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People think that 1/5 americans are trans? Billionaire owned media really does shit in our brains, huh?
That struck me too. 1 in 5 are trans? Who are these people they polled?
It doesn't surprise me. With how much focus there is on issues like trans athletes in the media and politics, people incorrectly assume the actual number of people "at issue" is in proportion. This is how we get state legislatures spending huge amounts of time creating legislation that will impact like three people.
But like, do they not notice that every fifth person they meet isn't trans?
Maybe they think all the trans people are in some other part of the country like New York or California, or maybe they think that trans people are so indistinguishable from cis people that anyone they meet could be secretly trans?
That could explain the paranoia that some people have about trans people. And also why people e.g. think that Daniel Radcliffe's wife is trans because she's taller than him (even though they have a child together, but then again, maybe these people think that transwomen can get pregnant.).
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And these are the averages. Which means for every answer that accurately said 1%, someone said 39% (or two people said 30%)
Which means they think if they know two other people, one of them must be trans. Or more likely, that entire cities of "others" (that they've never been to) must be trans.
I'd like to know how large their sample size was. I mean, this was yougov, so I expect at least some level of credibility to this, but depending on how large the same size is and how biased your selection is, you can get some really weird numbers.
E.g. do the same study with some old KKK members or with a school class in a black, impoverished neighbourhood or with a group of CEOs and you will get very different results.
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the people who answer polls
Definitely depends on the spaces they exist in, too. I only recently learned I was wrong about how many black people there are in the US. Turns out they're just "overrepresented" in the media I consume and I've lived most of my life in very diverse neighborhoods. Similarly, trans topics overrepresent the amount of trans people in a lot of online spaces and people tend to extrapolate when they only have all the data. I can see why a terminally-online individual would feel like there's a trans epidemic.
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Wait, atheism is that low in the US?? 38.9% of Australians indicated no religion at the last census, I knew we had more but never expected a whole order of magnitude difference!
That number is wrong.
28% of people in the US don't have a religion. People here just don't like the word atheist.
"Don't have a religion" includes
- Atheists
- Agnostics
- Spiritual but not religious people
- Religious but unaffiliated people
Saying "don't have a religion" equals atheist is like claiming that everyone who didn't vote for Trump or Harris is an anarchist.
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Atheism still has a stigma associated with it here. Not sure now, but there were surveys less than 10 years ago saying that Americans were less likely to vote for an atheist than for a convicted felon (and this was before Trump!). Other polls often use the term "Nones" to refer to people who don't affiliate with a major religion, but that tends to include atheists, agnostics, areligious people, and some others thrown in there.
There's a good explainer here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/
That poll has 17% of Nones as atheist, which would be about 5% of the population, just above the 3% in the chart from OP. Although I bet part of the "agnostics" are agnostic atheists, but don't use the term. That being said, Pew also has this page: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/age-race-education-and-other-demographic-traits-of-us-religious-groups/#age 
That shows that people under 50 are way different. 73% atheist of 69% None is about 50%, which means that a full half of Americans under 50 identify as atheist. So, a BIG generational gap.
I mean yeah, I don't identify with the term atheist because it ended up shifting meaning to anti-theist on the internet in my opinion. I guess I just conflated it with "no religion" in my head, which is what the Australian statistic is.
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Yes, this chart is bogus. In the last 5 years Gallup estimates of the LGBT population have gone from 5% to 7.6%, not 3%. And there's no way people who understand how to eat soup or wear pants would think 30% of Americans live in New York City.
33% Atheist
27% Muslim
30% Jewish
58% Christian (41% being Catholic, so that's about 70% of all Christians)
This just proves that Americans do indeed have more people per capita.
Ah, New York City, population 120 million.
This list is Wild. Like two thirds live in Calif & Texas loool
Also 41% are black.
90% live in CA, TX, and NYC! Sounds right to me I can't think of a single other large metro area or anything like that.
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I'm not buying that atheist one.
I bet if we're going by self-report, a lot of people who "aren't religious" still shy away from the atheism label.
All the numbers on this chart make no goddamn sense. Even the most right wing of fox news watching nutjobs wouldn't say there are %20+ trans people in the USA. They always claim it's like 3 people and that's why they need to ignore them/they don't matter.
I need to see the region they polled in. Preferably the exact counties because these numbers don't make sense for either of the extreme sides answers, but also the moderates wouldn't answer some of these questions these ways either.
Who TF did they get answers from??
"-How many live in New York?
-30%!"
xD
No, that thing is just wrong. They "interviewed" two groups of 1000 people online who had opted into their "panel". Either they're lying about bias, or they were scammed.
The easiest giveaway is the "40% of adults are veterans" number. The average American is well aware that almost half their aquientances are not veterans.
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It says 3% of Americans are atheists, but about 29% of Americans are "religiously unaffiliated". I would say the poll only overestimated by 4%.
People can be agnostic too, I think religiously unaffiliated doesn't mean they are atheist but the reverse is true.
Tbh unless a survey specified otherwise I would think it just means not religious.
Read the linked source.
the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or 'nothing in particular,'
Many of the unaffiliated retain religious beliefs or practices without affiliating.
One fifth of the US public and a third of adults under the age of 30 are reportedly unaffiliated with any religion, however they identify as being spiritual in some way. Of these religiously unaffiliated Americans, 37% classify themselves as spiritual but not religious.
Affiliation is about which community you are affiliated with. It's not about beliefs at all, actually. Affiliated means "I would call myself an X", and if you are not affiliated with a certain group, you are not affiliated, no matter if you are atheist, agnostic, spiritual but not religious or even religious but not strong enough to actually affiliate with one group.
Remember, atheism is a belief in itself, contrary to agnosticism. Atheism is the conviction that no God exists, even though there's no proof for an absence of a God. Agnosticism on the other hand is acknowledging that there is no proof that God does or doesn't exist, so they just don't care about it.
Atheism is in many ways similar to a religion. There are communities formed around the shared belief that God doesn't exist, they preach that God doesn't exist, they study their literature to find proof that God doesn't exist. They defend their faith that God doesn't exist, like any religious person would defend theirs. There are even atheist missionaries who stand on street corners preaching that God doesn't exist.
To be an Atheist is to believe so strongly that God doesn't exist that it becomes something like a religion in itself, and that's rather rare.
Agnosticism on the other hand is really wide-spread, even within religiously affiliated people. There are tons of religiously affiliated people who are socially religiously affiliated but are actually agnostic ("All my friends and family are X. I don't really care whether God exists or not, I don't really believe in the spiritual teachings of my faith, but I'm not that much at odds with it that I can't live as an X, and denouncing the faith would lead to repercussions, so I'll just formally keep being X, because it's less hassle.").
Given that the "estimated proportion" range is only between 20-76%, regardless of the question, this seems more indicative of a poor understanding of statistics than an over/under estimation of specific demographics, especially since a lot of contradictory demographics are way overestimated.
For example, I am significantly more likely to believe that Americans suck at percentages than that they believe nearly ever single person in the country is either Muslim, Jewish, or Catholic (these three "estimated proportions" add up to 98%).
Side note: interestingly all religious categories listed add up to 189%, but there is some overlap depending on definition (e.g. some people might argue that "Catholics are Christians" or "Jewish is an ethnicity so you can be Jewish and atheist"). Thus I picked the three that most people would agree are extremely unlikely to overlap, which coincidentally added up to nearly 100%.
EDIT: I would like to see this survey redone with the same questions, but with the addition of a few questions for things that are widely known to be extremely uncommon, bordering on non-existent, such as "percentage of people with only one ear" or "percentage of people with more than 12 siblings," and some questions for things that are widely known to be extremely common, bordering on universal, such as "percentage of people that have electricity at home" or "percentage of adults who own a phone." If even these questions result in answers grossly over/underestimating the percentage, what we have is actually an aversion to providing very small or very large estimates. (It is already known that people easily overestimate the frequency of things that are unusual especially if they can easily think of an example, such as overestimating the number of redheads because you had a classmate with red hair, or even because you can think of a celebrity with red hair).
I found it unbelievable as well so I tested these questions on college and graduate students. Answers were in range. CS majors literally believed that 40% of Americans are black and a third of the population lives in Texas.
What a person needs to answer correctly is sociocultural awareness.
I think this still shows a poor grasp of percentages/statistics. If you were to follow up the Texas question by asking in turn, "what percentage live in California?" " How about New York?" "And Florida?" "So then what percentage live in the 46 remaining states plus US territories?" you'd watch a classroom of students slowly realize they've way surpassed 100% thanks to their overinflated initial estimates. Or conversely, if you gave them a paper with a list of states and asked them to write down what percentage of Americans lived in each state next to the state's name, it might not be accurate, but it would probably add up to 100% for significantly more respondents.
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Wow you guys need better media and media literacy, these are wild levels of disinformation
Nearly half the population apparently having been in the military, 1 in 5 trans, 1 in 3 gay or lesbian. Do these people imagine entire battalions of non cishet people?
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The income estimates are interesting.
We're apparently quite bad at estimating all income levels except who earns $100,000-$500,000 / year.
I think it's because $100k-$500k is a good range for the "rich" people that you normally interact with. That would cover things like lawyers, surgeons, engineers.
My takeaway is that people are pretty good at estimating how many people have children and voted in 2020.
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How tf car-brained USAinians in a car-dependant society assume only half the population owns a car?
Or that a fifth/a quarter of the country is Muslim/transgender/living on a million per year?
Or that NY is a third of the USA?
Is this data just bs?
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This is quite a fascinating insight into many things.
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One of which is how far apart the estimations are from reality.
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Fear plays a huge part in most of these estimations. E.g. the world's leading organized religion is Christianity. And yet, when asked how many people in the US were Muslim, the average estimation in the US was 26%. But the reality is (according to this,) around 1%.
Another example being the percentage of Hispanics living in the US. Reality is closer to 17%, but many believed that there were over 2 times that.
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85% own a smartphone, 88% own a car, but only 83% have a driver's license, that would explain a few things. Is gas cheaper than mobile internet in the US?
Also, Americans means US citizens, Mexico and Canada are conveniently excluded as usual.
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I refuse to believe this
0% of households have an income over 1milion??? I mean I get its low but I believe it exists.
There are 128.45 million households in the US. This graph explicitly round to the nearest whole percent. To have a percentage of 0, there could still be 642,141 households.
Edit: Actually I misread the stat. Of our 341.9 million people, 1.7 million might belong to a household making above a million dollars to still be approx 0%.
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Rounding, right? 0.499999 rounds to zero.
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101% of Americans are estimated to be either Democrat or Republican
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True proportion: Democrats: 42% Republicans: 47%
Did I read this wrong? I’m almost certain there are more registered Democrats than Republicans.
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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