Friday 21 November 2014

TDOR in numbers

    It's Transgender Day Of Rememberance time again. Our service was last Sunday, a group of us in a darkened church holding candles. My job this year was to Blu-tac the list of the last year's victims to the wall, the line of A4 sheets went up and down each wall twice.

    There were a lot of names this year. 221 people. People like me, all murder victims.

    One country seems to appear more than others: Brazil. 112 victims. In fact the Americas don't look like a very safe place at all for transgender people. Brazil, Mexico, USA, Venezuela... The only non American country in the top ten was India, in at number 10 with 4 victims.
    But hang on, Surely Brazil and India have huge populations, shouldn't that make a difference? A few minutes with a spreadsheet and some population data from Wikipedia yielded a list of victims per 1000 head of population. Yet again it's not looking good for the Americas, the first non-American country is Hungary in at number 13.
    I am however ready to take these figures with a slight pinch of salt. In at the top is Belize, with 1 victim for 349728 people. But is one victim statistically significant, or is it simply noise within the error bars? I have to take the latter course, this tells me much less about the real threat to Belizian transgender people than the 112 deaths in Brazil tells me about that country even though on paper Belize is more dangerous.
    The figures do tell one clear story though. Some parts of the world are not safe for transgender people, and the Americas do not come out of it smelling of roses. Come on, you can make your countries safer than this!
    You wanted the data? Here you go:
Country Number of deaths
Population
Victims per 1000 head of population
Belize 1 349,728 0.002859365
Guyana 2 784,894 0.0025481148
Honduras 8 8,725,111 0.0009168938
Brazil 112 203,466,000 0.0005504605
El Salvador 3 6,401,240 0.0004686592
Ecuador 5 15,871,500 0.0003150301
Venezuela 9 30,206,307 0.000297951
Uruguay 1 3,404,189 0.0002937557
Mexico 31 119,713,203 0.0002589522
Peru 6 30,814,175 0.0001947156
Argentina 6 42,669,500 0.0001406157
Colombia 5 47,871,500 0.0001044463
Hungary 1 9,879,000 0.0001012248
Dominican Republic 1 10,378,267 9.63552007285995E-005
Netherlands 1 16,877,400 5.92508324741963E-005
Chile 1 17,819,054 5.6119701977445E-005
Malaysia 1 30,405,400 3.28888947358035E-005
USA 10 319,117,000 3.13364690693382E-005
Thailand 2 64,871,000 3.0830417289698E-005
Philippines 3 100,573,700 2.98288717626974E-005
Canada 1 35,540,419 0.000028137
Uganda 1 36,600,000 2.73224043715847E-005
Turkey 2 76,667,864 2.60865491178938E-005
Spain 1 46,507,760 2.15017880886975E-005
UK 1 64,105,654 1.55992480788044E-005
Bangladesh 1 157,345,000 6.35546092980393E-006
Pakistan 1 188,181,000 0.000005314
India 4 1,262,720,000 3.16776482513938E-006
Total
221



This data came from these places:

Tuesday 11 November 2014

Vanity sizing

    This week I've been working on a piece of clothing, a 1950s reissue from about 4 years ago, Simplicity 3673.

    It came together really well, and I had a perfect dress. Except I had one a size too small. Zip won't do up.

    Why? Vanity sizing. A 12, 14, or 16 in the 1950s now equates to a 10, 12, or 14 in 2014. You sell more clothes if people trying them on think they're a size smaller, so manufacturers have shifted the sizes upwards over the decades. And I didn't check the feet-and-inches(Dressmaking's not like engineering folks!) before cutting, so ended up with a 1950s sized garment. Modern Simplicity clothing fits me at the right size, this one didn't.

    We can all cock up our measurements whether we're making spacecraft or clothing. But at least a millimeter from the '50s is the still a thousandth of a metre in 2014.

    (This post was first made a couple of days ago to my local hackspace list. I'm not the only one hereabouts afflicted with the delusion that they can make clothing.)

In case you were wondering...

So, the post count has slowed to a trickle, surely she's moving on from blogging. Maybe she's become a Real Woman with no time for such things, or perhaps hlogging's just far too last decade.

Never fear, this ain't going to go away. Let's just say there is a lot I'd like to write about at the moment but can't really do so.