The Myth of Trans Male Privilege?: A Casual Statistical Analysis of Three English-Language Wikipedia Articles
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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.
3. We need to lift up all trans politicians, regardless of demographic, and remove the barriers to success without presenting one group as more important than another.
