One post that really annoys me is the one that's like "so many trans women play d&d and its clones why aren't there more tgirls on the big actual play media"
because that's like. such an example of grossly overestimating what should be happening based on who you personally know? Approximately 10% of the US population plays these sorts of games more than once a month and another 5% or so plays monthly or near monthly. That gives us a most generous estimate of 15% of the population who would be suitable to use as an ongoing player in any kind of podcast, video series, whatever.
And If we use about the most generous estimate of how many of us there are, it's like maybe 0.8% of the population is a trans woman and is willing to identify themselves as such to various manners of polling/surveys/etc. And honestly if you ain't willing to answer a survey you're definitely not going to be publicly on a podcast or anything.
If all of the tgirl population was routine d&d/d&d clone players (and of course very untrue lol) that would be a best case scenario that would be a bit over 5% of the size of the total population of people who play regularly. As like an absolute possible cap of participation.
In reality I don't believe there's any evidence that the amount of regular participants in d&d and clones among trans women is particularly different from the general population, not least because the kind of things that get in the way of participating in regular play tend to affect trans women more than the average person. Yknow, being busy, not being able to afford it, not being able to have a consistent availability schedule due to increased precariouaness from societal discrimination, all of that. Things that are also particularly a problem for a large scale entertainment property like a major podcast or video series before you count how much of the potential player base ain't gonna feel safe becoming a publicly known figure like that.
Like yeah yeah a generous estimate would be about 2 million to 2.75 million trans women in the country, sounds like a lot right. But the regular playerbase of d&d and clones is over 51 million. And that's a count of people specifically interested enough in the thing! You start trying to whittle down who would be potential person participating who is also a trans woman, and it's like maybe 300k, 400k.
Here's another factor: the proportion of the American population that makes at least a few dollars a year from online content is about 14%. Let's apply that to get a good estimate for who is likely to be doing any kind of even hobbyist with 9 bucks in tips for content online in a year: OK now we're down to like ~55,000 trans women who are regular d&d and clones players and are also putting stuff out online enough that they're picking up pennies from it - a suitable proxy for "willing and able to potentially participate". And that's kind of a top end for who might possibly participate in the kind of thing the post wanted to see! You could put all of those theoretical trans women in to the existing d&d and clones actual play/edited play media industrial complex evenly and that'd still probably work out to maybe getting one trans woman each on most of them! There's been a lot of attempts to make such things by a lot of people after all! There was even this decent history podcast I used to listen to that started doing actual plays to try to cover participating in the history subjects they were covering and it got so annoying that I stopped listening (they were not good at presenting a compelling actual play or editing it down to be compelling, ugh). And hey two nickels time cuz I had that happen again on another history podcast. Shit is rampant.
That's the nature of hobbies really. There is a lot more people not like you than you generally expect!
