Amanda K. Baumle and Sonny Nordmarken, Demography of Transgender, Nonbinary and Gender Minority Populations . Springer, 2022, 250 pages

What the paper says

In the United States, there is a vast research literature and a range of specialized journals in the social sciences on gender minorities.In this domain, however, demography has been an exception and has only recently begun to explore this field of research.The first-ever session on trans and nonbinary persons at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in 2019 illustrates this development.It has been made possible in recent years by the availability of more complete and precise databases, both in terms of the numbers of individuals surveyed and the quality of the questions posed to them.Amanda K. Baumle and Sonny Nordmarke-professors at the universities of Houston and Georgia, respectively-are the editors of this first compilation of demographic studies on gender minorities.This category covers all individuals who are not cisgender-that is, people who do not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth (e.g., trans, intersex, nonbinary, agender).The book is built on a thorough literature review and an analysis of new surveys.At first glance, it seems that queer theory and demography are based on two opposing approaches.While the former "seeks to abolish distinctions which contribute to inequality, including identity categories themselves" (p.246), the latter seems to be attached to more rigid classifications that facilitate comparisons between surveys across time and space.The thesis defended in the book is that this apparent opposition needs to be nuanced to make way for two crucial developments.First, the development of a demography of gender minority populations using the classical tools of the discipline is needed to improve knowledge of groups who are still understudied.Second, the emergence of a "trans demography" can allow demography to rethink its classical methods and theories on the basis of the analysis of minority cases.The book is organized into seven distinct contributions.Chapter 1 presents the different tools available to demographers to study gender minorities.A number of modes of data collection have been developed in recent years to allow these populations to be identified in general population surveys, although the categories of self-identification used within these populations (e.g., nonbinary, agender) remain marginal.Whether they are based on one or two questions or on more or less open response categories, these methodological choices lead to biases and errors that demographers must take into account in designing surveys and analyzing data: false positives, missing information, symbolic violence toward respondents, the need to recode, etc.The authors invite demographers to understand gender identity and sexuality as characteristics essential to demographic analyses and, thus, to insert questions on these issues into all surveys.The most widely accepted recommendation is to ask two successive questions-one on the sex assigned at birth, the other on how the person identifies at the time of the survey (e.g., man, woman, nonbinary)-and separate both from questions on sexual identification (e.g., homosexual,