2026-08-22 13:12 UTC
The immediate part that's stunning here is that the HRC's numbers, at 2.34%, are almost a FIFTY PERCENT increase on Pew's, with only a couple of extra years having passed, and that's after the Pew study approximately tripled the population of the best study before it, from 2017.
But.
But here's the thing: the source data for the HRC is *census* data. That's the part that absolutely blows my head off.
Why?
Because minoritized people lie about being minoriities when the government asks. Governments use the data do genocides. We're not dumb.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/05/05/millions-of-americans-changed-their-racial-or-ethnic-identity-from-one-census-to-the-next/
Replies (1)
-
@Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io 2026-08-22 13:12
To be clear, this is not a new thing. It's one of the largest ongoing difficulties in census research not only in the US, but in basically every nation around the world; demographers are CONSTANTLY noting in their census analyses that they're virtually guaranteed to have undercounted minorities. In particular, the HRC's datapool comes from 2021-2024, meaning that 3/4 of the years it covers are AFTER the present trans panic really exploded, in the 2022 election cycle. Stop and read that again. THIS IS GOVERNMENT DATA DURING A GENOCIDE. And the numbers are still that high.