Collection · 6 entries
The Numbers That Get Misquoted
Six entries whose figures are repeated constantly and almost always without the sentence that makes them mean anything. Intersex is the widest case: the same organisation gives about 1.7 per cent of births and about 0.05 per cent, thirty times apart, because one counts every variation of sex development and the other counts genital differences apparent at birth. Both circulate as the prevalence of intersex.
Neutrois carries the most useful figure on this site and it is not about neutrois. The Gender Census recorded it at 2.6 per cent when it appeared as a checkbox in 2021 and about 0.4 per cent when it had to be written in the following year. Nothing about the population changed. The question did, and that same effect sits under every community percentage quoted anywhere here. The rest of the set shows the other standard error, which is treating a community sample as a population estimate: Transgender and Non-binary each have one of each kind of number, differing by orders of magnitude, and they are quoted interchangeably in news coverage. The set is ordered by how badly the figure is usually mangled. It excludes the culture-specific entries, whose counting problems are real but different, being census undercounts and community estimates rather than survey artefacts, and it excludes any entry where no number has been published at all.
Plate for the collection
Hand-set, never alphabetical
The set, in order
6 entries
- IntersexTwo figures thirty times apart from one source, counting two different things, both quoted as the prevalence.
- NeutroisFell sixfold between two survey years because the checkbox went away. The clearest demonstration of the effect on this site.
- Non-binaryAbout 1.2 million United States adults, and 61.7 per cent of gender-diverse respondents. Not the same kind of number.
- TransgenderA modelled population estimate from Williams and a self-selected sample of 92,329 from USTS, routinely cited side by side.
- GenderfluidIncluded as the counter-example: two independent community samples landing on the same quarter, which is rare here.
- AgenderA community share of 24.3 per cent that is often reported as though a quarter of some general population were agender.
Keep going
The other collections
- The Pairs People Mix UpFour pairs of gender terms that get mixed up constantly, and what each pair actually turns on: the body, the axis, the register, or a plain category error.
- Categories That Resist TranslationSeven gender categories routinely given as the local word for transgender, and the specific reason each of those renderings fails.
- The Vocabulary of the 1990sSeven words first attested between 1992 and 1996, made in zines and newsletters before the general internet, carrying most of the framework still in use.
- Where the Law Drew a LineSix gender categories with a date, a jurisdiction and a document behind them, from a criminal tribe in 1871 to a third gender in 2014.