Regarding the people who have approached me regarding transitions they want but feel they can never make. They are not happy at their situation, but cultural, economic, and other barriers seem (and may be) insurmountable. The vast majority of these trans people merely want to interact with someone who will see them as they see themselves. Some of them want to hear first hand about situations where trans people can be themselves safely. It’s the comfort of catching a glimpse of the promised land, even if you can’t enter it yourself.

Regarding what transitioning is. For some people, transition can be entirely social with no medical element. Hormones are not a required part of medical transition. I know at lease one trans person who has had some surgery and no hormones ever, by choice. I also know of two trans people who have had some medical transition but haven’t socially transitioned.

For many trans people, there’s a set of incongruities between how they experience themselves and how they are seen, their bodies, how they’re allowed to present themselves, etc. Things that are actively distressing for one trans person may not bother another one. One way to look at transition is the process addressing the important (to the individual) self-perceived incongruities.

Regarding how many trans people there are and how do I know so many. Everyone I have spoken about is someone that I have met in person. A couple of hundred, at least. A lot of that is involvement in LGBTQ rights, which tends to put me in the presence of people who are social super-connectors. Some of that was a period of being the only out executive at a big company. There was a while where HR would give my contact info to every person who told them of a desire to transition at work.

But the two biggest factors are a) living somewhere that it’s relatively safe to transition and b) being deliberately visible in a lot of ways. Trans people absolutely migrate to places where they can be themselves safely. Trans people pretty much have full legal equality in California (not The same as social equality). So trans people come here. Washington and Oregon come close to legal equality, as does most of the east coast as far south as Virginia. A lot of cities in otherwise hostile states provide protections. Iowa City and a few other towns in Iowa are decent places to be trans. And even without legal protections, some places are islands of relative safety.

So, in my extended community of friends there are several trans people, and not because I sought them out. Just because there are a lot of trans people here. Three people from the 50-odd person Company I worked at in 2008 have subsequently come out as trans (pre-transition for me and the introduction to them was made by a former Wall Street colleague).

Being willing to be publicly identified as trans means cis friends connect me to trans friends, especially those just coming out. Occasionally some of those people become friends.

Closeted trans people are still trans. Many trans people regard themselves as having always been trans, even though they figured it out later in life. Some trans people talk about “before I was trans”. There’s no monolith of experience or language for describing it.

I actually think the number of trans people is closer to 2-3%, but the studies for that have methodological problems (the percentage is much higher, but there’s a failure to distinguish between types of gender non-conformity). I don’t really care, other than the increasing number of people who decide transition being seen as contagion.

There is one thing that’s “contagious”. Seeing a happy trans person changes your world if your trans and you believe trans people are sad and tragic. You can’t unsee that. Almost every trans person I know has some story about how someone they barely knew came to them and told them that seeing them changed their lives.