Wednesday 9 June 2010

Prevalance of Transsexuality in Australia

A snippet from a story about a young trans woman, from The Australian:
Last year the Australian Passport Office issued 202 passports in which the stated gender was different to an earlier passport or to a birth certificate.

Some of those might be for Intersex conditions, but a reasonable approximation is 200 transsexual transitions per year. Most people - including all FtoMs who have GRS (Genital Reconstruction Surgery) have to go overseas. There would be perhaps 30 GRS procedures performed in Australia per year, the bulk of them by Dr Ceber in Melbourne.

Australia has a population of about 21 million. It has a birth rate of about 1.25%. Although population has grown significantly over the last 50 years, birth rate has declined from around 2% in 1960, so the number of births per year is pretty constant, about 200,000 per year.

The usually quoted figures for transsexuality are 1 in 30,000 for women, and 1 in 100,000 for men.

So we could expect the single trans man per year to get a new passport, and three or four women. Let's be generous, and say 5 in total.

Now, there's probably some backlog there - the previous government had a very trans-unfriendly policy, but even then, it was possible, as long as one had had SRS - Sex Reassignment Surgery, and one was unmarried. So the expected figure might be double that, to be generous, say 10.

The measured figure is 202. Strongly suggesting that the rate of transsexuality in Australia is not 1 in 30,000/100,000, but 1 in 1500/5000. This would be consistent with similar figures measured in Singapore, of 1 in 3000/10000.

There's not just a handful of us: there's thousands, of trans or intersexed people who have transitioned.

4 comments:

Dawn said...

"There's not just a handful of us: there's thousands, of trans or intersexed people who have transitioned."


And, thousands more in waiting!

Annie said...

Interesting! I'm sure official statistics will get closer to these numbers with increased visibility :)

Donna Patricia said...

Zoe:
thank you for this data. It's quite consistent with the back-of-an-envelope numbers I calculated a while back,and also with the much more detailed analysis of the Gender Identity Research and Education Society. I'd welcome your thoughts on the latter's document on Prevalence and Incidence.

Battybattybats said...

So with transsexuals at 1 in 1500, Intersex 1 in 100 to 1 in 60, crossdressing between 1 in 50 and 1 in 10 males (and unknown numbers of females)...

Thats a lot of people whose issues are being negligently ignored and misshandled. Thats a lot of people under-represented in all manner of parts of public life from holding public office to media representation and beyond.