63 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
63 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
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# How many enbies are there?
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<small>2022-04-28 | [@andrea](/@andrea)</small>
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We're being asked quite often, especially when talking to members of the academia, if we have any estimates
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regarding the number of nonbinary people (either in general, or in Poland in particular).
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Until now, the best numbers we could give them were describing the number of enbies who decided to create a card on our page
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or respond to our [census (Polish)](https://zaimki.pl/spis), etc.
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Until now. Behold!
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> Canada is the first country to provide census data on transgender and non-binary people.
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This week Statistics Canada [published a report](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm)
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in which they analyse the results of their census in terms of gender diversity.
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And a TL;DR version is basically this:
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- 0.33% of responders were not cis;
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- 0.13% of responders were not binary;
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- the younger the age group, the more trans and nonbinary people were in it;
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- most enbies lived in the largest urban centres.
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Which is all hardly any surprise – but it's amazing to finally see some concrete numbers to confirm our veeeery rough estimates!
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However… we can't just take those numbers at face value. The correlation between being nonbinary
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and things like age or place of residence suggests that it's one of those things
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the true extent of which we can only measure once they become normalised,
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once the society gets liberated from the chains of cisnormativity.
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As an analogy, take a look at this graph of left-handedness over time:
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It's not like people got spoofed by some evil left-handist propaganda and suddenly started using their hands against their nature.
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Quite the opposite – around the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> century the society finally stopped trying to force kids to suppress their left-handedness,
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and it just gradually became a non-issue until it became clear that the number of naturally left-handed people is around 12%.
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We see a similar shift now when it comes to trans issues.
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Younger generations, as well as residents of big cities, tend to be more accepting of queerness,
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which makes it easier to come out or even question your gender in the first place.
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That's why I believe that there is actually way more trans people in the population than 0.33%.
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The more accepting we become as a society,
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the more people will feel free to question, explore, discover and disclose their gender identity.
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For the same reason we can't just extrapolate Canadian numbers onto the entirety of the human population.
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With such big differences within Canada, it would be unreasonable to assume the differences between countries aren't just as big.
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But, considering the history of left-handedness, [divorce rates](https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/divorce-rates-lowest-40-years-35587),
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same-sex marriage etc., what makes sense to me is making an assertion that the _real_ number of trans and nonbinary people
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in a post-transphobia society would be _at least_ as high as the highest currently available metric, if not higher.
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Among Canadian 20-24-year-olds 0.85% are not cis and 0.43% are nonbinary.
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Since we're at the beginning of the “left-handedness curve” and at this point the real number is anyone's guess,
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I think it's fair for me to just round it up and say:
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> There are reasons to believe that at least 1% of the population is transgender,
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> and at least 0.5% of the population is nonbinary.
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Putting that in terms of the population of Poland, for those who had asked us before,
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it's about 377 thousand trans people and about 188 thousand nonbinary people.
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And even if you took the lower ends of the estimates – there's still quite many of us 😉
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