Do We Count?

In Hong Kong the census will now have a box for trans to check,

Male, female... or transgender? New categories proposed for Hong Kong census
Male, female or transgender? Proposed new questions aim to get real picture of population
South China Morning Post
By Fanny W. Y. Fung
December 6, 2013

New census categories may be introduced in order to collect data on transgender people and those in same-sex relationships or co-habiting.

The changes are being considered for the 2016 "by-census" in order to reflect the city's changing social structure, legislators have been told.

A gay-rights group welcomed the proposal as a step towards helping formulate equal-opportunity policies.

It follows a ground-breaking court case that allowed a transgender woman to marry, and lawmakers' rejection of a move towards a public debate on a law barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

We are hard to count, there are a lot of trans-people who don’t want to be or do not identify as transgender. There are many reasons why this is so, one reason is that after we transition we no longer identify as trans but as our true gender so we will just list our gender as female or male. Some do so out of fear of discrimination or violence against us.

When I was on a research project to develop a survey for the trans-population in the greater Hartford area our biggest challenge was finding trans-people in marginalized communities. It was easy to find trans-people who were out and went to places other trans-people met but to find those that worked the street or who were members of minority was very hard.

A survey in Canada’s Ontario Province  called Trans PULSE used RDS (Response Driven Sample) survey, where the first persons (the seeds) to take the survey was asked to recruit three other trans-people (1st generation) to take the survey and they in turn were asked to recruit three more people each (2nd generation). That process is repeated until the desired number of respondents is achieved. The NCTE/Task Force survey used a convenience sample by reaching out to as many groups that they could find to take the survey.

A true random sample is almost impossible to conduct with the trans-community because if you sample a thousand people at random you might only find one or two people who are trans and you cannot gather any meaningful data that way. So a census questions makes sense but it depends on the way they ask the questions.

What box would you check on the census if the question was “What is your gender identify?”

What box would you check on the census?