WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE TRANSGENDER? 11 Other Countries There is currently no way to know the exact number of transgender people in the world. However, several recent population-based studies, summarized by Sam Winter and colleagues, have produced estimates in the range of 0.5 percent to 1.2 percent transgender people in the popula- tion studied. Three of these studies were conducted in Europe, one in the United States, and one in New Zealand, and all used large samples (from 1,832 to 9,950 subjects). However, particular care should be used in inter- preting these results on a global level, since much less is known about the transgender population in larger regions of the world, including Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America. According to a 2014 report by Amnesty International, studies that iden- tify as transgender those individuals who had undergone hormonal or sur- gical treatments related to their transgender status, or who had sought legal recognition of a gender change, place the estimate at about 30,000 transgender people living in the European Union. However, this estimate excludes the many transgender people who have not sought hormonal or surgical treatments and or legal recognition of a gender change. Other studies that use a more inclusive definition of transgender as those who do not completely identify with the sex they were classified as at birth place the estimate at about 1.5 million transgender individuals. A population-based study in Massachusetts by Kerith J. Conron and colleagues found that about 0.5 percent (one-half of 1%) of the stateÊs population was transgender. It is not known whether this same percentage can be applied to other populations, because transgender people might move from a region in which they felt discriminated against or unsafe to a different region where they felt their safety and rights were better pro- tected. However, using the 0.5 percent standard, this would equate to, for instance, about 181,432 transgender people in Canada (using StatCanÊs population estimate of 36,286,400) and 2.54 million transgender people in the European Union (using the European UnionÊs 2016 population esti- mate of 508 million). Using a world population estimate of 7.4 billion, this would equate to about 37 million transgender people across all countries. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY Although there are few surveys providing even an estimate of the total transgender population, there are more that have studied the character- istics of specific populations of transgender people. Most such surveys
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