Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Case Closed!

There has been something of an ongoing debate online over the origins of what can be called the "Transgender Paradigm."  The rather notorious kook and gender fascist Mr. "Cristan Williams" has tried to claim that the term has a long history, and that the fact that the term, and the movement that has pushed it as an umbrella term arose pretty much starting in the mid-Nineties is a "myth."  Mr. Williams has provided quite a bit of highly questionable (at best) evidence, and has tried to bury opponents in an heap of ad hominem attacks and arrogance.

Well, yesterday, a very geeky web comic, that has nothing to do with transsexualism or transgender, happened to provide a link that led me to what has been missing this argument.  Real evidence.  Google has a site that allows you to analyze the occurrence of a collection terms in a large collection of books over a time range. 

So, I checked the occurrence of three terms, "transsexual," "transvestite," and "transgender" from 1960 to the most recent data, which is 2008.  The results, to say the least, destroy Mr. Williams' claims.
As can be seen from the graph, the term "transgender" is completely absent until around 1990.  It then starts to becomes a bit more common during the mid-Ninties, until it finally becomes more common around 2001.  

Contrary to Mr. Williams' claims, it is clear that what has been claimed by most is true.  The "Transgender Movement" began in the Nineties, become increasingly active during that decade.  It was effectively non-existent before 1989 at the absolute earliest.  

Unlike Williams, who seems to have access to information that, well, no one else actually does, anyone can check this out for their own self.  Go to http://books.google.com/ngrams and try it for yourself.  You can use the values I used, or those of your own choosing.  But, as they say, the matter speaks for itself.

As I have said for some time, while it is possible that there might have been isolated incidents where the term "transgender" was used, it was not a common term, and the movement that we now deal with did not exist, before around 1990.  It is, instead, a very recent phenomenon, and well, Mr. Williams is delusional at best, and more likely deliberately deceptive.

4 comments:

idappaccayata said...

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transgender&year_start=1960&year_end=1980&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=

Just Jennifer said...

Thanks for proving my point for me. I did another search, with some very interesting results:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transgender&year_start=1900&year_end=1980&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=

To explain what this means, I searched from 1900 to 1980 with a smoothing of zero. In another words, this is RAW data. The actual numbers, if you will. It shows a series of very sharp spikes in specific years. And that indicates, as I suspected, that the term was used in very isolated cases. Put another way, a few people, in isolated cases, made up what they probably thought was a new term. And then it disappeared again, until someone else thought it up, until the mid-Nineties, when the modern day "Transgender Movement" began to arise. There was NO such movement before the Nineties.

Facts...they will get you every time.

Angel said...

Interesting... so, by increasing the "smoothing" value, Cristan is able to make the graph appear to show something other than what the raw data actually shows. I suspect that if I were to take the graph and increase the "smoothing" enough, it would show that the word "iPod" was already in wide usage before the year 1950!

Oh lookie!!! http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=iPod&year_start=1940&year_end=1980&corpus=15&smoothing=30&share=

Even more interesting, I tried clicking the links below the graph, and that took me to a page listing the publications in which all of these instances of "transgender" occurred... many of them were different publications that carried the same quote verbatim from a review of a play, followed by publications written by the queen transvestite himself, Charles "Virginia" Prince.

So yeah, this is what's meant by "Lies, damn lies, and statistics".

Just Jennifer said...

Mr. Williams posted a response on his blog where he digs himself into an even bigger hole. He is desperate, but there is really no way he can support his claims. Lying just makes it worse...