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I generally find the 21st Century Salonnière’s (also known as Dolly) writing to be thoughtful and insightful, despite the controversial arena she roams around in. Back in April (I have a terrifying reading backlog, ok?) she published the post Sexual Offenses Are More Common Among Transwomen Than Men, a title as provocative as it is unambiguous.
Using prison data from both the UK and the US, Dolly finds that about 50% of trans prisoners are there for a sexual crime, in contrast to 11% - 19% of the general prison population. Hopefully it’s obvious that prisoners are overwhelmingly male by a huge margin, especially for violent offenses, and that the number of trans prisoners is so miniscule as to be almost a rounding error (in the UK there were only 142 trans prisoners out of a total prison population of 92,949 as of 2017).
Dolly’s overall argument is structured thus:
Premise- Trans prisoners are more likely to be there for a sexual offense
Conclusion- Trans people are more likely to commit a sexual offense
I’m not the only one who noticed some glaring omissions in this argument, and a few commentators pointed this out. I would hope my criticism is seen as constructive, but the main feedback I would give is to be more transparent about implicit assumptions. To be clear, Dolly’s operating assumptions (whether stated or not) may be perfectly reasonable, but the discussion is clouded when they're kept shelved away.
The two main assumptions implicitly made are:
Trans prisoners are representative of the trans general population
The amount of law enforcement attention spent on any particular crime is representative of that crime's frequency
I might be missing others, but those are at least the most important. Setting aside the validity of the prison statistics (I’m assuming they’re legit and have no reason to think otherwise) I remain skeptical these are reasonable assumptions for many of the same reasons “And I for truth” listed in their comment to the post:
I’m also skeptical based on my experience as a public defender.
Sex criminals are by far the people treated the worst by the criminal justice system, both by the legal punishments but also informally by retribution from other inmates. When I'm dealing with a sex offense case, I make informal requests to the prosecutor and the judge to not read out their charges out loud, or to take their case last when the courtroom is emptier. Those same clients routinely ask me to not give them any paperwork about their case for fear that it would be discovered by others. All of this is done to protect them, by limiting the number of people who find out about the nature of their charges.
Inmates in general are almost by definition more violent that the general public, and beating the shit out of someone accused of a sex crime is the kind of violence most likely to be implicitly condoned by the powers that be. Correctional officers genuinely have a thankless and very difficult job, and the last thing on their mind is worrying about kiddie diddler getting shanked. Didn’t see it happen, and even if they did, it was self-defense because the rapist provoked it. So yes, the idea that someone accused of a sex offense is more likely to identify as trans once in prison solely for the purposes of better accommodations makes a lot of sense to me. This says less about the authenticity of trans gender identity and much more about the horrific conditions our criminal justice system casually tolerates.
There would also be an added filter at the investigation stage. Sex crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute, absent clear evidence of violence or coercion. Law enforcement is put in a very difficult situation because they WANT to be receptive of complaints, but they often can't do anything with them due to shoddy evidence. In most of the rape cases I've handled, there is rarely any dispute whatsoever that the people involved had sex, but then the only evidence of a crime is conflicting testimony from the only two witnesses (he said she consented, she denies it). For example, I once had a case where a guy in his 40s had a friends-with-benefits relationship with a 21 year-old for at least two years. The day she reported a rape to police, she was also seven months pregnant with his child. I am not at all saying it’s impossible to rape someone you’re in a relationship with (no matter how casual), but good luck convincing a jury of that beyond a reasonable doubt.
Prosecutors are thus more likely to pursue charges like this if there are other factors to tip the balance. In the case above, the guy had a domestic violence history from a very long time ago. I also have to assume that their age gap also played a role in moving the needle towards “prosecute”. It would not be surprising if a sex crime garners more lurid attention from the law enforcement apparatus just because the suspect is trans. Prosecutors openly advertising their preferred pronouns does not disavow them of any potential bias against trans people they may harbor, and either way they can only file charges when a beat cop or detective cares enough to forward a report. We’re not pulling from a progressive crowd here.
The overall methodology is complicated by the severe dearth of data on a population this miniscule — how many conclusions can you draw from a sample that is 0.15% of the population? This is further hampered by the relatively incoherent framework of gender identity, particularly when it melds into non-binary territory — how do you determine who should be counted in this group?
One of my hobby horses is being a spoilsport for when someone tries to hoist a heavy conclusion on some flimsy stilts. We can shore this up with some figurative gravel — perhaps some reasonable assumptions to close the gaps, but these should at least be stated outright and explicitly. Short of that, sometimes we just don’t have enough evidence to come to a conclusion, and it’s ok to admit when we don’t and can’t know something. This isn’t a call to give up on trying to answer questions, because even a failed attempt to resolve an inquiry can leave us with a useful blueprint for the future.
Wouldn't "trans people are less likely to commit a non-sexual offense" be sufficient to explain the observations, without needing to invoke any differences in their rate of committing sexual offenses at all? This makes some intuitive sense, too, as I'd assume we are mostly talking about MtF rather than FtM so they are depressing their testosterone levels and thus violent tendencies. Moreover, transitioning is costly and mostly depresses your social status (except for some weird and not particularly highly-incarcerated subcultures), so it stands to reason that out of the "sex, status, money" triad of motivations for crime, trans people would disproportionately have sex figure in their value function to the exclusion of the other two (though this of course could also explain them being more motivated towards sex crime than an average person, to the degree we are willing to assume that "will to engage in gender self-expression" and "will to sexual activity" are positively correlated).
"less likely" compared to what though? Saying something like "trans people are less likely to commit a non-sexual offense" doesn't really tell us anything about their overall criminality, which is useful information to have. Dolly's overall conclusion is that they're more likely to commit a sexual offense compared to men, but she doesn't try explaining why that might be the case (I assume that would delve into armchair psychology, implicating AGP and whatnot).
I was going off of your quote,
which does not imply, mathematically, that trans people are more likely to commit a sexual offense compared to men. (It does imply that they are more likely to have committed a sexual offense conditional on being in prison.)
For example, imagine you have a base population of, say, 1000 cis men and 1000 trans people. Of the men, a total 15 commit sexual offenses, and another 85 commit non-sexual offenses (and get imprisoned). Of the trans people, 1 commits a sexual offense, and another 1 commits a non-sexual offense. Then the following are simultaneously true:
50% of trans prisoners are there for a sexual offense.
~15% of the general prison population are there for a sexual offense.
Hence, in particular, trans people are more likely to be there for a sexual offense. (P(sexual offense|trans and there) > P(sexual offense|cis and there))
trans people are less likely than cis men to commit a sexual offense. (0.1% to cis men's 1.5%)
I'm of course not saying that this is what the numbers are, but if you only know the first two points (which I assumed "trans prisoners are more likely to be there for a sexual offense" is supposed to gloss), this scenario is not ruled out. Therefore, the conclusion does not follow from the premise.
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