FiveThirtyEight

How Large is the Transgender Population?

Laverne Cox (GLAAD)

Laverne Cox (GLAAD)

The transgender community is really stepping into the spotlight right now, and making progressive strides into mainstream society. So far this year, there’s been award-winning portrayals of transpeople, a transwoman becoming the face of a national advertising campaign and a prominent television personality going public with his transition story.

With all this progress, I was wondering exactly how large the U.S. transgender population numbers. I was fully prepared to find conflicting information or even no numbers, as I wasn’t sure how closely data was being tracked. The Transgender Law and Policy Institute has a fact sheet that claims 2-5% of the population is trans, but of course that’s self-reported and there’s no way of knowing how accurate it is.

Nate Silver’s data journalism site FiveThirtyEight posited one of my concerns in an article last year, that it’s difficult to get accurate data. Journalism Mona Chalabi mentions the widely-known stat from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law’s Williams Institute, which puts the transgender population at around 700K, or around .3% of the U.S. adult population. But Chalabi does acknowledge that more research is needed.

 

A lot of positive things are happening right now for the community, and hopefully that’s lead to even more acceptance and progress. And hopefully, more accurate numbers.

Masturbation Data: Age, Gender and Frequency

FiveThirtyEight NSSHB Masturbation Results 2009

FiveThirtyEight NSSHB Masturbation Results 2009

Indiana’s National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) recently crunched some data that allows us a few insights into the nation’s masturbation, broken down by age, gender and frequency. Their methodology: 5K+ Americans, ages 14-94, with data collected March to May 2009. (Data science site FiveThirtyEight made a fun graphic illustrating the results, pictured above.)

Here’s what we can glean from the findings:

Women:

Around age 40, the number of women who haven’t masturbated within the past year begins to exceed 35%, and keeps climbing up. (The 30-39 bracket topped out at 37%, but then sank to 35% for the 40-49 bracket.) The older brackets grow between 8-12 percentage points. Why is this? This could point to the fact that women of earlier generations were conditioned to think that masturbation was dirty, and don’t touch themselves on a regular basis, if at all.

Across the board, women in the 2-3 times a week and over 4 times a week fall into the minority. This could indicate achieving a comfort level with their bodies, resulting in knowing exactly which buttons to push (so to speak), and/or a higher-than-average libido.

Men:

The numbers for me only hit single digits with men ages 70+ masturbating 2-3 times a week, and men ages 50-59, 60-69, and 70+ masturbating over 4 times a week. It’s probable that the decreases are inversely correlated with age.

What’s surprising is that the highest percentages weren’t in the 18-24 age range: We hear so much in popular culture that boys masturbate most frequently (at least from anecdotal evidence of any mom with at least one son). But this study shows that the largest percentages for frequency are really falling within the 30-39 and 40-49 age brackets.