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Notes -
New Aella survey post on child sexual assault just dropped: https://aella.substack.com/p/a-whole-lot-of-csa-data
I think her analysis is generally unobjectionable, but do find it notable that she buries the lead on the "non-cis" sexual assault findings. I didn't dig into the crosstabs, but non-cis people are plausibly getting sexually assaulted even before they become openly non-cis. And while there's plausibly causation in the direction of abnormal pre-egg-breaking/transition behavior being more likely to attract sexually assault, the data re: non-cis people reporting more CSA still very much supports the hypothesis that either:
It might be that these hypothesis are both correct, but for different population subsets. For example, nonbinary people might be disproportionately motivated by a desire to escape a concept they associate with their assault, while transgender people are the ones afflicted by a root factor. (Or vica-versa, either explanation would be possible.)
I would personally bet on the second hypothesis predominating, though. And in particular, the associations re: social class/parental age/trauma are suggestive of some specifically anxiety-related problem. Working hypothesis: If you grow up poor or insecure or to young parents or female you become anxious and depressed, which leads you to be more likely to suffer sexual assault, more likely to interpret past events as sexual assault, more likely to start identifying yourself as non-cis (because of body image issues? Data is obviously underspecified and outside the scope of aella's post), and more likely to be negatively affected long-term by sexual assault when it does happen.
...So if you have kids, and want to maximize their chances of identifying as cisgender into adulthood, your top priority should be reducing their opportunities for anxiety. Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.
Ideological disclaimer: as a catholic I believe there are only two genders, fixed at birth, but as a transhumanist also I'm in favor of letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies. (I accept some nuance re: having to get psychologists/a judge to sign off that someone is truly acting in their own uncoerced self-interest, with increasing scrutiny in proportion to the danger posed by the modification and the mental irresponsibility of the requestor.)
Wow, those graphs are physically difficult to parse- in fact I'd actually say they're actively harmful to a proper understanding of the data. A "plain reading" (at least to me) of that data suggests 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 12 boys have been sexually penetrated in an unwanted manner before the age of 12, which isn't passing the sniff test given, if I remember correctly, prevalence of sexual contact by 12 is about 5%, or 1 in 20. So I doubt I'm reading the graph correctly, but there's no way to derive the total context or get a scale of the proportions involved relative to all respondents.
I think this is ignoring the obvious-to-me confounder that becoming non-cis can cause them to become a victim of sexual assault [or reinterpret themselves as such] where they hadn't necessarily considered themselves as such before. This can also happen to cisgendered people, and women more than men for reasons that have to do with an asymmetric biological incentive to claim abuse for social or financial stability or gain (it's very popular to do this and makes headlines when it happens re: #MeToo, also, internal narratives matter to people re: 2rafa's comment below).
Well, no, if you grew up poor, 2 things are likely true for kid-you:
Which means you're more likely to be "propositioned", and less likely to feel you have the power to pull back before it happens, and apparently this decreases monotonically by wealth level (outside of the 'elite' answers, whose error bars are very large- though I can believe this becomes truer for elite children simply because the chance for catastrophe in that scenario becomes large/taking 'no' for an answer and being driven enough to take risk kind of selects you out of the 'elite' group, obviously).
Also, and perhaps most importantly, we don't actually hear the first question: what's abuse? The analysis buries "indicates that they might be the most enthusiastic participants" in there, which suggests the question of "abuse" wasn't worded properly (i.e. in the legal sense, not the objective 'it was unwanted' sense- and I'd expect a survey designer who claims to value childhood autonomy to know better), which is a massive deal, especially when it comes to drawing conclusions on the last question.
Perhaps the second set of data will be more illuminating, though I'm not holding my breath on this one. If the base question/premise is bad, the analysis won't get better.
I think this is just reporting bias-- CSA victims are probably more likely to share and respond to this survey. I don't think that's an issue with respect to Aella's analysis because she's specifically interested in cross-response correlations rather than the headline numbers.
The confounder definitely exists-- we have plenty of other surveys showing non-cis people are more vulnerable to sexual assault-- but the data for this survey contradicts any notion that this is primary. If this was the primary confounder, then we should expect to see a much larger difference between response rates of cis vs non-cis people comparing between the 0-12 vs 13-18 age groups, since the coming-out rate is WAY higher in later adolescence than childhood and pre-teen-hood. Instead, the difference in response rates remain very similar. Plausibly there's still some "wierd kid" confounding factor because the kids who become non-cis are never normal even before transitioning... (the one kid I know that transitioned had previously shown me furry porn in the cafeteria because we were both bronies... and had some pretty solid taste, honestly, ngl.) That gets right back into the question of what exactly makes these kids weird, however.
You say this like you're going to provide a counterargument and then propose two factors that seem extremely likely to increase anxiety and depression.
I made a typo in my OP. Fixed it, so my second bullet point reads:
I do think it's likely that the difference in sexual assault rates between cis and non-cis people is partially (though probably not totally) due to differences in specifically reporting rates. I don't actually think we need an explicit definition for what constitutes as 'abuse' though-- it would be sufficiently interesting to find that non-cis people adopt inclusive definitions of abuse at a higher rate, or are more likely to re-interpret invents in a negative way.
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