Q: There aren't many transgender people. Why should we have resources for such a small group?

A:  Yes, transgender people are a relatively small portion of the population, but from an educational and librarian standpoint, this argument has never made sense to me.

For example, books about world religions are present in libraries even when a community is primarily a single religion.

Most patrons at the library are not under the age of five, yet no one uses that as a reason to cut out storytimes.

Also, most trans people do not "look" trans. Also, trans people objectively exist; therefore, it makes sense for a library to have materials and information about them in order to counter prejudice and negative assumptions.  

Here are some resources about the amount of transgender people in the population:

The well-known statistics blog FiveThirtyEight explains Why We Don't Know the Size of the Transgender Population.

This article from Education Week explains some of the challenges faced in determining the amount of transgender children in schools today. 

This Daily Dot article shows how the amount of people identifying as trans is growing in number.

Click here to go back to Supporting transgender, gender nonconforming, and gender nonbinary students/patrons in your libraries