For years, transgender activist Leona Lo has been trying to push for greater official recognition of the transsexual community in Singapore. One reason she hasn't had much of an effect, she says, is because many people assume the transsexual community's very small. "They think it's just me and [comedian] Abigail Chay," she complains.
It doesn't help that the most commonly cited study for the natural frequency of transsexuals (done in the Netherlands in 1993) suggests that only 1 in 11,900 biological men are male-to-female transsexuals, and only 1 in 30,400 biological women are female-to-male transsexuals. Applying those statistics to Singapore, it translates into a paltry 188 MTF transsexuals and an even more insignificant 74 FTM transsexuals.
But last year, Prof Femke Olyslager and Prof Emeritus Lynn Conway presented a new statistical study completely overturning those numbers. Hailing respectively from Ghent University, Belgium and the University of Michigan, USA, the two are respected researchers in Electrical Engineering who also happen to be transsexual women. As Prof Olyslager was in Singapore for a physics conference last week, Lo persuaded her as a friend to present her findings to the local and international press.
In her presentation, Prof Olyslager explained how the Netherlands figures are flawed: they're calculated using an accumulative method, based on a ratio of clients at Dutch gender reassignment clinics to the population of the country over the age of 15. This means that over the years, the ratio will keep going up - it doesn't measure the natural prevalence for transsexualism at all.
She and Prof Conway decided to process with the same raw data from the 1993 study using an incremental method weighing the number of clients at the clinics against the total number of births each year. What they ended up with was a much higher prevalence of 1 in 3,500 for MTF transsexuals and a 1 in 6,200 prevalence for FTM transsexuals. And remember, this isn't counting the numerous transsexuals who chose not to have surgery or who had surgery outside of the Netherlands.
Interestingly, these new numbers are pretty similar to a Singapore-based study carried out by renowned psychologist Dr Tsoi Wing Foo back in 1988. According to him, prevalence rates for MTF transsexuals came out as 1 in 2,900, while FTM transsexuals were 1 in 8,300 - rates that were previously judged as much too high to be credible.
Using their new method, Olyslager and Conway have calculated these rates as being 1 in 2,000 and 1 in 5,600 for MTF and FTM transsexuals respectively. Re-calibrating to allow for surgeries abroad and transsexuals who choose not to have surgery, they estimate that Singapore rates are closer to 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 1,000 for MTF transsexuals, and 1 in 4,000 to 1 in 2,000 for FTM transsexuals.
According to Olyslager, what this means is that Singapore currently has at least 1,000 MTF transsexuals, of whom roughly 680 have had surgery. These are modest estimates based on old numbers, she emphasises, and prevalence might be much higher. (Numbers collected from clinics today would be misleading, as now most Singaporeans go for gender reassignment surgery in Bangkok.)
These findings are important, not just because they're the first statistics on transsexual prevalence to be published in the press (Dr Tsoi's work was unjustly neglected for years), but because they show that there's a significant community of persons in Singapore (and other states) whose needs aren't being met by the government.
As of now, with no legislation against discrimination in the workplace, persons going for gender reassignment surgery run a big risk of losing their jobs (not only after the operation, but also before, as they are required to live for a year as their desired gender before surgery.) There's also an array of risks that comes with the hormonal treatments - dangers of osteoperosis, breast cancer or vaginal collapse if administered improperly. Proper avenues for aftercare, counselling and social security are desperately needed.
Lo herself has been making offers to give talks on transgender awareness in workplaces and other institutions. "Society needs to recognise that transsexualism is a legitimate medical condition, and that will lead to less transphobic behaviour," she says.
"Why are we sweeping this under the carpet? People with counselling after surgery will have a more successful life and be more socially responsible. It's up to the health authorities to set up a task force and do some work."
F. Olyslager and L. Conway's "On the Calculation of the Prevalence of Transsexualism" was first presented at the WPATH Conference in Chicago in September 2007, and has been submitted to the International Journal of Transgenderism. It can also be found online here (in PDF.).
For more trans-information, also see www.lynnconway.com and www.leonalo.com.