308,745,538

That's the population of the United States per the numbers released by the US Census Bureau at 11 AM EST.  The population grew at a 9.7% rate during the decade, the second slowest rate since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

And as we political junkies know, .the new population counts lead to reapportionment of congressional seats.

Texas was a big winner in in the reapportionment sweepstakes.   The Lone Star State will pick up 4 new House seats to increase our congressional delegation from 32 to 36 seats thanks to large increases in the Latino/a community population.   Florida gained two to increase its congressional delegation to 27 seats.

Six states, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington gained one seat

The big losers were New York and Ohio, which lost two congressional seats each.  Eight other states, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania lost a single seat

In a few months the political fun will begin in terms of redrawing the district lines, and no thanks to you peeps who stayed home in the last midterm election, the Republifools will have a major say in many states as to where those lines get drawn

The other problem is those lines and districts will also stay in effect until 2020.

One of the things I've been advocating for years and the trans community needs to be working on starting right now is having for the 2020 census 'trans' as an additional identity option so that we have official federal statistics and population counts to point to.

I have believed for a long time like Dr. Lynn Conway that the ratios quoted for us are wrong and transpeople are far more numerous in the population..    We just need the hard numbers to back it up.

I'm also convinced that one of the factors leading to us getting cut out of legislation is the Big Lie being told that 'we're just a small subset of the population'.when we're probably 3% of it.    

Having those hard census numbers makes it easier for is to not get screwed politically by unscrupulous pols and our enemies..

But stay tuned, the next few months are going to be very interesting politically.    It's also going to be fascinating to see as the data from the 2010 census continues to get rolled out and broken down by city, race, and other categories over the next year.  .