Something I Thought About

Trying to figure out how many trans people there our is very hard, when you have such a small population sampling doesn’t work that well so I was think about somehow using the Social Security database. Well someone also thought about that,

Transgender Americans Have Been Registering Their Transitions With Social Security Since 1936
Very few surveys ask people if they're transgender. One economist managed to mine American government data for clues to the transgender American experience over the last seven decades.
Pacific Standard
By Francie Diep
October 5, 2015

Transgender rights may seem like the hot new issue in America today, but transgender people have been around—and have been making contact with the government—for at least the past few generations. That's according to a fascinating analysis published last week by the United States Census Bureau.

For the analysis, Census Bureau economist Benjamin Cerf Harris looked through Social Security Administration data dating back to the administration's inception in 1936. Harris sought records of people who had changed their first names from something that's strongly associated (at least 90 percent of the time) with one gender, to something that's strongly associated with another gender. He found that, since 1936, more than 135,000 Americans have putatively transitioned genders and registered a new name with Social Security as part of their transition. At least a few folks make this change in every year of Harris' data.
[…]
Of course, it can be difficult to know for sure whether any one person in the Social Security Administration data is truly transgender… But Harris took several steps in his analysis to try reducing the likelihood of wrongly identifying non-transgender individuals as transgender. For example, he looked only for sex changes that were registered after the person turned 16, to reduce the odds of including people in his analysis who simply had the wrong sex recorded for them when they were born.

I was a little surprised that only 135,000 people may have transitioned. It would be interesting to see if the rate of changes is increasing now that the rules have changed for changing your gender marker, also the data that he used only goes up to 2010 and the new Social Security policy on changing your gender marker only went into effect in 2013, so it would be interesting to study the current data.