One thought on “Monday Message Board”

1. Something in the water?

   The number of self-reported transgender people has been going up – SFIK this is not paralleled by other categories under the LBGT+ umbrella. The ensuing debate has been strong on heat rather than light. The competing claims are roughly that it is a mass delusion promoted by a handful of trans activists, or alternatively rhe harbinger of a new age in which gender is fluid for everybody, freely chosen without social pressure, and its denial a form of prejudice.

   Let me make a fuddy-duddy suggestion. Whether it is well-grounded or not, trans identity and uncertainty is the occasion of a great deal of anxiety, familial conflict and stigma This is quite enough unhappiness to provoke tragically high suicide rates. The current situation is a serious public health problem. It might be a good idea to treat it as one, following the old-fashioned method of digging out the numbers and looking for causal explanations of them.

   Start with the numbers. Google AI, citing the Williams Institute: “Over 2.8 million Americans (aged 13 and older) identify as transgender, making up about 1.0% of the population in this age group. This includes roughly 2.1 million adults (0.8% of the adult population) and 724,000 youth aged 13 to 17 (3.3% of that age group).”

   Williams breaks this down by age group. here is a trend scatterplot, taking the midpoint of each age range for the corresponding births:

   

   Download link if embedding fails: http://www.jameswimberley.es/Notes/Trans_ID_chart_trend.png

   The points do not represent the self-reported incidence by date, but the birth dates of those who now self-identify. But as awareness typically comes early – before adolescence, the chart is a reasonable view of the historical trend.

   The chart tells us that what we have to explain is not a recent spike but a long-term trend. This makes the mass delusion hypothesis untenable. Where were the activist trans witches who quintupled the rate by 1990? They did not exist. The opposing theory of a steady weakening of the prejudice keeping trans people in the closet is not absurd, but I see no evidence for it.

   Genetic determinism does not work any better. Any deterministic gene would be reproductively deleterious, on a par with haemophilia. What about a recessive gene like that for sickle-cell anaemia? What could possibly be the analogy to the useful protection the latter offers in one copy against malaria? It’s a theoretical possibility, but a very long shot. Above all, genetic mutations do not spread at the rate observed for subjective trans identity.

   It is of course likely that if the explanation lies at least partly in biology, it requires the typical combination of a genetic predisposition with some environmental trigger. If you have red hair and freckles, don’t go sunbathing. Stay indoors and you will be pretty safe from melanoma. Perhaps – given the early age at which the syndrome appears – a similar process could work epigenetically, through exposure in the womb. Even more speculatively, it could be the genetic hangover of a distant period in our lineage when sex was regularly switched in development by environmental triggers, as in 500 species of fish today and even some trees, which suggests a very ancient origin.

   We should therefore at least consider the possibility that it`s something in the physical environment. I was hoping we could blame air pollution, but this has fallen in the USA over a similar period. A strong inverse correlation is not helpful. Sales of gasoline and diesel oil fell in the most recent period, when the incidence accelerated. Let’s try GDP:

   

   Download link if embedding fails: http://www.jameswimberley.es/Notes/Trans_ID_chart_real_GDP.png

   This looks a remarkably good fit, apart from the most recent period including two economic crises. It would be consistent with the data that cultural factors may account for the recent divergence, though they don’t work for the longer term.

   The trouble with GDP is the lack of a causal mechanism. Ordinary citizens do not experience GDP directly, only through their income and the myriad goods and services that make it up in a correlated wave. If there is a causal link, it has to be from some identifiable component or components of GDP. Amazon offers around 500 million different product lines in the USA. Add in other retailers, services, unpriced externalities, services, and intermediate goods that consumers never see: the total number of goods must be over a billion. Brute force data-crunching will not find the needle of causation in this mega-haystack.

   FWIW, I have a few rubbernecking suggestions. Have a look at global ad local heating. Another is to start with the long list of chemicals known to be harmful, in lab rats and cell cultures, particularly those that affect reproduction and development. The third is to emulate the postcode epidemiology that confirmed the link between air pollution and dementia. That used Medicare enrollees; for trans identity, Medicaid and the VA could offer usable datasets, or the national health services of the UK and the Nordic countries. There is no single hypothesis to test, so success is very far from assured, but something may pop up from the maps.

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   Data and sources here as download: http://www.jameswimberley.es/Notes/Trans_ID_USA.xlsx