Normal people have no idea what 1% or 10% means when you get to numbers that are in the millions, or billions. And yet that is how we always talk about these things. A person worth a 100 billion dollars wealth going up 1% is vastly different than a person who is worth 1 million dollars going up 1%. For the billionaire this literally represents them gaining another 1 billion dollars, and amount of money that on its own is hard to quantify. Whereas for the millionaire they gained $10,000, still a lot but not unimaginable. The same goes for population, 1% of the US population is roughly 3.5 million people. Yet, we don’t think any of the states with a population less than that don’t matter. So why do we think that 3.5 million Americans, across the US don’t get to be happy.

As someone in Cybersecurity, I stopped using percentages a long time ago to describe data, as so many of the things we care about are often less than 1%. So little network traffic is anomalous, most packets are ok, etc. And I think that we in the trans community need to stop using percentages when talking about the trans population.

People can ignore 1%. Even 2 or 3 or 5 percent. But they can’t ignore 3, 4 or 5 million. If we go with the population estimate of the US in 2024 of 345 million, and assume that 1% of that is trans, we get 3.45 million people. And how many states have a population of less than that, about 20. With Utah just having 3.5 million, just above that. Talking in percentages dehumanizes people, it makes them just seem like a statistic rather than a person.