Half a Percent: How Much of a Problem is Transgender?

 

Googling the question: "How many transgenders live in America?" you get various answers, but the most generous estimate is somewhere around half of one percent of the population identifies as transgender or gender fluid at any given time.

There are, of course, no real numbers, no good numbers. 

As someone who has devoted his career to thinking about some very rare conditions, along with the common ones, The Phantom is moved to ask: Why are we so concerned about the transgender folk who live among us, our fellow citizens?

Thinking about my own high school, that means in a school of 2,000 students, we are talking about, roughly, 8 students. 

Assuming we are talking about half of these folks who are male transitioning to female, you're down to 4 students. 

Now Ron Desantis and Ted Cruz and Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene will howl about the danger of having these students undressing in the girls' locker room, sharing bathrooms with "normal" girls or trying to swim as females on the girls' swimming team, but really, how likely is this really ever going to be a problem? 

This is not to say there haven't been problems: When a swimmer who lived the first 18 years of life as a male, developing male muscles, joints and bones under the influence of testosterone began to swim as a woman on the Penn swimming team, that swimmer crushed the competition and the existing women's records for the sport.

Penn Swimmer

So one person can cause a disturbance.

Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

And then you get to the problem of a person who did not need to ask a doctor's help to become a gender bending individual. Caster Semenya, the South African women's track star, who has set all sorts of records has posed a problem, not because she is transgender, but because she is like genetically male, while not being biologically entirely male, and, in fact she does not have a penis. But she may have testes, or had testes in her inguinal canals once. From what you can see on the internet she has partial testosterone insensitivity syndrome.

Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

She is a rarity.

It should also be noted, she did not seek to have her gender altered by any doctor, if she has this syndrome. She simply "is" this way.

Gdansk, Poland 

So why are the Republican culture warriors like DeSantis and Cruz so obsessed with these rare cases?

Paul McHugh, MD

The answer may be because these are cases which make people who are "woke" or otherwise open minded look foolish or bizarre or simply ridiculous, as they try to cleave to a position of extreme tolerance in a case which tests the understanding of the average citizen, who is unversed in what exactly transgender is, and how that may be different from "intersex" or from homosexuality or pseudohermaphrodism, each of which is separate and different from each other. 

So the far right has found the perfect scapegoats, small in number, poorly understood, people who most people have no first hand experience with.