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I mean I can go along with mere membership doesn’t prove much maybe the first or second time something happens. If the pattern is revealing itself and you can find a half dozen people who all were part of one community and despite never meeting and not even sharing the same culture start doing the same thing over and over, it’s not reasonable to keep saying “anyone who sees this specific group of people doing this thing is just misrepresenting reality”. Those people specifically keep doing that thing. Despite being in different circles in separate countries and not having the same language. If I found that most of the current crop of school spree shooters all liked speed skating, it would be worth talking about especially if the people shooting had few or no other points of connection.
I've talked before with misandrism on how people fuck up statistical understandings when they're being bigoted. Most bad things are such low base rates that even when elevated in certain populations, the result is still a very low base rate. Like the statements "men are more likely to be violent (than women)" and "men are likely to be violent" are incredibly different in meaning off of a single word. The former is true, the latter is false. The male baseline is in fact still very peaceful.
So in this sense consider it the same way. A half dozen people is not very much considered to the millions and millions of trans people there are. Even if it's an elevated rate, it still remains the case that the large large large large (continue on for a while) majority of trans people don't seem to be doing mass shootings. The statements of "trans people are more likely to be violent" and "trans people are likely to be violent" are just as different as the previous example. The main baseline is still being a very peaceful group like almost any other group.
But even if that was the case, how many people do speed skating? Tons. Clearly speed skating isn't the main catalyst given the however many much larger majority of speed skaters who aren't shooting up places. Now maybe speed skating is an accelerant on already broken minds somehow. Or maybe there's something about speed skating that attracts those with violent and broken minds. That is possible. But speed skating isn't causing shooter behavior in most people.
Are there millions and millions of trans people? They're a pretty small minority that's simply absent from large parts of the world. And there seems to be multiple phenomena involved, with most of these people specifically being MTFs, which isn't even the biggest group.
I'm getting flashbacks to the Catcher in the Rye obsession among prominent murderers, for some reason. No doubt there are many people who like Catcher in the Rye, but it seems overrepresented among murderers.
In the US alone at one of the lower estimates of around .5% that is still almost 2 million people on their own. So yes, there is millions and millions
The US is way on the high end for transgenderism population prevalence, for one thing.
And for another, does that .5% include non-binary, genderqueer, etc things that are different phenomena, and which would dominate the numbers if included? Most statistics that I see show a ‘not male or female identifying’ category, when in reality MTF’s, FtM’s, agendered weirdos/fake genders, and intersex(rare birth defects) are four essentially unrelated things. To the best of my knowledge intersex and fake genders are much more common than FtM which is much more common than MtF.
There's not many estimates for China but this one at least suggests .3% and India's hijra alone (which is their officially recognized form of nonbinary] seems to be 3 million yet alone anyone who is traditional binary trans or might call themselves trans but not hijra.
So point still stands that yes, millions and millions.
If you cast a wide net like that, estimates seem to increase to more like 2%. The .5% is a lower end estimate and typically about people who do meaningful binary transitions.
Hijra aren't trans, though, they're a weird localized form of fake gender who exist by public embarrassment(somehow they don't get beaten up? I thought India was a third world country with weak rule of law?) enabling their begging schtick.
I will acknowledge that in general, we don't have reliable numbers from large parts of the world. Trans seems a WEIRD phenomenon to me, but it's possible that I'm wrong. 'Millions and millions of trans people' is a legitimate possibility, even if I lean towards 'there's less than ten millions in the world'.
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Isn't this textbook Chinese Robbers Fallacy? There are a lot of humans. Even a relatively niche online subculture might have tens of thousands of members. A half-dozen violent criminals out of that number doesn't really prove anything, let alone provide sufficient grounds to condemn the subculture itself. The question, at that level, is not whether all mass shooters like speed skating, but how many speed skaters turn into school shooters.
That depends on whether you're trying to determine how to treat your friend the speed skater, or trying to stop school shootings. If most Ys are Xs, and you want to get rid of the Ys, it's generally a good idea to take a look at X to see whether you can make it lead to Y less often - whether or not Ys are a large fraction of Xs. This chain leads back to FtttG talking about how trans spaces ought to be given a spring cleaning of terrorist propaganda, not talking about how all the transsexuals are evil and must die.
A fair reply, but,
I still don't think that's been demonstrated, for multiple reasons.
First, the point of Chinese Robbers is not merely that you shouldn't discriminate against the Chinese as a whole just because they have a significant minority of robbers among them. The point is that it is a statistical illusion. There is not, in fact, a particular reason why so many Chinese become robbers - you would be mistaken to organize any interventions predicated on the notion that there is some specific reason why the Chinese are more likely to become robbers than anybody else, even if you avoid the most egregious mistake of treating any randomly-chosen Chinese person as meaningfully likely to become a robber. Whether popular Chinese media depict stealing in a positive light is irrelevant because there's nothing there to actually be explained. They're not more likely to become robbers than any other human beings; there's just way more Chinese than Belgians, so all else being equal you numerically end up with more Chinese than Belgian robbers worldwide. All that has been shown here is that there are a fair few trans shooters - but nobody has tried to show that it's a statistically significant number relative to the total number of shooters. I'm not claiming it's not statistically significant, but leaping from "there's been like, six of them!" to proposed interventions without actually running the numbers is just plain bad epistemics.
Second, it also hasn't been demonstrated that violent rhetoric in trans spaces is responsible. Insofar as disturbed individuals from varied backgrounds and ideologies converge on becoming school shooters, it seems fallacious to point to anything violence-related in a specific set of shooters' background and blame that. Compare "many mentally-disturbed young males become trans, some mentally-disturbed young males become shooters, some online trans spaces include violent rhetoric - is the violent rhetoric to blame?" to familiar moral panics like "many mentally-disturbed young males are gamers, some mentally-disturbed young males become shooters, some video games include violent content - are violent video games to blame?". Lots of people consume various forms of violent content, and it is a favorite trick of censors to lean on Chinese Robbers situations to blame whatever kinds of violent content they don't like by claiming that the correlation shows that this time the violent content directly led to real-world harm. Me, I'm skeptical of the entire framework. AFAIK basically no trans spaces encourage their members to go forth and kill random children to prove they're the übermensch. The Zizians' private Discord server, maybe, but come on, that's not the kind of "violent rhetoric" that's lurking on regular trans subreddits. If we were talking about an epidemic of Kirk-style killings I might find the argument more persuasive, but here you can only point at a much hazier blob of "violence", and I think that's a stretch.
Third, even if violent rhetoric in trans spaces were in some way causally responsible through normalization, it has not been demonstrated that this relationship is so direct as to make the peddlers of violent rhetoric legally responsible for the shootings to a degree that nullifies their First Amendment rights. How many people read this violent rhetoric without becoming school shooters? My guess is "an overwhelming majority". Stochastic terrorism might be an interesting thought experiment but I do not believe a country can simultaneously have free speech and legally recognize the concept - the slippery slope from "don't publish anything that could motivate the right crackpot out of millions to kill people" to "don't ever criticize anybody too harshly" is so steep it's a cliff-face.
I'm quite explicitly not demanding the arrest of anyone posting violent, hateful rhetoric in trans subreddits, nor claiming that anyone posting such content could be found criminally liable for incitement to violence. Innumerable subreddits have been banned over the years without any of the moderators or posters facing legal action. If Reddit decides to ban a subreddit which consists of nothing but people ranting about how much they despise "femoids" (or black people, or homosexuals, or Jews etc.) and openly fantasising about how much they'd like to assault and torture them, they should adopt the same standard when it comes to subreddits consisting of people ranting about how much they despise TERFs, "cis scum" or similar. Or we can do the modus ponens and say that if trans-identified males are allowed to share their creepy fantasies about murdering TERFs on Reddit, then incels, racists and homophobes should be allowed to as well.
I think you're constructing a strawman in an effort to make me sound like an authoritarian and an opponent of free speech (particularly laughable when I've racked up multiple QCs for loudly condemning the censorious approach adopted by several Western governments). I don't appreciate it.
I made this point at greater length in the linked post: if you think I'm getting too worked up about trans-inspired violence, that logically implies that Western governments are getting far too worked up about incel-inspired violence. Can't have it both ways.
That would be my view, yes. (As befitting a Mottizen, I should think, almost by definition.)
I didn't intend to, and apologize for giving that impression. I didn't refer to you by name and, indeed, wasn't directly replying to you at all, but to Maiq, himself replying to magicakittycat. My purpose was to pick apart the epistemics of the question; I wasn't trying to specifically condemn any one position, let alone any one poster.
Yes, as per the above, I would agree with that. Certainly, with respect to school shooters, I think it's such a specific behavior, shared by people from such disparate ideological backgrounds, and so far from what a vast majority of those ideologies would recommend even when they endorse some forms of terrorism (!), that trying to blame any particular movement for a given shooting is almost always a mistake.
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And even that doesn't necessarily matter too much! Mass shooters are extremely rare, so even a statistically significant difference between populations often goes from extremely rare to extremely rare but slightly less so.
Like I can't imagine anyone has preregistered the belief that .05% of a group = acceptable shooter rate but .09% = unacceptable and needs a crackdown.
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Mostly decent points; I was largely criticising the structure of your argument, not particularly taking a firm position on the issue, and I did think of some of these questions myself.
I will note that, uh... not trans spaces specifically, but some SJ spaces can get pretty bad. When I said "terrorist propaganda" I wasn't being hyperbolic; I was talking about the shit I've seen, which is if anything worse than the stuff mentioned in that Unherd article (I hadn't actually read it until writing this post). I was talking about literal calls to do terrorism, and advice about how to avoid being arrested for violent crime. I'm pretty libertine when it comes to speech, but "don't literally urge people to riot and assassinate" is probably like #2 on the list of exceptions everyone makes (#1 being the most blatant forms of harmful sensation, like pointing a concert-rated speaker into someone's bedroom at night). You're right that mass shootings specifically have some mental-illness issues, but I do think there's cause to crack down on the places that start to function as insurgent communications infrastructure and that doing so might ease some of the rioting in the medium-term.
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