by fluctuating subsets of the community, not the actual truth that lies underneath them, and we need to keep that in mind when analysing their data.
These scewed numbers do not indicate that inexplicably afab people are more likely to be nonbinary and noone crossdresses anymore, or that the only amab people who come out are trans women and the missing percent of trans guys just won't come out for some reason.
They indicate that amab and afab people use labels differently, even when they are experiencing the same phenomenon (in this case that of transgenderism and genderqueerness).
And I want my community to finally grapple with that.