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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Crime does disproportionately impact minorities, though, including trans people

As @sarker points out above it appears that crime does not, in fact, disproportionately impact trans people.

From @sarker's comment:

18 / 3M = 0.14 homicides per 100k

CDC reports 6.8 homicides per 100k Americans in the general population.

So, trans people are fifty times less likely to be murdered than a random American? That doesn't pass the smell test.

As @FtttG points out below, trans people are substantially more likely to report being the victim of a crime, though that comes with obvious caveats. But some basic sanity checks: trans people are also disproportionately non-white, particularly black and Hispanic. They are disproportionately poor and young. These are all groups that face high rates of crime victimization, and you'd expect that, even if trans identity itself doesn't affect victimization, they'd be more likely to be victims of crime. Beyond that, my bet is that trans people spend time with other trans people; trans people commit more crimes; and so even accounting for race and income, you'd still see elevated rates of victimization.

None of this means buying into the HRC's framing that there's a systemic trans genocide going on, except insofar as our public policy choices let criminals run rampant in those communities.

That doesn't pass the smell test.

Then you must accept either a much higher number of trans homicide victims (surely HRC has squeezed all the blood from that stone) or much lower number of trans people in the country. Thing is, I went through the trouble of scrolling a little further down Google, and HRC itself estimates 1.6M trans people 13+ in the US. So we're looking at a homicide rate of 1.2 homicides per 100k (apologies, I fucked up the math in the original post, corrected) if we simply take the HRC's numbers at face value. About 1.6M is the lowest estimate I could find on the front page.

To match the genpop homicide victimization rate, you'd need there to be only about 260k trans people in the US. And this isn't even counting the "gender expansive".

HRC is being pulled in two different directions: one, to maximize an estimate of the number of reported trans people; two, to maximize the number of trans murders. The former is a much easier task than the latter, because the same amount of work can get you any estimated number you want. The latter is much harder, because (AFAIK) most places don't report the gender identity of victims; so instead, they have some intern trawl through news reports and flag the ones that explicitly list the gender identity of the victim.

So, although I think the HRC estimates of the number of trans people countrywide are significantly inflated, the bigger factor is that the HRC is not capturing most of the number of trans victims.

HRC is being pulled in two different directions: one, to maximize an estimate of the number of reported trans people; two, to maximize the number of trans murders.

Correct, as I noted in my original post.

However, HRC's estimate of the number of trans people in the country is the lowest I could easily find.

@sarker was specifically arguing that murder does not disproportionately impact trans people, and I think the data bear that out. I'm agnostic on the question of whether crime disproportionately affects them.

CW is that (holding quality of trauma care constant) murder closely tracks other violent crime, but is measured more reliably.

If the motte is that property crime disproportionately effects trans people, then it isn't connected to the bailey that the "trans day of remembrance" crowd are trying to occupy.

Why would it? Is there any reason to believe trans are more subject to crime than average?

This report from 2021 claims that trans people are over four times more likely than cis people to experience violent victimisation, based on data from the 2017 and 2018 National Crime Victimisation Surveys. As it's based on survey data rather than police reports, the usual caveats apply.

Apart from homicides where you get near-complete reporting, I would say surveys are more reliable than police reports. They are definitely more useful in making comparisons across time periods and social groups because the unreliability is less correlated with the variables of interest.

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