How many are we?

This post is a contribution to the August 2022 edition of the Gender Exploration Carnival, whose topic is Surveys.

I write this post not from the perspective of the survey-filler or the survey-analyzer, but from the perspective of the person who need reliable data on different rates inside the trans population. We don’t know how many we are, and the estimations vary in a wide range, so we cannot apply simple Bayesian analysis on the data, because the datum of proportion of trans population is unknown by much. So, we can’t do any other thing but resorting to surveying the community gathered by methods that depend more on the attractiveness of the survey than on the representational validity of the sample.