Prevalance of Transsexuality in Australia

A snippet from a story about a young trans woman, from The Australian:

Last year the Australian Passport Office issued 202 passports in which the stated gender was different to an earlier passport or to a birth certificate.

Some of those might be for Intersex conditions, but a reasonable approximation is 200 transsexual transitions per year. Most people - including all FtoMs who have GRS (Genital Reconstruction Surgery) have to go overseas. There would be perhaps 30 GRS procedures performed in Australia per year, the bulk of them by Dr Ceber in Melbourne.

Australia has a population of about 21 million. It has a birth rate of about 1.25%. Although population has grown significantly over the last 50 years, birth rate has declined from around 2% in 1960, so the number of births per year is pretty constant, about 200,000 per year.

The usually quoted figures for transsexuality are 1 in 30,000 for women, and 1 in 100,000 for men.

So we could expect the single trans man per year to get a new passport, and three or four women. Let's be generous, and say 5 in total.

Now, there's probably some backlog there - the previous government had a very trans-unfriendly policy, but even then, it was possible, as long as one had had SRS - Sex Reassignment Surgery, and one was unmarried. So the expected figure might be double that, to be generous, say 10.

The measured figure is 202. Strongly suggesting that the rate of transsexuality in Australia is not 1 in 30,000/100,000, but 1 in 1500/5000. This would be consistent with similar figures measured in Singapore, of 1 in 3000/10000.

There's not just a handful of us: there's thousands, of trans or intersexed people who have transitioned.