How Many We Are

26 February 2010 by kathleen.

I was looking at some transgender-related blogs recently, and I was startled when I began to consider the number of us.

Back in the 20th century, there were a good number of us — but not nearly so many as today.  In the ’70’s and ’80’s the procedure was being “perfected” and was consequently performed primarily by well-funded, big-city medical schools.  Would anyone care to guess how many MtF operations were there world-wide in, say, 1981: 50? 75? 200?

SRS is no longer an experimental procedure; it’s a business.  TS Roadmap has a world-wide list of over 60 vaginoplasty surgeons. If each surgeon does only 100 per year (that’s averaging two per week) then these surgeons — collectively — must be able to perform five to six thousand of these operations per year. Not only has this group of surgeons been growing, but because we tend to last more than one year after surgery, the number of post-operative MtF accumulates. By now there might be close to 100,000 post-op, MtF transsexuals world wide.

What amazed me, though, when I thought about these numbers, was this: what would the world have been like if we had not had the opportunity to change our sex? How many of those hundred-thousand or so post-ops would otherwise be dead at their own hands? how many would be locked in institutions? how many would have been killed or maimed by hateful people in a world which didn’t acknowledge us?

I ask these questions not to say, “ain’t it awful“, but instead to shout, “ain’t it wonderful!“

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