The

The work isn't choosing better categories: it's learning to think without need categories in the first place. I mean- Please Stop trying to shove people into tidy little boxes! I escaped my box!

But how do we help people notice they're thinking in binaries without immediately sorting 'binary thinking' into another binary? This is why I say "labels are traps".

the welsh have the monopoly on things ending in hell. fuckin hell and bloody hell hit different in a welsh accent. its like music to my ears

the scots have piss and shite for sure. "its pishin it doon out there" "this is a load of shite" absolute poetry

if i may speak for the english i think we do penis related words very well. dickhead, knobhead, twat, etc.

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Before I begin, I want to make some big disclaimers: I am NOT a professional statistician, polisci specialist, or etc.- I’m merely a person with access to Excel with some undergraduate-level statistics courses under my belt. The data used here is compiled by me, somewhat messily, from the Jan. 9th 2026 versions of these three Wikipedia articles, plus some supplementary information I could find attempting to verify demographics information. I am not claiming these numbers to be 100% accurate, and they should be taken with a massive grain of salt, but I do believe they speak to larger trends and therefore are worth discussing.

Figure 1. Percent of total number of transgender politicians by region.

First up, I have an interesting general demographics figure that, while not entirely relevant to the point of this post, I think is interesting nonetheless. As you might expect from English language Wikipedia pages, the majority of the reported data comes from North America and Europe. Verifying how reflective this is of reality, and whether there are (likely) politicians missed in non-English speaking parts of the globe, is outside the scope of what I, a random guy on the internet, is willing and able to perform.

Table 1. Number of elected transgender officials by demographic.

A summary table compiled from my master data sheet, listing out just how many officials from each demographic there is worldwide, according to the articles. The most standout numbers here is the difference between the numbers of trans women and men- 159 vs 15! That’s more than 10x the number of trans women that have been elected to a position of power than trans men. A note for this section is that I grouped some identities together for simplicity of data presentation, but there were more microlabels and groups than listed here.

Figure 2. Identity of transgender officials worldwide, with categorizations by region.

The big summary figure, showing that worldwide, only 7% of transgender elected officials have been trans men. The most “even” proportion, coming from North America, only represents 10% of the total. The least even proportion came from Oceania, where no electorates identified as trans men, although they also made up the smallest percentage (6%) of the global total. Europe had the least diversity, with only two groups represented- trans men and trans women- with no entries labeled as nonbinary. Again, it bears repeating that these figures are based on a small aggregated source, and very well (and should) be further revised in a future academic context.

Takeaways

Does this data support the idea that trans men, like cis men, are advantaged over women in government? In short: No. Significantly fewer trans men have been able to achieve political power than several other groups of trans people in a stark reversal of their cis counterparts’ trends. Trans politicians make up a very small minority of worldwide officials, and an even smaller minority of those officials are trans men. What can we conclude, then?

1. Trans people, as a group, are a political minority and have little sway over the policies that affect us.

2. Trans men experience unique challenges that significantly reduce their ability to rise to political positions of power, undermining the argument that “male privilege” is easily accessible to them once they come out.

*Book is Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex by Pat Califa by the way

Which is interesting, since the book is over thirty years old.

If Pat Califa were, in fact, actually agitating for an increase to the sexual abuse of endangerment of children, don't we all think perhaps that would have been mentioned in the last 30 years of commentary?

No?

No, we should just assume that a queer man--the group of people MOST LIKELY to be stigmatized as child molesters in the west--is himself a secret child molester and that it took the brave and insightful eye of someone who personally detests him for being a queer man to figure it out?

You really think a book that has had multiple reprints and multiple additions in the last 30 years is secretly calling for mass child rape and no one else ever noticed?

I'll say it again:

That's one HELL of a bold claim.

A claim refuted by Califa in 1992 before the first edition of the cited book was even released:

'I don't agree with NAMBLA, because their position is that age-of-consent laws should be repealed, and there are members of that organization who think it's OK for prepubescent children to have sexual relationships with adults, and I just cannot agree with that. I think it's developmentally inappropriate.'

So, yeah, okay, this is just straight up lying to call a queer man a child rapist so you can feel great about sexually harassing him by mocking his genitals in public.

Tweet by Stella Sacco at antlervel.vet reading

"Have you identified a pervasive societal problem or was that one person weird to you"

This conversation would not exist if it was a bi flag or a pan flag or an ace flag

Aight here’s a trans woman who’s narrative is thematically linked with her transness in a way that enriches both her story, her characterization, and the story around her who doesn’t ever mention that she’s trans (but y’know she has a trans flag in her room in the background subtly like you asked)