Transgender Shelters and Lorentz Transformations

 San Joaquin River Gorge - photo by JoAnn Sturman

by Scott Sturman

Are there any limits to public welfare in California?  Until hearing a report on NPR about the lack of privacy for transgenders living in California homeless shelters, I thought free food and shelter were more than adequate. Evidently not, for social justice advocates demanded a solution.  And keep in mind the NPR report applied only to transgenders using public shelters and not the entire cohort in the state.  Cost is no object when it comes to safeguarding dignity and sparing embarrassment. 

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM IV) estimates about 1:30,000 males and 1:100,000 females are transgender.  The numbers have been challenged by advocacy organizations which inflate prevalence for political and financial advantage.  Some aver the ratio for males is 1:500, a variance of 60 fold.  The 2010 California census noted 28 million people over the age of eighteen with a slight predominance of females living in the state.  If the DSM IV figures are used, one expects to find about 600 transgenders residing in the entire state.  California numbers certainly exceed the national average, so let’s be generous and estimate the transgender population at ten times the national average or 6000. 

For once it would be refreshing for social scientists to approach problems logically and dispense with heavy doses of guilt and caring.  Small wonder the bleeding hearts have orchestrated the expenditure of $16 trillion since the inception of the War on Poverty without having much effect on the poverty rate.  There are lessons to be learned about limits and allocation of resources from mathematicians and physicists, and particularly one of the most famous of all–Albert Einstein.

Einstein demonstrated as the limit of a non linear system is approached, the amount of energy required to accelerate a particle to near the speed of light increases infinitely due to a corresponding increase in the particle’s mass.  The effect of velocity on an object’s mass is trivial under normal circumstances, but when the limits of the system are approached, the effect becomes profound.  This is described by the Lorentz transformation, Gamma = 1/√1-v2/c2, where v is the velocity of the object and c is the speed of light.  The mass of a body in motion (m1) equals the mass at rest (m0) x (Gamma).  As the velocity approaches the speed of light, a small increase comes at prohibitive levels of energy input.

This is analogous to the world of social science where enormous sums of money and effort are expended to provide exhaustive services to all segments of society. The cost-benefit relationship governing social welfare may not be described by the Lorentz factor, but the system is non linear and subject to fail when the goal becomes making a perfect world for each and everyone.  The transgender homeless shelter controversy qualifies as a tempest in a teapot and another example of trying to do too much for too few when only scarce resources are available.