I work in a profession which requires that I maintain a familiarity with Human Resource concepts and understand how to evaluate the capabilities of other people. I have met many Transgendered people in the various groups in the San Francisco area. The "people evaluator" portion of my brain now runs in automatic, if I want it to or not. As a result I have made an interesting observation.

The best way to relate this theory is to use some terms that appear in either "1984" or "A Brave New World" I do not remember which. I have heard these same terms used in Human Resource exercises. In short a number of categories are used to sub-divide humans by predominant characteristics. The (very) brief description is as follows:

Alpha - A Leader, works by herself, able to set her own course with no outside assistance
Beta - Group member, Leads as part of a group or team, can set a new course with the team
C - This group represents most people is the core follower group
Delta - Subservient group, they go out of their way to make their superior happy
Epsilon - A group of people who find it challenging to do simple tasks

In the general population barring any extraordinary circumstances these categories should roughly represent the five parts of a normal distribution curve. In other words 2.5% of the population are Alpha's, 13.5% of the population are Beta's, 68% of the population fall into the center "C" category, 13.5% of the population are Delta's and 2.5% of the population are Epsilons.

The interesting observation I have made of the transgendered people I have met is that they seem to be significantly skewed into the Alpha and Beta categories. This actually makes since, if someone is going to break away from the sociological norm and set their own course they would almost have to be an Alpha or a Beta. So what am I getting at ?

If most of who we see at meetings and on the Internet are Alpha's and Beta's and transgendered people are normally distributed throughout the population (which is a logical assumption). We are only seeing 16% of the transgendered people there are. I am rounding a bit here figuring that not all the Alpha's and Beta's are out and some non-Alpha/Beta's are out.

As it is right now I can easily Identify thousands of TG people between local and nationwide group memberships and a variety of web sites. If we extrapolate the theory outlined above it would indicate that their are tens of thousands of us. Now I have not done any extensive research on identifying transgendered people who are quasi-out. This type of research may turn up tens of thousands of people, if so this would imply we number in the hundreds of thousands.

Until now I have only really talked about those people who are transgendered to the point of having a persona of the opposite gender. Let's theorize that this represents a person who is 80% or more transgendered. What about the people who are between 51% and 79% transgendered ? They are more Transgendered than they are not Transgendered . How many people do you suppose this could be ?

Without sufficient research I can only speculate, however when you figure that people are created by a random selection of chromosomes half male and half female, we can speculate that we get a normal distribution of humans. In this scenario the big group +/- 1 standard deviation or 68% would be the people who are 50% or less Transgendered, 16.5% of the population would be the Quasi-transgendered (51-79% transgendered) males who just deal with their feminine feelings internally, 16.5% of the population would be the Quasi-transgendered females (who are called "tom-boys" and can express their masculine side anyway), 5% are the transgendered males and females (who are 80%+ transgendered) I spoke about in the start of this article (remember their are potentially hundreds of thousands of them).

Now this is interesting. I have been able to redefine 32% of the population of the world as transgendered. I wonder if I can do any better ? Perhaps I will follow-up this article in the future, with an article that speculates on the human race evolving into a new species which combines (hopefully the best) attributes of the male and female gender into one person. Hummmm... What should we call these people of the future ?

Feel free to write me and point out any flaws in my theory, or just talk about it. If you do have supporting evidence that contradicts my theory, please let me know what it is so I can revise the article and make new assumptions to compensate for the new evidence. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.


If you want to hear more on Nicole's views try this