The silent majority

I follow the transgender community, along with many other issues, subjects and groups. I do this for a number of reasons which I won't say much beyond the fact the reasons are there. But following and participating are two vastly different matters, which is always intriquing to me because the transgender community assumes transpeople agree with them, or at least publically, but far too often not privately or personally, to avoid showing the deep divisions in the community amongst the different subgroups of people.

And this is what is interesting, because the smallest active group in the transcommunity are the legally recognized, or post-transistion, men and women, those who have finished the medical process and legal avenues to be physically their (target) sex or gender and to have all, or all those possible, legal documents changed, starting with the name change and birth certificate.

And this group has long been claimed by the transcommunity and long labelled by the media as transgender or transsexual. But they're not. The courts are more and more recognizing they're legally male or female, without any qualifier, especially trans-anythng. They're just one of the many men and women in life and the world.

But the interesing point is the numbers of those who after their transistion, silently leave the community if they ever were a part of it, whch sprisingly most do not because the resources available today allows them to simply go through their transistion without ever belonging to let alone being a member of any support group.

In earlier years the support groups were the only resource for transpeople, especially transistioning ones. Wth the Internet, some moved to and found the resources on Website and forums. It's all there, the information and the people, without ever really meeting other transpoeple let alone going or belonging to a group. It's the new indedepence of transpeople, and now the largest way people transistion.

The membership of transgroup is fairly stable at best and decling at worst, mostly becuase they depended on member for money. Without it, and the continued longterm membership getting tired of more and more costs for less return, groups are struggling in many places. And they're attracting fewer new people while the number of new people increases. Which leads to the new reality.

When you do the back of the envelope (or napkin wherever you are) calculations with the number of new legally recognized men and mostly women, simply using the statistics from the current number of surgeons performing sex reassignment surgery, required for women but not men, adding an estimate for the latter, and the number of active or public legally recognized men and women, you discover the reality.

The number of legally recognized men and women not active or public outnumbers the public or active, out of choice or circumstance such as career, life, etc., by a factor of greater than 10 to 1. The percentage of silent legally recognized men and women is about 95% of the total men and women. And this is a conservative estimate and possibly in the 98% range.

They're leaving because they don't see or identify themselves as transgender or transsexual, but simply men and women. The genes are different, and their anatomy is obviously slightly different, after all medical science and technology can only do so much to change the body between the sexes, but the mind isn't different. Even brain research is more and more showing the brain is physically more similar to their non-birth (transistion) sex than the norm.

That's why being transgender is a physical condition and not a mental one, and definitely not a mental disease or disorder, as currently catagorized in the DSM-IVTR. And it's why they think, act, and behave as their identified gender and not their birth gender. And why, once finished with their transistion, they are simply men and women.

Just like everyone else. Just normal like everyone else. Granted the differences, but let's remember we're all different, and we're all a mix of male and female, it's what makes us human. We're not exclusively male or female but some proportion, only transpeople are more the other. But that's a tanget point.

The point is that the transcommunity has no right to call legally recognized men and women transgender and claim them as one of them. They are exclusive of the community once they finish their medical and leagal transistion. And it's why 95+% walk away and never come back.

And it's why their silent. To speak out means coming out. And coming out means becoming public, the last thing they want if they can help it. They don't want to be one of "them" which people associate with drag queens, transvestites, cross-dressers and pre/in-transistion transpeople. They're not and don't want to be.

And it's why the silent majority will never be seen, let alone known. The sad reality of coming out. So silence is better than the alternative.