The Wake County School Board worked over their hiring policies this past week.

What they tweaked was adding a ban on discriminating based on sexual orientation. The Wake Board didn’t add transgender and well, transgender defenders are freaking out.

ABC11 reported on the reaction, emphasis added:

LGBT activists argue it misses the mark, leaving transgender employees out of the equation entirely.

“People should be judged based on the work that they do, not qualities that aren’t relevant,” said Shawn Long, Dir. of Operations for Equality NC. “Trans folks are already a marginalized community within a marginalized community, and the trans employees should always represent, particularly in the schools, the student body. And there are tons of trans students.” 

Oh really? Tons? How many exactly?  How are you defining “tons”? Are these long-time transgender students or newly ‘self-identified’?

Give us a total, Mr. Long.

Let’s see what “tons” look like?

Numbers on the LGBT community are fairly elusive, but the population in any given source is small. What’s even smaller are those ‘self-identifying’ as transgender.

I think one of the more widely circulated percentages is from the Williams Institute circa 2011. That one says that 3.5% of the U.S. population says they are gay, lesbian or bisexual and that of that 3.5%, only .3% “self-identify” as transgender.

Applying that to the current U.S. population of around 319 million, that 3.5% translates to 11,165,000.  Of that 11 million number, .3% would be 33,495. For simplicity, divided by the number of states equally that’s 669 ‘self-identifying’ as transgender per state.

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) reported in 2014 that 2.3% identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual. Of that 2.3%, only .7% “self-identified” as transgender.

So, applying the same math to that 319 million, we have 7,337,000 and the subset of ‘self identifying’ transgender as 51,359. Spread across the 50 states, that’s roughly 1,027 per state.

Feel free to check out all the different numbers.

But you know, Mr. Long says it’s “tons”.

Common Core math. The struggle is real.

So while Mr. Long complains the ‘transgender’ community has been marginalized, he’s literally making a mountain out of an anthill.

How do you marginalize a “community” that is ‘self-identified’ at any given point in time and that is barely existent?

Reminder: “Due to the political nature of our work, contributions to Equality NC are not tax-deductible.”