Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Trans people are everywhere.

[citation needed]

EDIT:

Reason I ask is that, when fighting for the cause of minority groups, it doesn't help to make claims that are easily shown to be false--it hurts your credibility, and by association, theirs.

The "x are everywhere" is what, for example, brought us the Iraq War and the TSA and all the rest...just good marketing whipping people up into a frenzy.

EDIT2:

Fine, for the downvoters, here's some citations (because apparently that's too much to ask):

Various studies show a rate of between 0.1-0.5% of people identifying as trans ( http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-we-dont-know-the-siz... ).

A 2011 study by the UCLA Williams Institute found there to be around 700,000 trans people ( http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/census-lgbt-d... ).

How are you going to cite a study disproving the inherently subjective and hyperbolic definition of 'everywhere'? There is literally nothing in the universe that is 'everywhere'. Can you link an academic paper establishing a quantitative definition of when something can be referred to as being 'everywhere'?

Hydrogen is literally everywhere.

Anyways, I don't think any reasonable person would say that 5 people in 1000 would be enough to support the claim the GP put forth.

I am not a scientist but i don't think hydrogen occupies every single point in space everywhere in the universe

Anyway, if 5 in 1000 (as your own link states, these numbers are inherently difficult to quantify — but i'll go along with it) is not enough to qualify as everywhere, what is? What's your exact limit on everywhere? 1 in 500? 1 in 100? 1 in 10?

The suicide rate in the US is ~12 in 100'000, but you didn't seem to think mentioning it hurt OP's credibility (or, by association, the credibility of people who've committed suicide).

For every randomly sampled population of 1000 humans, you can expect to find at least one or two people who identify as trans (and probably more who are too afraid or uncertain to publicly identify themselves). This is what I mean by everywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com