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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8745 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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[Yes, it's my monthly post about my hobby horse.]

Perhaps the most recurrent complaint made by the trans activist coalition is that transgender people in Western countries face an elevated risk of violence and murder, and that this increased risk is directly attributable to anti-trans bigotry. The Transgender Day of Remembrance is observed every November 20th, to memorialise those murdered as a result of transphobia. Organisations like Human Rights Watch claim that violence against trans people in the US has reached "epidemic" levels. A Trump-instated genocide of trans people is either claimed to be imminent or already ongoing, albeit in its "early stages" (conveniently). Various US states have passed laws banning defendants from using the "trans panic" defense (i.e. the defendant was so shocked upon discovering that an object of their sexual desire was transgender that they lost control of their faculties) in murder trials, under the historically dubious claim that this defense has resulted in vastly reduced sentences or even outright acquittals. The increased risk of violence and murder that trans people ostensibly face is sometimes used to justify other policy demands made by TRAs (e.g. trans women must be permitted to use ladies' bathrooms, because if they're forced to use the men's room they'll get beaten up).

Gender-criticals like myself routinely push back on these claims, pointing out that one cannot simply attribute every murder of a trans person to transphobia (any more than every murder of a white person can be attributed to anti-white animus): many of the victims touted by Human Rights Campaign were murdered by a close acquaintance or a domestic partner, and in some cases the perpetrator was also trans. Similarly, a disproportionate share of the cited murder victims are usually sex workers, an already at-risk demographic even leaving transgender identity aside. A simple per capita analysis indicates that, in Western countries, trans people face a vastly reduced risk of murder compared to the general population. A major limitation of the per capita approach, however, is uncertainty over both numerator and denominator: it's possible that there are some murder victims whose transgender identity was not made public knowledge, and getting hard data on the absolute number of trans people in a given country is remarkably difficult and dependent on inherently noisy methods like polls and surveys (which become all the noisier if the question is worded in such a way that it's likely to be misinterpreted by a non-native English speaker).

Two academics at the University of Oxford, Michael Biggs and Ace North* (!), have developed a novel method of investigating the claim that trans people face an elevated risk of violence: comparing the ratio of murder victims to murder perpetrators. If the ratio for a particular demographic is greater than 1, murder victims in that demographic outnumber murder perpetrators, and vice versa. If trans people in the UK face an elevated risk of violence, one would expect the ratio of victims to perpetrators to be greater than 1; if their risk of violence has reached "epidemic" levels, one would expect the ratio to be much higher than other demographics (such as female people).

One detail I particularly like is that the researchers sourced their figures for transgender murder victims from a trans activist website, while their figures for transgender murderers were sourced from a gender-critical website, in hopes that the two organisations' respective incentives to make each figure as high as possible would offset each other. To be as generous to the trans activist coalition as possible, the researchers disambiguated murderers who already identified as transgender prior to their arrest and those who only began doing so afterwards. After assembling a dataset of victims and perpetrators, the researchers analysed their respective media coverage in the national broadcaster, the BBC.

What did they find?

  1. Since the beginning of this century, the ratio of trans murder victims to perpetrators in the UK was 0.8: there have been more transgender murderers than murder victims.
  2. Transgender people follow the male pattern of homicide, rather than female. For all British males in the period, the ratio of murder victims to perpetrators was 0.7, while for British females it was 2.9 (i.e. even though women make up a minority of murder victims, they are three times more likely to be a murder victim than to commit a murder).
  3. The BBC covers trans murder victims far more extensively than it does trans murderers, with an average of 12.5 articles per victim vs. 3.9 per murderer. (The researchers acknowledge that the primary cause of this discrepancy is the single outlier case of Brianna Ghey, something of a man-bites-dog story as both victim and perpetrators were only sixteen at the time.) If a murder victim was transgender, this is usually mentioned prominently in the article, whereas a murderer's transgender identity is often not mentioned at all, or omitted from initial reporting and only stealth-edited in after complaints from readers.

Stray thoughts:

  • I was surprised to find that the researchers' dataset of murder victims includes no female victims at all, while their dataset of murderers includes two female perpetrators.
  • As noted above, sex workers are overrepresented among the victims, making up 36% thereof, and it appears that several were murdered by their johns. Likewise, many victims were murdered by friends, romantic partners or family members, which suggests that transphobic animus plays a minimal role in violence against trans people.
  • While the number of male inmates in women's prisons ought to be zero, I am sympathetic (up to a point) to the idea that transgender inmates may face an increased risk of violence from their fellow inmates, and that they ought to be protected. (Some people think that extrajudicial violence from fellow inmates is just part-and-parcel of incarceration and if you can't do the time, don't do the crime: I am not one of those people.) However, I think the best way to accomplish this is by segregating violent offenders from non-violent (this is already the entire impetus behind minimum- and maximum-security prisons) and placing especially vulnerable prisoners on protection if necessary, on a case-by-case basis. @Celestial-body-NOS, while sensible enough to recognise that putting male inmates in the women's estate is a bad idea, thinks the best solution is to house all trans-identifying male inmates in a dedicated facility, lumping together those who've been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria with opportunists who only came out as trans post-conviction. I argued that, even from the narrow perspective of protecting transgender inmates, this policy proposal seems worse than mine: I'm not persuaded that the best way to ensure the safety of non-violent offenders who've identified as trans their entire lives is to house them in a facility with violent offenders who only started identifying as trans immediately prior to conviction. In light of this exchange, it was interesting to find that one of the murderers in the researchers' data set is Daniel (later Sophie) Eastwood, who was convicted of murdering a fellow inmate while serving a prison sentence for dangerous driving.
  • The researchers compare their dataset with comparable data in the US, and find that trans people in the US face an elevated risk of murder compared to the UK. But the US has a higher murder rate than the UK in general, and this is probably primarily explicable by the proportion of the population which is black.
  • The researchers compare their study with a Swedish study I've referred to many times, which followed trans people who medically transitioned over three decades, and found that trans-identifying men were twenty times more likely to be convicted of a crime than females, while trans-identifying females were ten times more likely to commit violent crimes than cis females of the same age (testosterone causing increased aggression?).
  • The prominent mentioning of the victims' transgender identity and omitting of the perpetrators' transgender identity is not entirely attributable to editorial bias, and may be downstream of official guidance for judges in murder trials.
  • Even some of the reporting about transgender murderers seems intended to promote the idea of trans people as uniquely oppressed and ostracised e.g. articles about Jenny Swift and Rowan Thompson emphasised their suicides in prison and only belatedly mentioned that they'd been convicted for murder, almost as an afterthought.
  • As I recently complained about, several articles about transgender murderers referred to the perpetrators as "women" without any kind of qualification or disambiguation. These are not our crimes.

*Sounds like the name of an American character in an anime.

Impressive how transwomen have found a non-racially-mediated way for men to attain more social credit than women.

Two academics at the University of Oxford, Michael Biggs and Ace North* (!), have developed a novel method of investigating the claim that trans people face an elevated risk of violence: comparing the ratio of murder victims to murder perpetrators. If the ratio for a particular demographic is greater than 1, murder victims in that demographic outnumber murder perpetrators, and vice versa. If trans people in the UK face an elevated risk of violence, one would expect the ratio of victims to perpetrators to be greater than 1; if their risk of violence has reached "epidemic" levels, one would expect the ratio to be much higher than other demographics (such as female people).

Novel or “novel”? Noticers have long applied related methodologies to FBI crime statistics, such as Noticing that Bleggs commit homicide against Rubes at a 2.3x rate relative to Rubes committing homicide against Bleggs.

The researchers compare their dataset with comparable data in the US, and find that trans people in the US face an elevated risk of murder compared to the UK. But the US has a higher murder rate than the UK in general, and this is probably primarily explicable by the proportion of the population which is black.

The question of who is committing the violent crime against [group] is often left unanswered, and those who attempt an answer end up getting jannied off the given platform or the topic dies altogether. RIP #StopAsianHate

Novel or “novel”?

Novel in the context of trans violence.

@Celestial-body-NOS, while sensible enough to recognise that putting male inmates in the women's estate is a bad idea

That is not an accurate representation of my views. A separate facility for trans-women was an offer of a compromise, and I do not appreciate the repeated assertions that agreement with the 'gender-critical' position, or whatever you call your side of the argument, is a prerequisite for being considered 'mature' or 'sensible'.

So in your ideal world, where no compromise was required with people like me (or those uppity women who would prefer not to be raped during their prison sentences if it's all the same), how would inmates be housed?

As an aside, don't you find it the least bit interesting that, for all your talk about the necessity of housing trans-identified males outside of the male estate in order to protect them from the "ghastly fate" that would otherwise befall them, trans activists cannot dredge up even one example of a trans-identified male being murdered in a British prison in the last twenty-five years?

I do not appreciate the repeated assertions that agreement with the 'gender-critical' position, or whatever you call your side of the argument, is a prerequisite for being considered 'mature' or 'sensible'.

I'll be more than happy to stop, if you'll stop implying that I'm a pervert for disagreeing with gender ideology. A simple trade.

So in your ideal world, where no compromise was required with people like me (or those uppity women who would prefer not to be raped during their prison sentences if it's all the same), how would inmates be housed?

Transgender women could be housed with the female population only if they’ve had bottom surgery, otherwise they go into protective custody in the male wing. I believe that’s the law in many countries right now including the UK, and it seems quite reasonable to me. What would your objections be to that?

So in your ideal world, where no compromise was required with people like me (or those uppity women who would prefer not to be raped during their prison sentences if it's all the same), how would inmates be housed?

One inmate per cell, all interactions between inmates supervised by guards sufficiently numerous to intervene in the event of violence of harassment having the potential thereof.

trans activists cannot dredge up even one example of a trans-identified male being murdered in a British prison in the last twenty-five years?

'Trans-woman murdered' isn't the only bad outcome we are trying to avoid; there is also 'trans-woman beaten up by low-life with extremely retrograde Views on gender roles as a warning to anyone else assigned-male-at-birth who might be thinking about getting in touch with their feminine side'.

I'll be more than happy to stop, if you'll stop implying that I'm a pervert for disagreeing with gender ideology. A simple trade.

I do not believe that you, personally, are motivated by sexual desire in your opposition to trans-inclusivity. That does not change the fact that other people's organs are none of your business, even when your interest in them is not sexually motivated. This is especially the case for the sexual organs, including the gamete-producing organs. If someone starts digging through your medical records willy-nilly, should the Data Protection Act only apply if they are touching themself?

One inmate per cell, all interactions between inmates supervised by guards sufficiently numerous to intervene in the event of violence of harassment having the potential thereof.

Oh, I see: you're doing that thing certain people do where, when asked what your preferred policy solution would be, you describe some impossible utopia that will never and can never exist – then when people point this out to you, you accuse them of being moral mutants.

As always, this is a tremendously useful contribution to the discussion and not a complete and utter waste of everyone's time. That's the hallmark of a truly ethical person: someone who spends all their time daydreaming about hypothetical solutions that will never come to pass, while rubbishing the pragmatic alternatives offered by the more grounded and down-to-earth.

Seriously, dude: this is about as productive a contribution to the discussion as announcing "when I'm in charge we won't need prisons, because everyone will get along with each other!"

Fine, no détente. If you continue to insist that my opposition to gender ideology is rooted in some kind of voyeuristic desire to know the genital configuration of everyone in my vicinity (despite how strenuously I've made it clear that I think it's tremendously inappropriate for trans-identified males to volunteer this information unprompted) – I will continue to insist that, if you really mean what you say, you are painfully naïve.

If you continue to insist that my opposition to gender ideology is rooted in some kind of voyeuristic desire to know the genital configuration of everyone in my vicinity

I do not insist that your inquiry is voyeuristic in nature. My point is that, even though it is not born out of sexual perversion, it is still not any of your business.

I also acknowledge that you have stated that your concern is not with penis/vulva but with testicles/ovaries. (Does this mean that you would consider someone born with a penis and two viable-egg-producing ovaries to be female, and someone born with a vulva and two viable-sperm-producing testicules to be male? What about someone born with one testicule and one ovary, each producing viable gametes of its associated size?) I disagree with your claim that either of them is something which you are entitled to be told by someone who would prefer to keep to themself.

Does this mean that you would consider someone born with a penis and two viable-egg-producing ovaries to be female, and someone born with a vulva and two viable-sperm-producing testicules to be male? What about someone born with one testicule and one ovary, each producing viable gametes of its associated size?

Why is that trans activists' attempts at "gotchas" always reside solely in the realm of the hypothetical?

I disagree with your claim that either of them is something which you are entitled to be told by someone who would prefer to keep to themself.

I continue to insist that asserting that one's sex ought to be kept "private" is a meaningless demand when, in 99% of cases, it can be reliably inferred at a glance. It makes about as much sense as demanding that one's height, eye colour or need to use a wheelchair be kept "private". It's a doubly meaningless demand in this debate given how many trans people will openly announce "I am a trans [woman]/[man]", and the terms "trans woman" and "trans man" are literally defined in terms which are derivative of sex: by disclosing that you are a trans woman, you have therefore disclosed that you are a person of the male sex (and vice versa for trans men). A "trans woman" is "a person of the male sex who identifies as a woman"; let's see what happens when we taboo our words:

Alice: I am a person of the male sex who identifies as a woman.
Bob: What sex are you?
Alice: That's none of your business.

Do you see how absurd this is, and how contrived it sounds post-tabooing?

Why is that trans activists' attempts at "gotchas" always reside solely in the realm of the hypothetical?

Firstable, that question was not an attempt at a 'gotcha', so much as a request for clarification of your particular definition of 'sex'.

Secondable, it is not necessarily hypothetical; any chirurgeon will tell you that human organs never look like the diagrams in medical textbooks: there are always variations, and sometimes they can both be very weird and go unnoticed until the body is scanned or opened up for some other reason. I have even heard of men who were born with all the visible male parts, never considered that they were anything other than men, fathered children, and then went to hospital for some procedure and found out that they had been carrying around uteruses for seventy years!

Thirdable, I believe that the Rightful Caliph has written a defence of the use of hypotheticals in argument.

I continue to insist that asserting that one's sex ought to be kept "private" is a meaningless demand when, in 99% of cases, it can be reliably inferred at a glance.

א, cis individuals outnumber trans individuals by such a degree that, given a sample drawn from the population at large, one can get past 90% just with their gender identity.

ב, Do I need to tap the sign?

given how many trans people will openly announce "I am a trans [woman]/[man]"

I am not claiming that biological sex be kept private at all times; I am saying that the choice should be left to the individual. If Alice wants to declare her transness to everyone, Betty wants to keep it a closely guarded secret, and Carol wants to tell her friends and the readers of her blog but not strangers in the shops when she wants to empty her bladder, their decisions should all be respected.

Returning to the analogy with other forms of medical confidentiality, if Daniel wants to post his entire medical history on his website for everyone and their brother to peruse, he is welcome to do so; other people are disallowed from making that decision for him.

ב, Do I need to tap the sign?

I don't know what this is supposed to mean.

I have even heard of men who were born with all the visible male parts, never considered that they were anything other than men, fathered children, and then went to hospital for some procedure and found out that they had been carrying around uteruses for seventy years!

Some concrete examples or citations would be appreciated. The sex-is-a-spectrum people routinely claim such edge cases exist and then are unable to dredge up even a Weekly World News article.

A separate facility for trans-women was an offer of a compromise

That sounds like a massive expense for a rather small percentage of the population. Prisons generally try to operate on economies of scale, it's a lot cheaper to manage prisoners if you can cram as many as possible into the smallest area you can (without getting complaints from the human rights crowd). It's akin to making a separate third restroom for trannies when you could just have them use the one that matches their sex (bathrooms are, after all, sex separated, and I've been repeatedly told that conflating sex and gender is transphobic).

But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din

List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within

They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.

"It's not a compromise with sin; we're just reducing expenses at the cost of throwing a rather small percentage of the population under the bus."

"Exactly what do you think a compromise with sin is?"

What an amusing topic to invoke the concept of "sin" under. Beautiful, really.

Pleading to the Gods of the Copybook Headings in support of housing transgender offenders in women's prisons is a ludicrous move. What do you think sin is?

I favour Granny Weatherwax's definition.

"It's not a compromise with sin; we're just reducing expenses at the cost of throwing a rather small percentage of the population under the bus."

"If I claim it's throwing the trans population under the bus then that means it's actually throwing them under the bus." You're assuming a shared moral framework here that very much does not exist. A trans woman is a man pretending to be a woman, or a man who has a mental illness causing him to think he is a woman. Someone who has a mental illness causing them to think they are Napoleon isn't thrown under the bus when I refuse to use taxpayer money to help them invade Russia.

Someone who has a mental illness causing them to think they are Napoleon

Now that's an analogy I've not heard in a long time.

Eh, I've been using that argument since 2010 or so, it's still as applicable now as it was then.

He is, however, arguably thrown under the bus if you insist on locking him in a facility with a population whose notorious Napoleon fetish causes them to brutally rape any transnapoleonics they can get their hands on, which is what I think Celestial meant. (Of course, this line of reasoning could imply that effeminate gay men shouldn't be jailed with regular male inmates, regardless of their gender identification.)

He is, however, arguably thrown under the bus if you insist on locking him in a facility with a population whose notorious Napoleon fetish causes them to brutally rape any transnapoleonics they can get their hands on

If he doesn't want to get thrown in the Napoleon-rape cage then all he has to do is not commit crime and/or invade Russia.

This amounts to an argument that it's good, actually, that they're getting thrown under the bus. We're quite a ways away from "they aren't being thrown under the bus, they're no more oppressed than any other men".

No, I just see preventing prison rape for mtf trannies as no higher of a priority than preventing it for non-trans male prisoners. It's something we should work to reduce, but frankly I don't see many practical ways to accomplish it, especially not without using resources that could be better spent elsewhere. I place a much higher priority on preventing the rape of biological women in prisons, and keeping mtf tranny criminals far the fuck away from them seems like one of the most practical and inexpensive ways to reduce that.

More comments

"Exactly what do you think a compromise with sin is?"

Having prisons in the first place.

Fines, Beatings, Exile and Death should be all the forms of punishment a civilized society dispenses.

"Exactly what do you think a compromise with sin is?"

The method by which we enjoy what prosperity remains despite absolute values-incoherence.

As I recently complained about,

While I'm no Clinton fan, I disagree with your take on Lewinsky in there. Clinton said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" in a court. If the court asks you something using an unusual definition, you answer using the court's definition. It doesn't matter what the public will think; courts can punish you with state-sponsored violence, the general public cannot. Anyone who complains that Clinton's answer was misleading should complain to the courts for requiring him to use that definition in the first place. And no, you do not answer a different question from what the court asks you so that the general public can know the truth.

Clinton said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" in a court.

Maybe he said that in a court as well, but he also said it in a press conference. He was under no obligation to repeat the knowingly misleading answer he made in court outside of the courthouse.

Honestly, who gives a shit?

This is a ridiculous flogged to death hobby horse some Americans insist on sticking to. Clinton had bad taste in women? So fucking what? That's completely and utterly irrelevant to literally anything at all other than keeping up juvenile kindergarten level "Clinton is a poohead"-rhetoric that mostly just tells how the complainer doesn't know when to give up when they have no actual criticism left.

  • -13

Clinton had bad taste in women? So fucking what?

Well, well, well. I know that even at the time there was a lot of rewriting what happened going on, but now we're "so he likes trashy bitches, is that a crime?"

Monica Lewinsky was 22 years old and Bill Clinton was 49 years old at the start of the affair. So, literally old enough to be her father - Chelsea Clinton is seven years younger than Monica.

It was adultery. It was power-imbalance (she was an intern, he was Most Powerful Man In The World if we go with the hype around the American presidency). It could be called grooming or other modern terms, but let's not go there, let's stick with the terms of the day. Sexual harassment? Inappropriate conduct in the workplace? Having sex of some sort in the Oval Office (the infamous blue dress which would have been enough, as per the E. Jean Carroll trial, to get Clinton convicted of rape)?

Logic-chopping (to use the kindest term) or lying (if we're being brutal) over 'what is a sexual relationship, anyway? we weren't in a relationship, I was just fucking her':

During the grand jury testimony, Clinton's responses were carefully worded, and he argued "it depends on what the meaning of the word is is", with regard to the truthfulness of his statement that "there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship"

On January 26, President Clinton, standing with his wife, spoke at a White House press conference, and issued a denial in which he said:

Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.

I'm old enough to remember this as it happened. And all the feminists who had been agitating about workplace sexual harassment suddenly decided that blow jobs were all fine harmless fun, so long as the guy getting them was committed to keeping abortion legal.

Did Starr mess it all up, did he degenerate into persecution? Yeah. But the basic form of it is that Clinton lied, but perjury by a president of the USA is not a big deal - so long as it's not Trump, right?

I'm not American. I was bringing it up to illustrate a point about how it's possible to make a statement which is technically true, and yet which any reasonable person would consider lying, using an example most people are familiar with. If you think I brought it up just to attack a President who's been out of office for a quarter-century – I mean, maybe read the actual article first?

As ever, misleading hyperbole is a tempting Faustian bargain when you're dealing with a problem that is widespread but not intense enough to spark much outrage if you stick to the facts. The same thing happened with rape-culture discourse - the real problem that made activists' blood boil was the staggering number of women who get socially pressured into sex they didn't really want, but calling that out for what it is is difficult without sounding either mealy-mouthed and unconvincing, or hysterical and overreacting. So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.

I think this is exactly the devil's bargain trans activism has struck with these laughable statistical manipulations - trans people feel unsafe in a generalized, exhausting way, but by any rational accounting, outside of specific circumstances like sex work or prison, most of what they're feeling is inchoate intimidation, not an ongoing bloodbath. So people don't care and they feel they "have" to doll up the story in lurid claims about murder rates to get their emotional pain taken seriously. If it bleeds, it leads.

Unrelated:

Various US states have passed laws banning defendants from using the "trans panic" defense (i.e. the defendant was so shocked upon discovering that an object of their sexual desire was transgender that they lost control of their faculties) in murder trials, under the historically dubious claim that this defense has resulted in vastly reduced sentences or even outright acquittals.

I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument. Surely this is a sound legal decision in the world where transphobic hate crimes aren't meaningfully a thing (so murderers shouldn't get to appeal to a supposed widespread, sympathetic understanding of "who among us would not feel compelled to strangle a tranny if we saw one up close?", because it's not true), just as it is in the world where transphobic hate crimes are widespread (and are thus a plague that needs to be stymyed by throwing the book at bigots).

But there’s two reasons for feeling widespread intimidation- either 1) a large portion of people are out to get you or 2) unjustifed paranoia.

This thread is evidence- albeit not a slam dunk- against the first hypothesis, and we already know transgenders have very poor mental health on average.

You say "but", but I didn't intend my comment to take a position one way or the other on whether the feeling of intimidation is justified - merely to put forward an explanation for why they feel compelled to engage in these statistical misrepresentations, other than cackling machiavellianism.

The intimidation being delusional is extremely relevant information.

I mean, I don't think it is delusional as such - I just think it's mistaken. But anyway, relevant to what? I think manipulating the murder statistics would be bad even if there were an actual plague of lower-scale trans violence. Indeed, it would probably be worse in that scenario, because recklessly doing evil in the name of a good cause oftentimes has worse long-term consequences than recklessly doing evil while tilting at windmills.

I don't think it is delusional as such - I just think it's mistaken.

What's the difference? A delusion is a false belief.

"Delusional" has mental-health-related connotations, and indeed, hydroacetylene explicitly inked the idea that it might be "delusional" to the claim that "transgenders have very poor mental health on average". I, on the other hand, suspect that their overblown fear of violence against them is much how any group of human beings might react under their circumstances, even if it's factually incorrect.

(To wit: I think that it short-circuits humans' evolved primate social instincts when they correctly perceive that a critical mass of other apes around them are only barely tolerating their presence and find them gross and obnoxious, even though their resulting gut feeling that they're about to get beaten up is off-target. That's civilization at work, and civilization wasn't in the training data. Argue all you want that the legal system works and most people just aren't going to jump from background antipathy to mob violence, the deep-rooted suspicion that the crowd of burly male apes giving you the stink-eye are definitely about to bash your face in is just not going to listen. I think this is a very common psychological dynamic in today's world, which lies behind a great number of persecution complexes.)

So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.

And, in a case of pitch-black humor, as a vague coalition and surely many of the same individuals go on to later to ignore actual rape and actual rape culture. Fascinating, really.

Enjoy arbys.

I cannot find the origin or meaning of "enjoy arbys." I see eigenrobot say it a lot, and as far as I can tell, it means "you reap what you sow" or "this is how the world is now, deal with it." What is up with arby's?

Yeah, Gattsuru's got it and I'm borrowing it from Eigenrobot.

I'm a little more optimistic than the 'bot but when it comes to topics like the above, I enjoy the little flourish gesturing towards the absurdity. I suppose a Camus reference might be more accessible, though.

I don't know if it's the origin, but there's an on-and-off again Nihilist Arby twitter account that started over a decade ago. Eigenrobot and tpot tend to mutate it into 'this is how things are, and you're not changing it no matter what you do'.

women who get socially pressured into sex they didn't really want,

Yeah but so much of this is determined in hindsight and parsed through the the generally hot-cold lens of female attraction. If nonconsensual sex is equivocated to 'sex regretted at any point in the 6 months immediately proceeding it' then the whole of society just ceases to function.

I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument. Surely this is a sound legal decision in the world where transphobic hate crimes aren't meaningfully a thing

If you pass a law saying that Jewish defendants are not permitted to use the excuse "I killed that child so I could drink his blood at Passover", that would be a sound legal decision in the sense that no Jew would use that excuse anyway. But the obvious effect of that is not on convictions, but as propaganda against Jews.

Are there many laws generally about the acceptable set of arguments you can put in front of a jury? "Ban the X Defense" IMO is usually trying to appeal to some sense that this was an affirmative defense (see self-defense law), not "you can't ask the jury to consider this". The only one I can think of offhand is that directly appealing to jury nullification is heavily frowned upon.

Are there many laws generally about the acceptable set of arguments you can put in front of a jury?

Some countries bar the admissibility of evidence that says "yes, I'm going to sleep with this guy and then cry rape, it'll be funny" after a famous case where that was indeed an affirmative defense.

It's very crooked.

Canada did that after a high-profile sexual assault case imploded during trial thanks to the defense catching the accusers lying and colluding behind the scenes to coordinate their testimony. The solution, to prevent such an embarrassment going forward, was to hold mandatory pre-trial hearings where the defense is forced to lay all their cards on the table ahead of time if they want records admitted as evidence, making it even easier for accusers to tailor their testimony.

Laws specifically are rare and generally tied to sex crimes. Court rules are more common, though, and will regularly block entire types of evidence, or even specific framings of arguments.

Also rape shield laws, which prevent a man from arguing a certain act was consensual using evidence that she had a history of consenting to such acts.

Famously a major plot point of the film Cape Fear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Fear_(1991_film)

Where's @ymeskhout when you need him.

My understanding is that defendants have tried to use it, although it's not actually been used to successfully get away with murder in the way activists have tried to claim. If there were actually idiots with one Jewish great-great-grandmother who tried to get off on a religious-freedom technicality by repeating the blood libel, I think most actual Jews would be in favor of banning that line of argument, whether or not any judges had ever bought it. I agree things would be different if the defense only existed as a paranoid trans fantasy, but that doesn't seem to be true.

My understanding is trans panic has been used successfully for lesser charges, but not in a while, and never for murder.

Isn't the trans panic defence a mutation of the gay panic defence, which is no longer accepted? Same for the trans panic one, I imagine, but it is part of the debate around "should you or shouldn't you tell someone beforehand you're trans if you're going to have sex with them?" Those who say "yes" are trying to circumvent the 'trans panic' possibility (get out before anything can happen, if the guy turns violent once he finds out you're trans) and also to avoid 'rape by deception' accusations; those who say "no" are arguing "I am a real woman, it's not gay to have sex with me, why should I out myself for a one-night stand?"

I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument.

Because it's a solution in search of a problem. Trans activists routinely claim that people have LITERALLY gotten away with murder by using this defense, and yet when pressed are unable to provide a single specific example of that happening.

Do you mean that the relevant states banned a defense that no one had actually used? Or a defense that had never been successful? If the latter, I still think it makes sense to ban it even if it hadn't historically bought its claimants as much leniency as the activists claim. More sense, even. No more time should be wasted on a legal strategy that rests on mistaken assumptions and doesn't even work. (See also "the Devil made me do it".)

To the best of my knowledge, the defense has never been used successfully in the manner trans activists claim (that is, a person is being tried for murder, admits they killed the victim, but uses the trans panic defense and thereby secures an acquittal) – at the very least, not in a Western country. The Wikipedia article lists the states that have banned using it as a defense, but doesn't specify whether anyone had ever tried it in the states in question, and only lists four examples of people trying to use it in murder trials (which took place in Massachusetts, California, Colorado and New York).

[Yes, it's my monthly post about my hobby horse.]

How did transgender issues become your hobby horse? Personal interactions with trans people (online or offline), gender issues of your own, workplace politics…? I’m generally curious as to why non-trans people get invested in this when it seems easy to ignore (especially now that it seems to be fading from the culture war issues du jour).

In any case I agree that white Western trans women probably aren’t at an extremely elevated risk of murder and that the trans genocide narrative is overblown, but even in the West, being trans can lead to discrimination, being ostracised by your friends and family, and make you more at risk of low level violence and hate crimes.

Likewise, many victims were murdered by friends, romantic partners or family members, which suggests that transphobic animus plays a minimal role in violence against trans people.

I’m not sure that follows. A romantic partner might commit murder because of the shame of being publically outed as being in a relationship with a trans gender person, and honour killings of trans people by their family members do occur. This is more common in cultures that do not accept trans people, which is why victims tend to be non-white or non-western. If transphobia becomes more widespread and accepted, it seems obvious that violence and discrimination will increase as a result.

The increased risk of violence and murder that trans people ostensibly face is sometimes used to justify other policy demands made by TRAs (e.g. trans women must be permitted to use ladies' bathrooms, because if they're forced to use the men's room they'll get beaten up).

As a trans woman, I don’t avoid the men’s room because of the risk of violence, but to avoid unnecessary attention and disruption when I’m in a public place. It’s not as dramatic and convincing as saying I need to use the men’s room or I’ll get punched, but eh, I don’t see why I should needlessly inconvenience myself, and a bathroom bill would just make things even worse due to false positives, enforcement issues, etc.

How did transgender issues become your hobby horse? Personal interactions with trans people (online or offline), gender issues of your own, workplace politics…? I’m generally curious as to why non-trans people get invested in this when it seems easy to ignore (especially now that it seems to be fading from the culture war issues du jour).

There was a time where on seemingly every forum I frequented a transgender person would show up to own the chuds with facts and logic, whenever anything remotely related to the topic would come up. At the time I did actually feel "owned", as I was a good little science-truster, and they kept coming up peer reviewed papers, or fancy documents explaining all the safeguards on the provision of gender affirming care. Now that it's coming out these papers are of poor quality, that studies more critical of trans medicine were being deliberately hidden from the public, or that these safeguards are being constantly eroded, and weren't really followed all that rigorously, I think it's par for the course to point all of that out with equal vigor.

Aside from that, I think the question rests on a false premise. Why do people get invested in topics related to psychology, medicine, or philosophy? I think they're just interesting in themselves, and transgenderism covers all 3, and possibly more.

I’m not sure that follows. A romantic partner might commit murder because of the shame of being publically outed as being in a relationship with a trans gender person,

Might. Sure. And how often does it actually happen?

and honour killings of trans people by their family members do occur. This is more common in cultures that do not accept trans people, which is why victims tend to be non-white or non-western.

Where we conveniently have no statistics or even informal obsevrations to back or contradtict your claims with.

If transphobia becomes more widespread and accepted, it seems obvious that violence and discrimination will increase as a result.

Or the whole "trans" fad, the entire social contagion and online trend, just dies out altogether, and the violence and discrimination go away with it.

Where we conveniently have no statistics or even informal obsevrations to back or contradtict your claims with.

You don’t notice the common theme here?

One of the issues being raised in this thread is that white middle class trans activists are claiming to be at risk of violence and murder when the stats show the victims are overwhelmingly Black, Hispanic and Middle Eastern. I don’t think you can deny the latter?

Or the whole "trans" fad, the entire social contagion and online trend, just dies out altogether, and the violence and discrimination go away with it.

And why would it die out? It might return to pre-2000s levels if the online trend goes down, but short of a global catastrophe I don’t see why people would stop wanting to transition. It might even increase in popularity with future improvements in biomedical technology.

It might return to pre-2000s levels if the online trend goes down

Bit of a wording quibble but I would count that as dying out; pre- and post-2000s transness seem like quite different phenomena with quite different motivations, even if they rhyme somewhat.

First let me obligatorily clear my throat and say I appreciate your willingness to participate here in what I know is a fairly hostile environment for you despite our rules.

For me, trans issues are not a big "thing" for me. They are not my hobby horse. In a sense, I push back on trans ideology for reasons similar to what @FtttG said, and similarly to why I keep getting into it with the annoying Joo-posters despite antisemitism not really being a big issue personally for me either: sometimes you see people saying offensively retarded shit that makes you feel like Roger Rabbit trying to keep it together while someone is tapping out Shave and a Haircut

"But," you protest, "most trans people aren't saying offensively retarded shit! We just want to be left alone!"

Well, yes. And no.

See, even the moderate, normal, well behaved trans people will generally be reluctant to criticize the strident activists,.the cancel mobs, the social censure that falls on anyone who clears their throat and says maybe trans women shouldn't be put in women's prisons. Sure, you might agree that Jessica Yaniv is crazy and acting in bad faith and maybe not even actually trans. But you still want us to take Caitlyn Jenner or Rachel Levine seriously.

In my personal experience, trans people I know are mostly chill. Most of the time.

Until you Ask Questions. Until they sense Doubt.

Then you get the Side-Eye. The "friendly reminders." The questions that aren't really questions. And you find yourself having to make Decisions.

I have had to make advance Decisions, simply because I know trans people. If they break the detente, if they sniff heresy, if they sense my Wrongthink and decide to press me, what is my response and how will I deal with the social fallout? Which friends am I willing to lose? Which online groups will I be forced to abandon?

Since I won't lie, I mostly stay quiet and Avoid the Issue and hope they will maintain the unspoken detente. Most do. But I know some won't. So whenever I am interacting with a trans person, besides having to suppress the occasional eye rolls at the inevitable water-testing declarations to claim ideological space (never met a trans person who didn't do this at least once), I have to be prepared for what happens if I am caught out.

And I resent this. I really fucking resent this.

If I were allowed to just admit "Look, I don't really think you're a woman and we can disagree about trans women in sports and JK Rowling, but I'll respect your pronouns and I honestly do want you to live your best life however you wish to," that would be fine.

But too many trans people, having had a taste of power, will not accept that. Not when they can Punish you. Not when they can either make you bend the knee and say deer-horse, or have you (socially) executed.

I resent this. And it makes me less well disposed towards trans people in general, to the point where even though I wish no ill to any individual, yourself included, I begin to cheer when trans people take losses even under the clammy auspices of Trump.

I'm sorry, but I wish we could go back to the detente where everyone agreed it didn't matter what's in our hearts as long as we outwardly treat each other with respect and civility. Can we do that? I'd like to do that.

First let me obligatorily clear my throat and say I appreciate your willingness to participate here in what I know is a fairly hostile environment for you despite our rules.

Thanks! Maybe I’m a bit oblivious but I don’t detect that much hostility towards me personally, in fact many times I’ve been disappointed that I can’t seem to get into a proper argument with a gender critical person.

See, even the moderate, normal, well behaved trans people will generally be reluctant to criticize the strident activists,.the cancel mobs, the social censure that falls on anyone who clears their throat and says maybe trans women shouldn't be put in women's prisons.

I’ve been happy to criticise them here I think, and I’m no different in real life.

If I were allowed to just admit "Look, I don't really think you're a woman and we can disagree about trans women in sports and JK Rowling, but I'll respect your pronouns and I honestly do want you to live your best life however you wish to," that would be fine.

I’m perfectly fine with you admitting that you don’t think I’m a woman. I might try to convince you that between “a woman is an adult female human that produces large gametes” and “a woman is anyone who says they are one”, there’s other definitions that have some usefulness.

Going back to this site’s rationalist roots, I feel like Big Yud’s classic post on bleggs and rubes applies here. Like what are you saying when you say you don’t think I’m a woman? Is it “for me, women refers to adult female humans, and you’re not in that category”, is it “I can’t override the part of my brain that sees you as a guy”, is it “I will not behave towards you the way I behave towards women because that goes against my beliefs”?

I feel like both the pro-trans and anti-trans camps are acting as if the debate is just about who gets to have the woman category and the man category, and then all the rest, prisons, sports, bathrooms, labelling sexual attraction, will magically get resolved.

Is a man gay for being attracted to a trans woman? No, because trans women are women! Yes, because trans women are biologically male! Well, both of those answers are kinda stupid, and are the result of ideologies trying to force reality into man-made categories instead of trying to find the actual question.

Because if you define gay as “person with XY chromosomes attracted to another person with XY chromosomes”, it’s not necessarily wrong, but it might not be useful. You’re going to get into scenarios just as absurd as defining gay as “person who says they’re a man, attracted to a person that says they’re a man”, where you can be a man insisting he’s straight while enthusiastically sucking the dick of someone that looks just like a hairy bearded man because “Hey, she’s a pre-transition MtF and trans women are women!” or “Hey, she’s an adult female human, still a woman even if she got phalloplasty, top surgery, has been on testosterone for 20 years and is in the top 1st percentile of height for women!”

So whenever I am interacting with a trans person, besides having to suppress the occasional eye rolls at the inevitable water-testing declarations to claim ideological space (never met a trans person who didn't do this at least once), I have to be prepared for what happens if I am caught out.

Well, what does it mean for you to be caught out? Is it them flat out asking questions, like “do you think trans women belong in men’s prisons” or “what did you think of Lia Thomas?” and waiting expectantly for you to say the politically correct answer? That’s shitty behaviour and I’m sorry if that’s been your primary kind of interaction with trans people.

Maybe it’s a social circle difference, maybe it’s a European thing, but the trans people I know, myself included, don’t do this. In real life, I never introduce myself with my pronouns or whatever, I don’t talk about being trans, or related political issues, unless I’m explicitly asked. In a perfect world I wouldn’t even be trans, and I’m immensely grateful that I have many relationships where it just does not come up, ever.

Thanks! Maybe I’m a bit oblivious but I don’t detect that much hostility towards me personally, in fact many times I’ve been disappointed that I can’t seem to get into a proper argument with a gender critical person.

May I ask what you're looking for? The term 'gender critical' can cover a lot of ground - in general I read it as 'gender-critical feminist', and you're certainly not going to find many of those around here. But if you mean people critical of 'gender ideology' in the broad sense, we probably have a lot, though I fear maybe a bit too spittle-flecked for useful discussion.

If it would be interesting, I suppose I'm gender-critical in the sense that I think the broad category of 'gender ideology' is mistaken. I am sympathetic towards the desire to be compassionate to people who suffer gender-related pain or angst, but as an anthropology I think it's limited and probably has done a significant amount of harm. I suppose I think that trans, as an issue, is linked to a larger trend of rejecting any un-chosen identity in human life, and viewing people and identity as fundamentally malleable? Once you get away from the usual hot-spots like sports, prisons, toilets, etc., and start digging into the larger philosophical question about what it means to be human, I think the conversation gets fascinating.

Thanks! Maybe I’m a bit oblivious but I don’t detect that much hostility towards me personally, in fact many times I’ve been disappointed that I can’t seem to get into a proper argument with a gender critical person.

Maybe you aren't trying hard enough! But seriously, it's probably partly that our rules prevent anyone who genuinely despises trans people (of whom I am sure there are some here who fit into that category) from really unloading on you, and partly because "gender critical" usually refers specifically to a particular brand of radical feminism, which is also not too popular here. Unless you are using it more broadly to mean the same thing as "trans critical." ("Gender critical" feminists are not just "anti-trans," though - they are critical of the entire concept of gender roles and innate "gender" which is distinct from biological sex.)

I’ve been happy to criticise them here I think, and I’m no different in real life.

That's cool, but like most people on the Motte, you are probably quite outside the norm. Now would you actually defend someone who is facing a cancel mob for expressing trans-critical views?

Like what are you saying when you say you don’t think I’m a woman? Is it “for me, women refers to adult female humans, and you’re not in that category”, is it “I can’t override the part of my brain that sees you as a guy”, is it “I will not behave towards you the way I behave towards women because that goes against my beliefs”?

It is mostly the first two. I realize "I can't override the part of my brain that sees you as a guy" is not a rational basis on its own to deny someone's identity, but it is certainly a rational basis to... not react to you the way I would to a woman, whether that be socially, sexually, in terms of threat perception, etc. And saying that I should because my brain does not get to overrule your self-identification is basically demanding that I ignore my instincts and evolutionary hardwiring and defer to something I have only your word for. To be clear, I am not claiming that you are asserting something ridiculous like "If I think I am a hot woman, you should perceive me as a hot woman." But it does to lead to situations like trans women accusing lesbians of transphobia if they can't override their brains and see trans women as women.

As for "adult female humans," yes, I do think a woman is basically an adult human female, and every edge case or exception you will offer is something I have heard already and does not convince me. The fact that there exists a tiny percentage of people who aren't easily classified into a sexual binary because of physical, chromosomal, or other abnormalities does not mean humans are not a sexually dimorphic species. Such arguments have always struck me as not unlike claiming that humans are not bipeds because some people are born without legs.

So, yes, if you were born with XY chromosomes and a penis, then I'm sorry, you're a dude. You can present as female as you like and live as a female and for social purposes, I'm happy to let you do that, but you're still a dude, and my internal mental state for you will always be "dude".

As for all the various combinations of sexual attraction you propose, I am also happy to concede some people might be more sexually fluid than they acknowledge, but again, a bunch of edge cases testing "But what if you're attracted to him? What if you're attracted to her?" does not prove anything about someone's actual sex.

“Hey, she’s an adult female human, still a woman even if she got phalloplasty, top surgery, has been on testosterone for 20 years and is in the top 1st percentile of height for women!”

Yes. Yes, she is. Even if she passes. Does it matter, if 99% of the people she meets never know she's not a man? Probably not to her. But she's still a female.

Well, what does it mean for you to be caught out? Is it them flat out asking questions, like “do you think trans women belong in men’s prisons” or “what did you think of Lia Thomas?” and waiting expectantly for you to say the politically correct answer? That’s shitty behaviour and I’m sorry if that’s been your primary kind of interaction with trans people.

Generally speaking, no, I have not had trans people ask me such obvious interrogatory questions. It's more like "Well, you know I won't be watching the new Harry Potter HBO series because I refuse to support a transphobe (looks around meaningfully)." Or an obese man in drag lecturing us (men, not including himself in that category of course) about sexual harassment and women's safety. Or casual assertions about trans genocide, how dangerous some red state is for trans people, how all their rights are being taken away (because some sports organization just banned trans women in women's sports), etc. And my choices are (1) Nod affirmatively, (2) Say nothing (slightly less cowardly, slight chance of being noticed), (3) Say "Well Actually..." and bang! You're a transphobe!

For the most part, my interactions with trans people have not been "dreadful" as @SnapDragon put it. As I said, they are usually chill. But it's a regular series of... can I say "micro-aggressions," only somewhat ironically? Sexual innuendos, constant reminders of how trans they are, something dropped about JK Rowling or Trump. Nothing that a non-trans person might not also say, but you just notice it comes from them with greater than average frequency and there is always a sense that they are watching to see who reacts and how.

And from a non-trans person, if someone is annoying me with their pet hobby horse, I might be free to say "Give it a rest, come on," or if that would be overly aggressive for the situation, I would at the very least only suffer a smirk and a snort if I were to roll my eyes. But with a trans person... Tag.

I'm being vague here because I don't want to be more specific, you know? But take my word for it: I know some trans people, and they are mostly okay, but sometimes they Do and Say Things that really make me want to Say Things in response, and I don't because there would be Consequences that aren't worth it to me.

I'm in the same position. I would love to just wait for the trans fad to blow over (as long as we minimize the long-term harm to kids - THAT'S something I truly can't ignore). Unfortunately I'm a shut-in whose only socialization comes from various online videogame and puzzle and rationalist circles... and they are absolutely rampant with trans activists (and far-left activists in general). My experience with them has been dreadful.

There's a giant yearly puzzle event that's run at MIT, and I used to be on a particular team. I didn't have a lot in common with them, except that we all liked math. Actually, most of them came from a math club whose emeriti included, um, Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison (cough). But this was enough to unite us. ...Until around 7-8 years ago when the social contagion factor really kicked in, and now 40% of them are trans and another 30% various other flavours of sexual activist. And one year we were doing the puzzle event, and the people running it made the mistake of making one of the events a funny riff on a gender-reveal party. Long story short, it ended in the organizers - who were volunteers who had spent a year of their life working hard to bring us this free event - visiting and tearfully (yes, literally) apologizing to us for their thoughtcrime. It felt almost like a struggle session. I was absolutely disgusted with our team, and I never felt comfortable around them since.

Even though I've since switched teams, the problem is endemic almost everywhere I go. Want to watch people solve sudokus on Twitch? You're 50% likely to hit a stream plastered with LGBT and trans and various other sexual tags (and they're all talking to each other, so you'd better not inform the guy with a male voice and a big-breasted avatar that he looks ridiculous). There are puzzle Discords that I'm on that I rely on to find good puzzles, but Discord servers are closed, controlled, ephemeral communities - the opposite of the old ideal of the Internet - and I will lose this access if I ever let a hint out of my actual centrist politics. (I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't happened already; at some point maybe people will connect my Motte posts with me, it's not like my identity is disguised.)

People often think of "The Emperor's New Clothes" as an inspirational fable, where the innocent child saves everyone from their plight. But in real life, it would not end well for the child. I try to be a genuine rationalist. I want to be able to say things that are true. And I'm simply not able to in any of my social interactions. It eats away at my soul.

The apology from the organizers at that club sounds ridiculous, but it's the only anecdote you actually mention to justify your idea that "your experience with [trans activists] has been dreadful". All the rest of your post is just complaining that you meet a lot of them, and possibly that they, uh, don't tend to like it when you tell them they're "ridiculous" out of the blue?… I don't mean this as an insult, but it's hard to avoid the impression that what fundamentally feels unbearable to you is their sheer existence in your vicinity, not anything egregious that they actually do.

Yes, I do find it extremely uncomfortable dealing with people who make everything about their sexuality (especially very weird sexuality). This used to be considered normal. And now I am not allowed to voice this preference, lest people like you call me a bigot. (You very clearly did mean it as an insult.) But I don't think you read "the rest of my post", because I clearly mentioned that I will lose access to my hobby if I ever inadvertently expose my true feelings. That's a rather different kind of dreadful than "gosh I sure hate that these people exist".

You very clearly did mean it as an insult.

I meant it as a reasoned accusation of inconsistency in your argument - you tried to justify your rancor as based on specific "dreadful experiences" with trans activists, then failed to actually prove this claim. I take the point that your complaint is the fear of "losing access to your hobby if [you] ever inadvertently expose [your] true feelings" but that's still not an actual lived experience, just an assumption about a hypothetical scenario. I don't think your post was honest. If your genuine complaint is that you find it extremely uncomfortable existing in the vicinity of trans people, at a basic vibes level, then don't act like your actual problem is a particular subclass of "activists" behaving in specific dreadful ways! By your new, more honest claim, you'd still be extremely uncomfortable with having to share your hobbies with totally apolitical trans streamers and gamers who gave you no indication that they'd cancel you for your opinions.

(Also, I think you are wrong that trans people are "people who make everything about their sexuality". I know too many asexual trans people not to laugh that claim out of the room. I have too many relatives who I just don't buy are incestuously involving me in a kink by asking me to use their new pronouns. But I grant you that if you're talking about an instinctive "ick" you can't suppress, rather than a rational position, this doesn't necessarily make a difference - if it feels sexual to your lizard brain, it is what it is. I can sympathize: I find the sight of people with piercings very uncomfortable, no matter how many times my higher consciousness repeats to my empathy reflex that the other monkey doesn't actually have a dirty nail driven into its flesh.)

Also, I think you are wrong that trans people are "people who make everything about their sexuality"

Well, not all of them, but let's say a disproportionate share. I've met hundreds of women in my life, and to the best of my knowledge not one has ever left the house wearing a T-shirt with the word "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across it. I do, however, know a trans-identified male (whom I'll call Bob) who has done this several times. Bob was doing a Secret Santa thing in work, for which the company was using a website in which you could add items to your wishlist and they would be visible only to the person assigned to be your Secret Santa. Bob requested a mug with the words "I LOVE GIRL COCK" emblazoned across it. One of her colleagues complained to a mutual friend that was profoundly inappropriate conduct for a workplace. ("He ain't persecuted, he just a asshole.")

To the best of my knowledge, Bob has never been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria, gave no indication of a desire to transition as a child, and only came out as trans in his mid-twenties. Prior to coming out, Bob admitted to a close friend (who in turn mentioned it to me) that he was consuming so much pornography that he was debating whether he really ought to financially support the "content creators" thereof. I have a very hard time believing Bob's pornography consumption is wholly unrelated to his subsequent trans identification. I would go so far as to say that I don't think Bob identifies as a "woman" so much as he identifies as the hypersexualised portrayal of femininity which exists in porn and nowhere else: women in real life don't wear "CUM SLUT" T-shirts, but women in porn certainly do.

Another example. Before we met, my girlfriend once worked as a tour guide in her home country, in which role she met a trans-identified male from an English-speaking country (whom I'll call Charlie). Literally the first time my girlfriend met Charlie, Charlie admitted that he'd fully medically transitioned, and asked my girlfriend if she'd be interested in seeing Charlie's neovagina. I believe they'd known each other for all of an hour.

I know, I know, generalising from a small sample size, Chinese robber fallacy, yeah yeah yeah. But I'd appreciate it if you could answer the following questions in complete honesty. Do you know any female people who habitually walk around in public wearing a T-shirt with "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across it? Do you know any female people who think it's appropriate workplace conduct to anonymously ask one of their colleagues to buy them a coffee mug reading "I LOVE COCK"? Do you know any female people who consume so much pornography (and so often) that they're debating whether they ought to financially support the companies or individuals who produce it? In your experience, when a female person meets another female person for the first time, do they typically expose their genitalia to one another? In your opinion, what is the difference between what Charlie proposed doing to my girlfriend and what Louis CK was cancelled over?

Like, when you have Pulitzer Prize-winning trans journalists openly admitting that they became trans as a direct consequence of watching too much "sissy hypno" porn, I think the cat is out of the bag. I'm not saying every trans-identified male is a pornsick fetishist (indeed, per Blanchard's typology I suspect that the homosexual variety has a completely different etiology to the autogynephiliac). But I am saying that trans-identified males are disproportionately likely to be pornsick fetishists when compared to males in general (and especially when compared to the females these TIMs supposedly identify as), and that this goes double for the terminally online trans-identified males which it sounds like @SnapDragon was interacting with.

And as an aside, I find it a profound insult to my intelligence that I'm expected to believe that males like this "identify as woman" or have an "internally felt sense of womanhood", when it's abundantly obvious to everyone that they are performing a misogynistic caricature of femininity that owes more of its particulars to Hugh Hefner and MindGeek than it does to any actual flesh-and-blood woman. I can't imagine how offensive I'd find it if I was a woman and I was expected to nod along with this and pretend that I believe that wearing a "CUM SLUT" T-shirt is just the sort of thing women do, that there are no meaningful differences between me and a male person wearing a T-shirt like that.

And if, after all of the foregoing, you still want to accuse me of Chinese robbering, then fine, I accept that. But at least meet me halfway and acknowledge that, even if not all trans-identified males behave anything like the above, it is perfectly reasonable (and not bigoted or hateful) to be creeped out by males who behave like the above, even if they identify as trans, and that they should not get a pass on their inappropriately sexual behaviour just because of how they identify.

But I'd appreciate it if you could answer the following questions in complete honesty. (…)

Ironically, and I don't know whose case this helps if anyone's - I do, but they're biological females who identify as male. (No, not my trans relative. I know multiple FTMs.)

I do know of the type of trans woman you describe, but I still think parsing their lifestyle as a sex thing is reductive. For a start, many of them consider themselves lesbians - that is to say, they are, in biological terms, heterosexual - so I don't really buy that they get a sexual thrill from being acknowledged as women by men. Mostly, I think it's a combination of the queer community having relaxed sexual mores, and of biological males starting out hornier than the average biological female, but suddenly unlearning all the specifically male norms that cause men to disguise and obfuscate anything to do with their raw sexuality.

'Bob' is perhaps a different matter if she really was so taken with pornography, but 'Charlie' seems a very good example of the kind of thing I mean: boys in a state of nature love showing their willies to people, including straight boys showing theirs off to other straight boys. The only reason men don't do it to women is that society teaches them it's very, very rude indeed. (Perhaps ruder than it actually is, I daresay, but then, as I said, I have naturist leanings at a philosophical level, though the actual hobby has never appealed to me.) Now here comes 'Charlie', who, because she now holds herself to be a woman socially, no longer feels bound by the "it's very rude for a man to ask women if they want to see his willy" rule. But neither is she especially aware of a "it's very rude for a woman to ask women if they want to see her foofoo" rule; even if she knows of one, she'd would write it off as patriarchal prudishness. So the exchange you witnessed ensues.

I don't want to claim that the boyish impulse to show off one's cool willy is a wholly non-sexual one, or that this end result is okay; but I think it'd be wrong to necessarily treat expressions in trans women's behavior of this kind of spontaneous exhibitionism, or even more explicit male-style horniness, as a specific form of fetishism, or to conclude that they're sneakily getting off all the time just from being perceived as female.

(I don't deny that some trans women arrive at their decisions through sexual fantasies; but I don't think this means that their subsequent female identification need be a purely sexual thing, in much the same way that attraction between two people can start as sexual desire and blossom into the full spectrum of romantic love. You might put on a dress because you think it's hot, then look at yourself in the mirror, and realize, oh wait, this feels right, I want this even when I don't have an erection. It might be helpful to think of a certain kind of transition as a process of falling in love with a person you're becoming.)

And as an aside, I find it a profound insult to my intelligence that I'm expected to believe that males like this "identify as woman" or have an "internally felt sense of womanhood" (…)

Oh, the perfect-platonic-essence-of-gender-written-on-your-soul approach isn't my position either.

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I think you are being dishonest. Nowhere in his post (or mine) did we indicate that we are uncomfortable with trans people "existing in our vicinity."

See, this is exactly what I am talking about. You pretend that it's all about irrational "icks" and that trans people aren't actually doing anything. Are you seriously denying that to reveal an "ick" (and I don't mean by declaring something offensive, just revealing with a slip of the tongue that you don't really think of someone as female or that you aren't wholeheartedly onboard with Trans Rights Are Human Rights) has social consequences? Do you think someone deserves to lose their social circle for not being properly aligned?

You say we're imagining hypothetical scenarios. Come on. If you pay any attention to left leaning hobby spaces ( which is almost all hobby spaces) you know it's not hypothetical what happens to someone who says JK Rowling isn't a monster, actually.

As for being inappropriately sexual, I believe you that you know lots of asexual trans people. Do you believe me that most trans people I know dress or behave in off-puttingly sexual ways, at least occasionally, in a way that seems intended to test boundaries and tolerance? Do you think this common experience is something us "transphobes" make up?

Nowhere in his post (or mine) did we indicate that we are uncomfortable with trans people "existing in our vicinity."

Not in SnapDragon's original post - but SnapDragon's original post began with a claim that "[his] experience with them has been dreadful". And then most of the post amounted to listing all the spaces in which he encounters a high percentage of trans people, without actual elaboration on what made his personal experience with them "dreadful". This naturally led me to suspect that it was the sheer experience of interacting with them which he deemed "dreadful", rather than any particular objectionable behavior on their part - making the framing of the argument as "I'm only so worked up about trans people because they've been awful to me" deceitful.

I'm not saying that the worry over hypothetical scenarios where SnapDragon is ostracized for gender-critical views is paranoid or irrational. But I don't think it's honest to start with "my experiences with trans activists have been dreadful", and, when pressed, admit that in fact nothing dreadful has happened to you, you're just constantly afraid that it might. Imagine a black activist saying he's only anti-white because of his personal "dreadful experiences" with white people, but, when questioned, he admits that he just means the stress of interacting with random white people with a constant background fear that they're violent racists who'll beat him up if he ever accidentally does something to offend them. I think this would be disingenuous even if we imagine our activist living in a genuinely very racist town, where that fear isn't actually irrational. He hasn't had that experience. He just hasn't.

Moreover, I took SnapDragon's reply as agreeing that he ultimately felt an "ick" about interacting with trans people ("I do find it extremely uncomfortable dealing with people who make everything about their sexuality", where, FWIW, I glossed him as equating being trans with making everything about your sexuality, not just saying that a lot of trans people happen to be over-sexed). I'm not accusing all transphobes/GCs of only being motivated by such an ick; but SnapDragon's first post gave the impression that he, in particular, was, and his second post seemed to confirm it explicitly.

Hence:

Do you believe me that most trans people I know dress or behave in off-puttingly sexual ways, at least occasionally, in a way that seems intended to test boundaries and tolerance? Do you think this common experience is something us "transphobes" make up?

I believe you, but this is a completely different claim from the claim that being trans is inherently a sex thing and therefore discomfort with being surrounded by trans people is justifiable as discomfort with people being off-puttingly sexual in your personal space without your consent - which is what I took SnapDragon to be saying.

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It's being forced to participate in a blatant, obvious lie that literally every human being in history except 5 weird tribes in the middle of nowhere would recognise as a lie.

If it were publicly sayable and reified that trans people are insane and think they're the wrong gender, the existence of trans people in the vicinity would be broadly okay. One would feel sorry for them, but not necessarily feel compelled to say so to their face. The fact that there has been a vast activist-indoctrination effort to punish people who don't play along is what people find uncomfortable.

I've discussed before elsewhere but it's incredibly unpleasant to interact closely with a trans person in a Blue workplace, consciously choosing every day to lie because you're a coward who's afraid to be thrown out of the program you've invested years of work into, dreading the day when you slip up and absent-mindedly call the squeaky-voiced 5ft person who was a girl six months ago 'her'.

If you have a large enough family, trans issues are going to happen to you at least once.

  • One of my cousins became trans in high school. She didn't show any sign of being masculine as a child, was a very picky eater, wanted to marry a lead singer of a boy band to the point where she plotted killing his wife... and then a year later her mother was dying and she decided that men are better able to handle such awfulness and transitioned into a boy, hormones and all.

  • We once pooled resources with my husband's friend to rent a house together and one of our friend's sons married a transwoman who dressed in a way that was really inappropriate all the time.

  • Another of that friends' sons is super autistic, didn't finish high school, and decided recently that he's a woman.

  • The last of that friend's children was raped as a teenager and decided to become a man in response. All three of these young adults suffered obvious physical and mental health challenges that were exacerbated by their belief they could improve their lives by trying to live as another sex.

  • Now I have a family reunion coming up on my husband's side, and my sister in law messaged our family to say that her oldest son was transitioning, that her husband still used masculine pronouns and my sister-in-law used female pronouns, my nephew was still using the same androgynous first name and was wearing androgynous clothes, and it was up to us how we want to prepare our children to see their cousin.

Trans people are everywhere and each individual has to figure out what to do about it. How do you address them, do you encourage them or discourage them from transitioning, do you even feel a gender? A small group of people can't just change how all of society thinks about sex and language and think, "Why do people keep talking about us?"

Trans people are everywhere

Nah. The closest they ever got to me was

  1. Random guy at university who suddenly started dressing up as a woman.
  2. Boyfriend of the (gay) brother of a friend's girlfriend.
  3. Sister of an old friend of my wife's.

I can confidently say that "trans people" are a fringe phenomenon at best; one that is easily explained by social contagion.

I have a very large family and trans issues are entirely theoretical, just some weirdos that come from other, worse, families. Ditto for my in laws.

trans issues are entirely theoretical

Yeah, I bet the Noem family would've said the same thing at the beginning of the year.

In the Evangelical circles you run in, this stuff is entirely theoretical right up until it isn't.

How old is your family? What percentage is under 25 years old?

You've never even had a coworker change gender on you?

Four of my examples are from Washington State, but one is from Texas.

You've never even had a coworker change gender on you?

Not to my knowledge, maybe a former coworker changed after I left but to date the women are still women and the men are still men.

You've never even had a coworker change gender on you?

I've had one in Australia from a pretty nerdy/biologically-male dominated industry. Also hilariously a remote dev we all kinda assumed was MTF then finally met after a year and a half and 99% sure that they're biologically female.

Going back four generations. Probably roughly a third 20’s and younger. Keeping track of exact ages is a woman thing, thats a best guess.

You've never even had a coworker change gender on you?

No? Is this a common experience? I don’t work in big tech, I don’t think I’ve ever had a coworker transition.

No? Is this a common experience?

Yeah kinda. A software developer who is ill fitted to their position changes gender and then for a year becomes unfire-able.

Am I just really unlucky here?

It does seem to be a tech thing, but not necessarily un-fireable; at the same time James Damore was the big public firing from Google, a less publicised case of a transman, Tim Chevalier, getting let go also happened (they tried bringing a case against Google but I think the employment contract was held to apply). Chevalier tried to claim they were being persecuted for being queer, disabled, trans, and speaking out against racism and sexism and the rest of it, but the facts seem to be that Chevalier spent more time being active on the internal chat channels being activist than doing actual work.

Chevalier actually spent a good deal of time policing the internal chat channels and making complaints against wrongthinkers. At one point he was going after people (partially successfully) for asking the wrong kind of questions at the "TGIF" company presentations from the founders and upper management. I suspect his firing was mostly because many of those on his side realized he would turn on them sooner rather than later.

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You're just really unlucky or surrounded by autists in a particularly woke environment.

I've worked in tech for the last 30 years and personally know of exactly one (1) trans person (and that's not via anything work related). She had obvious autistic tendencies (severe enough to prevent holding a steady job for very long) before transitioning.

A romantic partner might commit murder because of the shame of being publically outed as being in a relationship with a trans gender person, and honour killings of trans people by their family members do occur.

Yeah, but the cases sited on various activist sites for TRANS DAY OF REMEMBERING WE ARE BEING GENOCIDED! really do fall into, ironically, 'typical domestic violence for cis women' bucket. A broke up with B, who went on 'if I can't have you nobody else can' retaliation. C was openly living with D who fully knew C was trans, everyone in their families knew of their relationship and had no problem with it, and then... murderation. Where it's not "sex worker who may or may not have been killed by client", it genuinely is one of the few instances where trans women are being treated like cis women.

And that's before we get into "so trans woman A and trans woman B were on-again, off-again lovers and turns out B was nutty as a fruitcake and ended up murdering A".

EDIT: I apologise if that comes across as flippant, but I've gone through some of these lists from the previous years and looked up all the cases of "E and F and G were murdered, E and F and G were trans, now we're not saying E and F and G were murdered for being trans, except we are saying that" and there were examples like "G was pushed into the road and got hit by a car driven by H who had nothing to do with G" and that is treated as "trans death", i.e. this person was trans, this person died, ergo this is another instance of a trans person dying because of transphobia and hate crimes and violence and The Genocide. The one that most made my eyes bulge out was a trans guy who was also an environmental activist, was in a camp with other activists, the camp got raided by the cops and this guy was shot while in a tent. That was treated as "murdered for being trans" where there was no way on earth the cops could have known "ah yes, the person in this tent is trans, we must deliberately target them". You can't even say "the cops deliberately shot this person", it was more "when you start shooting, bystanders get hit" kind of death.

Sometimes the lily gets gilded in these accounts for the sake of "but we must tell a few lies in order to achieve the greater good".

EDIT EDIT: Take, for example, this case:

The first murdered trans victim of 2026 Sthepanny Cassiano da Silva was stabbed by an armed agressor while she showed her civil courage to protect a mother and her daugther in São João Batista on 1 January 2026. The first TDoR case of the year. Rest in Power Sthepanny.

Now, this is definitely a murder. Was it "murdered because trans/for being trans"? No, but it's being used to bump up the statistics. Sites such as this hand out lists of numbers to media outlets who then dutifully run stories on "300 [figure pulled out of the air] trans people were victims of murder last year, shocking rise in transphobic violence, stop hate crimes now, killed just for their gender identity!" when that ain't the reason. If you took only the genuine "yes, the motive for this murder was transphobia", you'd have one or maybe two (those were the most I could find out of the lists). That doesn't play so well when you're trying to sell the mainstream on "there is a transgender genocide happening!"

when it seems easy to ignore

It wasn't for several years, habits die hard, and the degree to which it's easier to ignore now than at its peak is going to vary wildly depending on local culture, social class, and familial considerations.

This is more common in cultures that do not accept trans people, which is why victims tend to be non-white or non-western. If transphobia becomes more widespread and accepted, it seems obvious that violence and discrimination will increase as a result.

In my experience on dating apps back in the day I did always question people who were like 85% clocky who'd try to obscure their status in app profiles. I, personally, have enough awareness of cultural cues in order to opt out of those particular matches but if I consider the reaction of somebody who's less culturally aware on account of being non-white, non-western I'd imagine that it's a dicey proposition to deceive somebody less informed and more likely to react badly on discovery.

Also transphobia is a tiresome setup. I'm moderately autistic (thus aligned with most of the trans population, there but for the grace of god go I) and whilst I'd appreciate some level of understanding I don't consider people thinking I'm weird for being eyecontact avoidant is somehow 'phobic'.

Not the OP, but a couple of points here. I could very easily say:

in the West, being [male] can lead to discrimination (...) and make you more at risk of low level violence and hate crimes

(I've omitted the ostracisation part, as I don't think that's supported in my parallel; but I don't think omitting it fundamentally changes the idea.)

The above is just true. But if men then had a culture of saying there was a "male genocide", and that their society was "androphobic" because of this, I'd get very annoyed, because -- as @WandererintheWilderness says -- it's an attempt to parlay a weaker, true claim ("men are more likely to be victims of violence") into a hysterical false one ("society is systemically murdering men!!")

Part of why I'm raising the parallel: one way trans activists misrepresent this stuff is by comparing trans women to women rather than to men. IIRC, men have a higher rate of being victims of violence than trans women? (It might require some statistical stuff like "once you correct for dangerous occupations like being a sex worker", or it might just be outright; I don't remember.)

There's something kind of ridiculous about this world model:

  1. If you're born male, your options are basically cis man or trans woman -- you don't get "cis woman" as an option
  2. If a male person chooses to be a trans woman, they are now instantly statistically categorised as "some type of women"...
  3. ... and therefore, any male-propensity-to-get-stabbed is supposed to instantly vanish; and if its doesn't, there's a trans genocide.

Like... no? This isn't even epicycles; this is no model at all. The dangerous portion of being (1) trans and (2) biologically male... is not the trans part. If a soldier chooses to call themselves a "trans accountant", they don't get to go "My workplace death rate is higher than cis accountants -- this is discrimination".

I agree that white Western trans women probably aren’t at an extremely elevated risk of murder

I appreciate you saying so, but this does seem like a weaker formulation than what you should probably agree to. "extremely elevated risk"? Is your position that white Western trans women are at an elevated risk of murder -- possibly even a very high one -- but it just doesn't rise to the level of "extremely"? Because I'm reasonably sure the accurate version of this would just be "they aren't at an elevated risk of murder". Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious". We can certainly discuss different patterns of violence and how they interact with being trans, but framing that as "genocide" needs to be immediately met with "you are lying for political expediency". (The generalised "you", I mean; you're not lying.)

It's also a bit of a motte and bailey: the bulk of trans activism focuses on white Western culture as performing some kind of trans genocide. Then when criticised, it becomes "Well, in this non-white, non-Western part of the world, these non-white-non-Western cultures are dangerous for trans people!" Again, you're not personally responsible for what other people are arguing; but you get how this is frustrating, right?

Is your position that white Western trans women are at an elevated risk of murder -- possibly even a very high one -- but it just doesn't rise to the level of "extremely"?

I don’t have a strong position this to be honest. As @hydroacetylene said below, many white western trans women probably fit the “basement dweller” archetype which significantly reduces the risk of murder. If trans people are (random number) 2x more likely than cis people to get murdered walking a random street at night, but 5x less likely than cis people to take that kind of stroll where they’d be exposed to that risk, does that count?

Again, I don’t know. I do know that I feel more uncomfortable in many situations now than before, so I’m more cautious. Maybe my risk of murder/general violence actually went down because I was completely oblivious before and the increased precautions I take counterbalance the increased risk. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. It’s hard to tell.

It's also a bit of a motte and bailey: the bulk of trans activism focuses on white Western culture as performing some kind of trans genocide. Then when criticised, it becomes "Well, in this non-white, non-Western part of the world, these non-white-non-Western cultures are dangerous for trans people!" Again, you're not personally responsible for what other people are arguing; but you get how this is frustrating, right?

It’s equally frustrating for me, perhaps more so, because this kind of activitism is doing more harm than good. It’s unfortunately a common theme in identity politics, same thing happened with white middle class feminists.

If trans people are (random number) 2x more likely than cis people to get murdered walking a random street at night, but 5x less likely than cis people to take that kind of stroll where they’d be exposed to that risk, does that count?

Yeah, that's the flipside of what I was gesturing towards with "[making statistical corrections for] dangerous occupations like being a sex worker". I'd say that, in your hypothetical, that would indeed count! It would be a real problem.

... but it's not true. I know you said it was a "random number", but the "random numbers" we choose are typically representative of what we think are reasonable values. Trans people being 2x times for likely to be murdered for walking down the street isn't a reasonable random number. Again: cis men are more likely to be murdered than trans women! Assuming that you're a trans woman, then you are literally safer as a trans woman than your other option (i.e. being a cis man). We can discuss the hypothetical world where you receive a 2x multiplier to being randomly murdered, as long as it's on the record that this is utterly non-representative of the world we live in.

I do know that I feel more uncomfortable in many situations now than before (...) Maybe I’m just being paranoid. It’s hard to tell.

Yeah, sorry about that; that sucks.

For most trans people I know, I'd try and (incredibly carefully) gesture towards something like: "You live in a catastrophically damaged epistemic environment. The people around you take anything less than complete submission to their religion as being literally genocide. Even if you personally don't express stuff like that, the people who say these things are contributing (negatively) to the general epistemic structure around you, and it's fucking with your ability to calibrate. Even high-decoupling, disagreeable humans aren't really built to completely ignore this kind of endemic social messaging -- it's going to seep in and cause you stress, anxiety, and a constant sense of being at war."

I think that's not quite the right message for you (but I'm still going to sneak it into evidence via quotation). I have no idea what kind of environment you're in; and obviously you're, y'know, actually thinking about this stuff already. I guess I'd suggest that your impression of things like trans-related discomfort, rudeness, or social difficulties are probably picking up on a real signal -- but when you hit the threshold of violence/murder etc, there's a good chance you're massively overestimating that stuff for whatever reason. (I stress again that I don't know you or your environment; if you're in a place with atypically high violence against trans people compared to the rest of the West, probably disregard my comment.)

Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious".

Better to say, I think, that the trans genocide is a motte-and-bailey. What queer theorists mean when they discuss "trans genocide" among themselves is rarely anything to do with the murder rate - the actual analogy is to residential schools, not Auschwitz; cultural genocide, forced assimilation and reeducation, an attempt to stamp out trans as an identity. I think it's hard to argue that this isn't happening, given that a majority of conservatives on and off this forum would openly advocate for it. There's just a root disagreement about whether it's actually a bad thing or not.

(There's also a terminological dispute about whether it's ever appropriate to use "genocide" to talk about processes that don't involve literal mass murder, or if that's always, inherently, motte-and-bailey. I can see both sides of that argument, but I don't think we should over-focus on it in the trans case, because advocates of the "trans genocide" terminology are ultimately just drawing on what is, as per the Wikipedia link, a widespread use of the term in their intellectual milieu. They're doing a separate disingenuous thing when they try to bring up the sloppy statistics to justify the trans-genocide thing, deliberately blurring the line between genocide-as-murder and genocide-as-assimilation more than they need to.)

They're doing a separate disingenuous thing when they try to bring up the sloppy statistics to justify the trans-genocide thing

"Disingenuous" is being kind. See this example, where a death is treated as "Well it must be because the person was trans, it can't just have been an ordinary hit-and-run" from that "here's the list of our dead" transgender activist site:

A 27-year-old white trans woman is the latest recorded victim of fatal violence in Louisville, Kentucky. Blair Sawyer was riding her bicycle when she was hit by a moving car, then fell off her bike with fatal injuries.

Police say the impact caused the bicyclist to be knocked off. The driver did not stop, continuing in an unknown direction. The rider was taken to University of Louisville Hospital where they were declared dead. Police have not released more information about the vehicle that struck and killed Blair, according to WDRB except that they are looking for a Ford Taurus.

As per usual, the media and law enforcement information misgenders Blair.

Until the driver is found and the details surrounding the accident (or incident) are clear, we can’t assume that this was unrelated to Blair’s identity. We don’t know. Clearly a crime was committed when the driver drove away and did not stop to render aid. But so much else remains unknown.

If you don't feffin' know the reason, and "so much else remains unknown", then you are scaremongering with "we can't assume this was unrelated to Blair's identity". Until the driver is found, and unless it can be established they (1) knew this person (2) knew they were trans (3) wanted to kill them for being trans, we are left with "random driver immediately identified cyclist as being trans and ran them down in a homicidal rage", unless we really want to push it to "driver was driving up and down deliberately looking for random trans people who might be on the road in order to run them over".

And yet this death will be included in that list of "2025 list of transgender people dead by violence" handed out to media etc. and treated as a reputable source (just like the SPLC with their list of hate groups).

"Disingenuous" is being kind. See this example (…)

What I was describing as disingenuous was the rhetorical move where they go "a trans genocide is happening; for proof, see these examples of hate crimes against trans people". This is a classic motte-and-bailey maneuver, intended to blur the line between genocide qua mass murder, and genocide qua cultural erasure. I think "disingenuous" would be the right word even if the hate crimes being pointed at were solid cases; the validity of the anecdata wasn't what I was addressing one way or the other in that paragraph. (I agree that "disingenuous" would be an understatement for some of this stuff, but I think it's the right word for this kind of motte-and-bailey vagueness around different definitions of very loaded words like "genocide".)

So it's the same kind of word-gaming as around "racism/racist" where people use the term about "B is a racist", then go "no no no I don't mean the KKK type racist, I mean systemic racism means we are all a little bit racist" and so forth, where they damn well did intend the reader or listener to take "B is a KKK racist who would be out there lynching Black people if he gets a chance" in order to win a political point.

That's not helping the sane trans people who just want to get on with their lives.

I agree. I did say I thought it was a motte-and-bailey; that's not a compliment.

(There's also a terminological dispute about whether it's ever appropriate to use "genocide" to talk about processes that don't involve literal mass murder, or if that's always, inherently, motte-and-bailey

As a person who is on the side that genocide should be intentional mass murder, we've already lost this in the mainstream. Between stuff like the residential schools, the holodomor (a tragic event but reserving scarce resources for your favored groups by taking away from your less favored groups is not murder, regardless if they die or even if the scarcity is a result of your economic incompetence), and the "Uyghur genocide", it's already clear that intentional murder or even death at all is not a requirement to how people use the phrase.

If we mean it in the most abstract cultural sense then yeah I think "trans genocide" isn't really that off, but that's largely because genocides of all types are happening then. If you genocide Muslims by banning practice of the extreme parts of their religion, then why can't zoning laws be a genocide of would be home builders? In that case, efforts to ban hormone treatment or whatever are also genocides too.

Although ofc this also does depend on the country. If you're like in Saudi Arabia where the state will death penalty you and the population will reliably chop off your head or stone you for being LGBT, then yeah I guess that's an actual real genocide there. But in the west? No. Mass violence does not happen in the west.

Edit: Importantly, not being genocide doesn't mean something is good! The oppression and collective punishment of the uyghurs, the starvation and mistreatment during the holodomor, the residential schools, etc are still bad things! I am a maximal freedom libertarian type and don't think you should be banning stuff like hormones and surgery regardless of anything like regret rates. I don't think collective punishment is ever acceptable, genocide or not. And zoning laws are still the work of the devil, even if it's not genociding home builders.

Uyghur genocide

Plenty of Uyghurs have been intentionally murdered by the CCP.

Even the Wikipedia page for it doesn't allege that as an actual common thing.

In all the stuff they list, none of them are death or murder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China

Internment, forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced birth control, forced labor, torture, indoctrination, alleged rape (including gang rape)

You can check with other major sources, even the stuff actively calling it genocide won't allege that there is mass murder.

Nice said that although some Uyghurs had been killed in detention, there was no evidence of mass killings, and comparisons with the Nazi Holocaust were unhelpful.

Those detained were instead largely freed after reindoctrination, Nice said, as part of a central government plan, ordered at the very highest levels, to reintegrate Xinjiang province and break up every aspect of Uyghur culture.

This is a UK tribunal literally calling it genocide and they still concluded that mass killings didn't occur and most end up freed. There have been a very small number killed by guards or whatever, but some prison guards beating people to death is not the same as widespread murder policy.

This article from 2020 claims that China conducts in excess of 60,000 organ transplants a year, including for vital organs like hearts. Given that this is vastly in excess of the number of people on the voluntary transplant list, and the number of people killed in traffic accidents or executed in conventional prisons isn't sufficient to meet demand, it logically follows that China must be killing, at the minimum, thousands of Uyghurs every year in order to harvest their organs.

Taking Falun Gong complaints seriously makes me immediately distrustful of any numbers the article wants to throw out. Falun Gong claims that they are being harvested by extra dimensional aliens who have taken over and corrupted society in order to use human bodies (which are the best bodies in all the dimensions apparently) and they are especially targeted because their bodies are extra perfect. It is impossible to trust their numbers and claims about organ harvesting.

And yes that is seriously what they believe https://time.com/archive/6954898/interview-with-li-hongzhi-2/

TIME: Where do they come from?

Li: The aliens come from other planets. The names that I use for these planets are different . Some are from dimensions that human beings have not yet discovered. The key is how they have corrupted mankind. Everyone knows that from the beginning until now, there has never been a development of culture like today. Although it has been several thousand years, it has never been like now.

TIME: But what is the alien purpose?

Li: The human body is the most perfect in the universe. It is the most perfect form. The aliens want the human body.

If someone is saying Falun Gong complaints around organ harvesting are serious and truthful, there is no reason to believe they have a good epistemic hygiene and solid sourcing with their claims about Ughyurs.

Especially when it's not backed up by any other mainstream claimers of genocide! That's the important thing here, the only claim of mass organ harvesting of Uyghurs is also from a dude stupid enough to fall for "the extra dimension aliens are harvesting our organs". Maybe he's just stupid.

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It may be that they die in custody without being actively executed, though I agree that there's a certain level of "herding people like cattle and torturing them to such an extent that they die in droves" that becomes indistinguishable from mass murder whether or not gas chambers and firing squads are involved.

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cultural genocide, forced assimilation and reeducation, an attempt to stamp out trans as an identity. I think it's hard to argue that this isn't happening, given that a majority of conservatives on and off this forum would openly advocate for it. There's just a root disagreement about whether it's actually a bad thing or not.

Would it be useful to compare this to the Christian Genocide, for which I am confident an equivalent and much more strongly-evidenced argument could be made? I have examples of Christians who show themselves in public being beaten by uniformed thugs while the police look the other way in Blue territory. Does that sort of thing happen to Trans people in Red territory?

Would the above argument be one you likewise see both sides of?

Well, I don't think mainstream Blues in America have "we should make all Christians renounce the faith and ban indoctrinating children into Christianity" as an explicit or even implicit goal in the way that a lot of mainstream Reds would proudly endorse "we should make all transgenders detransition and ban indoctrinating children into questioning their gender" as reflective of their agenda and beliefs. And as I said, I think that such large-scale policies are much better grounding for a cultural-genocide claims that acts of individual violence - i.e. whatever degree of validity the "trans genocide" case enjoys, it rests on the existence of political will towards dissolving trans identity, not on anecdotal claims of thugs beating people up.

But certainly, to the extent that policies intended to erase Christians as a cultural identity exist, there is a valid case that they would fit the bill of "cultural genocide" as leftist theory defines it. For example, I think that to the extent that the application of "genocide" to crimes that aren't literal mass murder is ever reasonable, it's reasonable to call Muslim jihadis genocidal even if they ideally want to forcibly convert all infidels rather than slaughter them.

IIRC, men have a higher rate of being victims of violence than trans women?

Not sure about violence, but a per capita analysis shows that cis American men are more likely to be murdered that trans-identifying American males.

when it seems easy to ignore

Not the OP, but five or six years ago, I was on the side of supporting transition and never criticizing it. After that, I became interested in the issue because of several factors that came together.

  • An FTM person in my family desisted while she was a teenager. At the time, I was supporting her, if not encouraging her, but then she fell out with her queer friend group and later moved to a different school. After that, her suicidal ideation and desire to be a man seemingly disappeared completely. Partly, I credit her parents, who refused to let her visit a gender clinic, which otherwise might have put her on an irreversible path. She now has a long-term cis male partner. This episode shattered my conviction that being trans is based solely on an internal, innate, hardwired feeling of gender.
  • The school hid the fact that this person had socially transitioned for a full year. I put myself in her parents' position, and I think it would be unacceptable to me if someone else decided that I couldn’t help - or rather, that I wasn’t allowed to help - my child.
  • Speaking of the feeling of gender, neither I nor anyone I have talked to about it has that feeling, so naturally, I can’t relate.
  • The episode with my family member was interesting because mentioning it was taboo in trans-friendly circles. I never felt animosity toward trans people, yet by the standards of the leftist community, bringing up desistance or detransition is itself transphobic. So there was no way for me to square my real-life experience with the community consensus. I researched the topic myself and found that there are other liberal opinions on it, some of which reflect my real-life experience much more closely than unquestioningly accepting the idea of a gender journey.

So, if the school or state is silently aiding a child in transitioning - and, for the sake of a thought experiment, let’s say it’s my child - does that really look like an issue I can ignore? I don’t think the people who push this policy in schools are ignoring me; they are putting me in a position where I have to take some sort of stance.

yet by the standards of the leftist community, bringing up desistance or detransition is itself transphobic

Not all of us. The sentiment is sadly common, but I wouldn't call it a consensus, there's very much an alternative, more positive viewpoint floating around - e.g. the whole "Cis+" concept.

It may not apply to literally everyone in the community - people differ and hold different views - but effectively, there is an atmosphere of fear around being ostracized for questioning anything. Many people share my views in private (which are much more liberal than FtttG, for example), but are afraid to dissent, because if they do, they cease to be a good person in the eyes of their peers and colleagues.

Many people share my views in private (which are much more liberal than FtttG, for example)

Are you saying people are more liberal than me, or your views are more liberal than mine?

I personally know many people that share my views, that I think are more liberal than yours

Hmm. Opinions about trans issues in particular?

Yes! It's your hobby-horse, as you put it yourself, so I think it's pretty much your only set of opinions that I can coherently judge

Well, that's one thing. What I'm saying is that there's no consensus on equating personal detransition with questioning the overall construct. There are trans spaces where even "I thought that I was trans but I'm not" is viewed with suspicion, but equally, there are many where it's viewed as a perfectly valid thing to say, so long as it doesn't entail doubting other people.

How did transgender issues become your hobby horse?

There are a range of answers I could give to this question, some very flattering to me and my worldview, some much less so. The answer that feels most honest is that I have this thing where, when I see people proudly, confidently asserting things I know to be false (especially in a calculating, emotionally manipulative way), I feel this compulsion to push back and say no, that's not true, and I can prove it. Covid brought out the same compulsion in me. Basically this comic.

Another part of it is a sort of Emperor's new clothes/"are you seeing this shit?" effect, where something stands out to me plain as day, but it feels like everyone around me is tiptoeing around it and trying not to Notice™ or draw attention to it.

As a trans woman, I don’t avoid the men’s room because of the risk of violence, but to avoid unnecessary attention and disruption when I’m in a public place.

I commend your honesty.

when I see people proudly, confidently asserting things I know to be false (especially in a calculating, emotionally manipulative way), I feel this compulsion to push back and say no, that's not true, and I can prove it.

Yeah but people do this about everything! Covid affected everyone so it’s understandable, but trans people aren’t very common outside of a few specific scenes.

Mostly I’m curious because many gender critical people seem very invested in this issue, certainly more than I am, and it’s hard for me to understand why if you don’t have a personal link to it.

Mostly I’m curious because many gender critical people seem very invested in this issue, certainly more than I am, and it’s hard for me to understand why if you don’t have a personal link to it.

Sometimes I pose to people a hypothetical: how willing would you be to vote for a political party, if in general they align with you quite well, and endorse all your niche little political positions, and seem to be competent and reasonable... but also, they want to redefine pi to be equal to 3.

That's the only problem. They think pi being 3.141 whatever is a bunch of stupid bullshit for nerds who've never had sex, and life would be much easier if it was 3.

It's an interesting hypothetical to pose, because a lot of people (especially left-liberals, in my experience) do see this as a deal-breaker. I don't know if it would be in actual practice, but they realize that they are supposed to say they believe in science and experts and whatever, and vocalizing that they would support a party committed to something so unambiguously, objectively wrong tugs at them the wrong way. Especially because it is a sort of nonsense idea that would never happen in reality (see a lot of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the red vs blue button debate).

Now, sometimes this is a preamble to me explaining that progressive dogma on trans people sometimes feels like declaring pi to be 3 to me. Or maybe I'm talking to someone more conservative about global warming or vaccines instead. But the point is that it feels very difficult to endorse someone for a leadership position when they are so nakedly willing to stare truth in the eyes and declare it a lie. They are so obviously choosing to preserve the structure of their worldview than admit an uncomfortable truth. That's the kind of thing that can breed the worst kinds of radicalism.

Maybe it irks me to an unreasonable degree, but it seems to me a particularly salient example of this kind of thinking.

Yeah but people do this about everything!

True, but also: no!

@FtttG's description resonated with me a lot (thanks for putting it to words).

I think you (rae) are right that the median person does feel a compulsion to push back on things they think are wrong. But... does the typical pushback on social media look anything like the Motte (in its best, idealised form)? Most popular pushback takes the form "your political bloc is dumb and stupid and evil, here's why".

Everyone (including people like me, and presumably FtttG) probably feels an urge to drop zingers on people who say dumb/evil things, and to push back against our tribal enemies. Call this "Pushback Type 1". PT1 lets us feel smart and good, and signal to our tribe that we are smart and good, and to enjoy the schadenfreude of our enemy getting squished. This is probably a universal thing that people are predisposed to like.

I think the thing FtttG is referring to is distinct. Call it "Pushback Type 2". PT2 is about criticising what we think is false even if (a) it can't be done in a crisp, devastating zinger, (b) it doesn't help some tribe we're aligned with, and (c) we don't get to enjoy having put someone down a peg. It's the obsessiveness of going: "This person is wrong, I don't care if the whole world is behind them; I need to explain why!"

The Motte is fuelled by a proprietary blend of PT2 spiked by PT1 (the exact formula is a closely-guarded secret).

There's still the question of why trans stuff specifically has captured FtttG. Obviously that's not for me to say, but a general explanation would be: people with PT2 inclinations can get sniped by any particular instance of falsehoods; it's a crapshoot.

... but I'd also then say: to me, trans stuff is the quintessential example of people "proudly, confidently asserting things I know to be false". I can't think of a stronger example. It's as ontologically broken as transubstantiation.

(I'm very sympathetic to your position of trans people basically wanting to be left alone, btw.)

it’s hard for me to understand why if you don’t have a personal link to it.

I mean, sure, but lots of people get intensely emotionally invested in issues that have zero practical impact on their lives. I'd hazard a guess that an outright majority of Westerners attending pro-Palestine marches in the last two and a half years have never met a Palestinian or an Israeli, much less been to the region. In absolute terms gender ideology has a minimal impact on my life, but it has a far greater impact on my life than the death of George Floyd had on any given Irish person, which didn't stop hundreds if not thousands of Irish people attending BLM protests at the height of Covid.

I've long felt that "why do you care about this, it doesn't even affect you" is a textbook Russell conjugation. Caring about the people affected by an issue, even if it doesn't affect me personally? I thought we used to call that "empathy".

In my defense, I’d have the same reaction to a westerner with no links to the topic regularly attending pro-Palestine marches or an Irish person attending BLM rallies.

But also, I personally want people to be less interested in trans issues, so it would be in my benefit to have you care less about this.

Caring about the people affected by an issue, even if it doesn't affect me personally? I thought we used to call that "empathy".

But your attention is limited and you have to pick your battles, so why this one? Effective altruist types will go by maximum impact/effort and end up donating 10% of their income to shrimp welfare, but most of us generally have to have a reason to care about a specific topic, and I think it’s important to look at why you’re invested in a specific cause.

Like if you’re an Irish person marching for BLM, it’s useful to realise whether you are actually doing it because you care about African Americans, or because it was the trendy thing to do.

an Irish person attending BLM rallies

Have I got a link for you!

(Seriously, the extent to which our chattering class and wannabe activists have been taken over by mind flayer larvae American progressive talking points, you would not believe).

Have I got a link for you!

I mean, the Irish are the blacks of Europe, and the Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, so...

Well, I do donate 10% of my post-tax income to charity, I have done for years, and none of that money has ever gone towards e.g. a think tank trying to combat the intrusion of gender ideology into schools. To the extent that this is my hobby horse, all I mean is that I sometimes discuss it on a pseudonymous internet forum and on my blog. Frankly, I think I have my priorities in order.

I certainly don't think I could be accused of taking on this hobby horse because it's "trendy". If anything I'd say it has more to do with my reflexive contrarian streak. I've been a "well actually" devil's advocate gadfly type for as long as I can remember.

But also, I personally want people to be less interested in trans issues

Why?

To the extent that this is my hobby horse, all I mean is that I sometimes discuss it on a pseudonymous internet forum and on my blog. Frankly, I think I have my priorities in order.

That’s fine, again it was genuine curiosity, not me trying to discredit you.

Why?

In my opinion, the increased attention, both positive and negative, has made things worse for trans people. I don’t want to have trans scissor statements in the media so that woke people can show their support, I don’t want pronouns in bio, I don’t want my medical condition to be in the spotlight and have it become politicised with everyone having to have a take on it. I want people who are indifferent, not allies who go out of their way to make me feel “accepted”.

I want people who are indifferent, not allies who go out of their way to make me feel “accepted”.

That's fair. I sincerely apologise if I came off as hostile or defensive.

Well how exposed to crime are trannies in general? I would expect a large basement dweller percentage which meaningfully reduces population average exposure to crime, as well as strong underrepresentation of things like career criminals and the like that are very exposed to potential murder.

Yeah which is also part of the whole 'crossdressing streetwalkers absolutely massively skew stats on the trans population'. One side of the population is basement dwellers and the other side are selling their ass at truck stops at 3AM in the worst neighborhoods in the world.

Similarly, a disproportionate share of the cited murder victims are usually sex workers, an already at-risk demographic even leaving transgender identity aside.

Back in 2019 I looked up one of those lists of ALL THE MURDERED TRANSPEOPLE THIS YEAR, and searched each name. Every single one that I could find news articles about was a black transwoman sex worker killed by a black john in what was presumably "trans panic".

And even with that, the actual overall murder rate for trans people was comparable (probably lower) to the murder rate for wealthy white women.

I appreciate the method but it's still just way too flawed, murder victims are reported in a completely different way than murderers are. Things that bring some amount of shame to the family socially tend to not be covered accurately. In the same way that a lot of suicide victims are apparently just people who had an accident and addicts who overdose apparently just had some sort of health problem, a lot of trans victims just wouldn't be reported as such. The privacy of victims vs murderers is just on completely different levels and unless they were especially out as trans given social stigma, I can imagine a ton of families not volunteering that information about their family members.

in hopes that the two organisations' respective incentives to make each figure as high as possible would offset each other.

That might be good hopes, but they should also have checked if it's even true. A quick look through the "transcrime" site shows they also just count men who crossdress. Nothing in any of these articles says he is trans, nowhere does he say he is trans, but because he was wearing prosthetic breasts at the time he was arrested he counts apparently? The numbers for the trans site also don't look to be particularly accurate, they just seem to accept random user submissions.

But assuming they equal out isn't great, "random submissions to niche site most havent even heard about" is not guaranteed to be an equal bias to "including every single man who has ever done anything remotely resembling some form of crossdressing or has even murmers of rumors they might be trans"

Things that bring some amount of shame to the family socially tend to not be covered accurately. In the same way that a lot of suicide victims are apparently just people who had an accident and addicts who overdose apparently just had some sort of health problem, a lot of trans victims just wouldn't be reported as such.

Ah, I see. We have no idea of the true rate of transphobic violence, because of how widespread transphobia is. This effectively means that "trans people face an elevated risk of violence and murder" is an unfalsifiable claim.

I’d go further. Let’s suppose the trans son of an average white bread family is offed and there is reasonable ground to conclude that it was his transness that provoked the killer. I’d argue that in the post-2012 or so world, his family trying to conceal this fact would in fact invite more potential outrage, ostracism, censure, cancelling and mobbing than them doing the opposite.

You can't dismiss a problem just because it makes knowing things harder. Accurate information about controversial topics is hard to get and filled with tons of issues, in part because people don't talk about the controversial issues!

We have no idea of the true rate of transphobic violence,

Yes. Basing primarily off of reporting does not get you the "true rates" of something. Especially when they're clearly sourced differently with one sourcing being far broader than the other. Cause as I explained in the other comment, the trans victims site is clearly based off of national reporting (cause if it wasn't, they should have had to verify elsewhere for some cases instead of it all being BBC) whereas the trans crime site was using regional outlets and non BBC sources.

Your desire to ignore potential issues and just say "that's too hard so I don't want to consider it" is great evidence however that you aren't motivated towards truth.

This effectively means that "trans people face an elevated risk of violence and murder" is an unfalsifiable claim.

Unfalsifiable is not true. There is room between "this information is fuzzy and flawed" and "it is literally impossible to ever know"

I don't even believe that trans people are too likely to have higher rates of violence outside sex work because they aren't gonna be hanging out in racial minority enclaves.

But again, we can't dismiss obvious issues with basing data off of national reporting just because it throws a wrench into things. The average murder case doesn't get into the BBC to begin with and often requires friends/family to push for it, anything with social stigma attached is less likely for people to push for it.

Do you have better numbers? No really, do you? Or do you have fan fiction about how trans faces an elevated murder risk?

Because while those numbers are not perfect, they are a damn sight better than what radical trans activists base their statistics off of.

"if you aren't able to be flawless in your knowledge, you must assume other claims are" is a terrible argument. I don't claim to know the true rates, I am simply pointing out some glaring issues.

They're all riddled with errors and people want to gloss over "their side's" blatant errors because of motivated reasoning.

they are a damn sight better than what radical trans activists base their statistics off of.

I agree! I've even said multiple times on this site that I don't think violence against trans people is an issue. In part, because I don't think violence against anyone is an actual issue unless you hang out on like the five percent kill streets of a city.

Violence is incredibly rare in all directions from most groups in the modern western world. The only things that really kill you when you're young is drug overdoses, car accidents and by your own hand. If you don't get into trouble like gangs or hanging around the very few kill streets you're exceedingly unlikely to be murdered no matter who or what you are.

It is really funny however how blatantly motivated people are when I take this stance. People who might nod their heads when I say immigrants aren't some major victim group will freak out when I say there also isn't an issue with immigrant murderers either for instance. Same way there isn't a significant issue with either trans victims or trans murderers, and yet people freak out at me from "both sides" anyway. But these are all true, violence in the modern world just isn't an issue.

You can't dismiss a problem just because it makes knowing things harder

We're talking about a subject that has no real definitions, everything's circular and changes on a whim, the language is deliberately obfuscatory, etc etc.

While you're correct it's not literally impossible to know, any form of knowing would require forcing outsider definitions to pin things down.

any form of knowing would require forcing outsider definitions to pin things down.

Yeah, that's another good point. It's especially hard to know when definitions vary so much as well. Our information about "true rates" is fuzzy in all sorts of ways and we can either say "hey this is fuzzy and flawed in tons of different ways" or we can plug our ears and ignore the difficulty because we know what we want the answer to be.

"hey this is fuzzy and flawed in tons of different ways" or we can plug our ears and ignore the difficulty because we know what we want the answer to be.

As much as I hate that The Motte is not more influential than WPATH or the Beeb, shrugging and going "whaddyagonnado" is ceding the territory to much worse actors that also plug their ears, but do so with much, much more influence on the world.

Cause as I explained in the other comment, the trans victims site is clearly based off of national reporting (cause if it wasn't, they should have had to verify elsewhere for some cases instead of it all being BBC) whereas the trans crime site was using regional outlets and non BBC sources.

Untrue.

The numbers for the trans site also don't look to be particularly accurate, they just seem to accept random user submissions.

From the study:

To independently verify each case, we searched the BBC news website for the individual’s name. Apart from the two earliest homicides with transgender perpetrators, every homicide was reported by the BBC.

Yeah now follow through this just one more step. The trans site despite the submission model was clearly not used much and in actuality was pretty much entirely based off of national reporting, whereas the transcrime site used things like the BBC and/or other sites like the dailymail, daily star, and regional news outlets like Wales Online.

Clearly the trans victim database doesn't cover nearly as much as it could despite the poor methodology that is possible, because if that wasn't the case then there should be plenty of victims where they didn't find them in the BBC and had to look at regional reporting or other outlets.

Just from the starting point which do you expect to find more cases? The methodology that seems to primarily go off of just a single source of mainstream national reporting, or the methodology that uses multiple sources of national reporting and regional reporting?

The trans site despite the submission model was clearly not used much and in actuality was pretty much entirely based off of national reporting

This does not appear to be true:

And so on and so forth, but I think I've made my point. Both Trans Crime and Remembering Our Dead rely on both national and regional reporting.

That some cases might also have been reported by other sites or that some cases might not have used that link is irrelevant. Every single case they looked at for that was also on the BBC and the BBC was used as verification for it.

Which means they take from high profile cases that made national news and not stories that only made regional outlets. If that wasn't the case then why didn't they have more cases that couldn't be verified with the BBC?

Most murders of any kind do not appear on national news. So why did it happen that all of their murders listed did?

The murder rate in the UK is so low that I find it entirely credible that every single murder will eventually be reported in the BBC.

Let's be exhaustive about Trans Crime UK's reliance on national vs. regional reporting, shall we?

The only murderer in the paper's dataset where the corresponding Trans Crime UK page doesn't include a BBC link is Samantha Read.

If your contention is that Trans Crime UK's statistics are artificially inflated by using stories that were reported on in regional news outlets but not national ones, that just doesn't seem to be the case: 95% of the murderers in the dataset were reported on in national news.

And, Remembering Our Dead does include at least one murder victim which was not reported on by the national broadcaster (Penny Port, which only contains a link to the Sheffield Unison), implying that, if there were more murder victims only reported on in regional but not national news, they would be more than happy to include them.

I genuinely don't understand what your objection is.

The great thing about AI is that you get impartiality on demand if you make a completely unconnected instance and ask an impartial question, so let's go do that.

I asked ChatGPT

what percentage of murders in the uk got reported in the bbc

Seems like a pretty impartial question that doesn't lean towards wanting either way.

It responds with

There isn’t a reliable, widely accepted percentage for “what share of UK murders get reported by the BBC.” No major official dataset or mainstream study gives a single figure like that.

Here’s what we do know from research and BBC reporting:

  1. The BBC does not report all murders The UK has hundreds of homicides per year (e.g. around 650 in 2019 across the UK).

News organizations—including the BBC—only cover a small subset of events, because reporting every case would be impractical.

  1. Academic research confirms selective coverage A study of BBC regional TV news on homicide explicitly examined “why do some murders receive media attention and others little or none at all”—implying many receive no coverage.

Media studies consistently find that coverage depends on factors like:

Unusual or shocking circumstances

Victim characteristics (e.g., children, “ideal victims”)

Ongoing risk to the public

Court developments or campaigns

  1. Some partial indicators (but not a percentage)

The BBC has, at times, tracked killings (e.g., compiling homicide cases across police forces), but that’s data gathering, not proof they reported each one as a news story.

Individual high-profile cases can generate dozens of articles, while many others get little or none—showing coverage is highly uneven.

Bottom line

There is no credible statistic like “X% of UK murders are reported by the BBC.”

Evidence strongly indicates the percentage is well below 100%, likely a minority of cases, but the exact share varies by year and definition of “reported.”

Maybe they're wrong, if you wanna go find hard credible statistics about how many murders are reported about in a year at the BBC vs the number of murders done in the UK, go right ahead. But they couldn't find it at least.

Now the part about "victim characteristics" could point to over coverage of trans victims. But whether or not that equals or is greater than the bias of people not sharing their family's private information with the BBC isn't going to be easy to know. We can not assume things "cancel out" just because it makes conversation easier. The real world does not do things to make discussion easy.

We wouldn't, and don't, know true overdose rates or true suicide rates either because of social stigma, it's just what happens when you have things that are controversial, their loved ones are far less likely to volunteer the information to be broadcast.

  • -14

The great thing about AI is that you get impartiality on demand if you make a completely unconnected instance and ask an impartial question

It's possible I'm failing a sarcasm check here or something, but: do you actually believe this?

Like, this is an extremely untrue thing to say. I don't want to put a low-effort comment here saying "this is wrong", but I also don't want to waste time on a long comment explaining it, if it turns out that this was a joke or some kind of unserious comment. So I'm going to flag up that, if you sincerely believe "AI gives you impartial answers", that this is an extremely broken part of your epistemic model, which I can substantiate if it needs to be substantiated.

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How does this follow exactly? Murders of a visible minority demographic with a low baseline due to a small population are likely going to get higher per-capita coverage than less interesting murders. Considering how much of an easy bump in views that trans murders are due to the culture war aspect, it'd also be downright irresponsible of the news sites to not elevate stuff that happens.

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That might be good hopes, but they should also have checked if it's even true. A quick look through the "transcrime" site shows they also just count men who crossdress.

From the study:

[Trans Crime UK] lists 37 cases since 2000, but the scope is broad. Firstly, it includes perpetrators who cross-dressed but did not otherwise exhibit a transgender identity. Roderick Deakin-White, for instance, beat his girlfriend to death following conflict over his wearing of women’s clothes, especially during sex. This ‘was something in which he found great solace and was soothing’, according to the clinical psychologist at his trial (BBC News 2019). Deakin-White falls under the classic ‘Transgender Umbrella’ circulated by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, which specifically includes transvestites, defined as ‘cross-dressing for emotional comfort’, as well as transvestic fetishists who wore clothes ‘for erotic purposes’ (Green 1994:68). Cross-dressers were similarly classified as transgender by the popular Gender Book on Tumblr (Hill and Mays 2013), by a leading British sociologist of gender (Hines 2007), and by Britain’s dominant LGBT advocacy organization (Stonewall 2020b). The government’s definition of transphobic hate crime also encompasses crossdressers (Home Office 2024). Remembering Our Dead’s list of victims in other countries does include some cross-dressers. Nevertheless, cross-dressers would not normally be identifiable among victims of homicide—this aspect of their life would not be reported in news of their death—and so they could not be counted as transgender victims. Therefore we omit crossdressers....

Furthermore, we applied uniform criteria to victims and perpetrators, hence the exclusion of cross-dressers from the list of perpetrators.

Consider reading the study before criticising it.

Consider reading the study before criticising it.

I did, it doesn't matter the way you try to claim. Motivations and bias here in showing non trans people as trans reveals just how far reaching this site is. Assuming equal incentive = equal bias is flawed. Given that they couldn't find any case in the trans site that wasn't also on the BBC besides the first two they had, it shows the effects of bias of the trans site isn't actually that strong whereas the transcrime site is self evidently strong given that they had to specifically exclude tons of non trans cases.

If you pull from two datasets and one is good to go from the start, and the other has to have half the data taken out, which dataset do you think had more bias put into it?

And as I explained to you in the other comment

"Pretty much only BBC reporting" vs "BBC + tons of other different news sources" is absurd. Most murders are not reported in national news.

Nevertheless, cross-dressers would not normally be identifiable among victims of homicide—this aspect of their life would not be reported in news of their death—and so they could not be counted as transgender victims. Therefore we omit crossdressers....

Nor does this address the issue that many trans victims would also not be reported as such in the same way that overdoses and suicides are not accurately reported. Anything with a social stigma attached has far less chance of their family and friends reaching out to the national news going "our loved one with social stigma died, please blast it to the world".

If you pull from two datasets and one is good to go from the start, and the other has to have half the data taken out, which dataset do you think had more bias put into it?

I genuinely don't think this matters provided you've gone to the trouble to properly vet and cleanse the data, which the authors explicitly have.

I was surpised to find that the researchers' dataset of murder victims includes no female victims at all, while their dataset of murderers includes two female perpetrators.

Are you referring to Male-to-Female trans people here? Usually these are identified as "she" and treated as women.

You're finding the same things I found when going in to the figures; generally "X was murdered for being trans!" turns out to be "X was murdered in domestic violence incident/criminal activity/hit and run". That last category has left me with fond recollections of the transphobic motor vehicles, doubtless the latest iteration of the racist truck, where cars and other motors kill people just for being trans and not, for instance, ordinary traffic accidents that happen to cis people.

Are you referring to Male-to-Female trans people here?

No, the table lists the perpetrators' natal sex. (I wish we could just say "sex" rather than "natal sex": the sex you're born with is the sex you're stuck with.) Of the 20 transgender murderers, two were female (i.e. trans men).

I wish we could just say "sex" rather than "natal sex": the sex you're born with is the sex you're stuck with.

If, as is my understanding, a distinction between 'sex' and 'gender' uses 'sex' to refer to biological factors and 'gender' to refer to mental and social factors, then biological sex is a combination of things, some of which we currently have the ability to change and some of which we do not.

If one defines 'sex' as "If I look between this person's legs (and don't get a face full of pepper spray), will I see a tallywhacker or a hoo-ha?", at least 5% and possibly as many as 13% of trans individuals (per statistics linked in a previous post by above) have changed sex from that with which they were born, and an unknown fraction more retain the sex with which they were born only due to lack of opportunity.

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If one defines 'sex' as "If I look between this person's legs (and don't get a face full of pepper spray), will I see a tallywhacker or a hoo-ha?"

Well, that's not how any sensible person would define sex, so I really don't know why you're bringing up this hypothetical scenario.

I've made it abundantly, abundantly clear to you that when I use the term "sex", I'm referring to whether a person was born with the organs associated with the production of large or small gametes, even if faulty. Obviously one cannot change what organs one was born with, and medical technology currently admits of no way to transform organs which produce large gametes into organs which produce small gametes, or vice versa. If you were born with functioning testicles, the only kind of gamete you will ever be able to produce throughout your life is a small one, and emasculating yourself doesn't change that.

Your continued insistence on trying to imply that, by virtue of being gender-critical, I'm therefore a sex pest obsessed with the genitals of complete strangers is not just tiresome and dishonest, but also profoundly immature. If this is the best rebuttal you can think of, maybe just don't bother.

As an aside: your contention that the configuration of the genitals belonging to trans-identified males are some kind of jealously guarded secret is not at all consonant with my experience. This is information that trans-identified males seem disproportionately keen to volunteer, even (especially) to those who have expressed no desire to hear about it (that is, if the legions of such people inviting TERFs to "choke on my girldick" and similar are any indication).

Well, that's not how any sensible person would define sex

It's how they define it when a baby is assigned male or female.

when I use the term "sex", I'm referring to whether a person was born with the organs associated with the production of large or small gametes, even if faulty.

To the best of my knowledge, when parents ask whether they had a boy or a girl, doctors and midwives do not generally take biopsies from the gonads of infants and culture them to see what size gametes they produce.

They usually look between the legs to see whether they find a sticky-outy bit or a hole.

medical technology currently admits of no way to transform organs which produce large gametes into organs which produce small gametes, or vice versa. If you were born with functioning testicles, the only kind of gamete you will ever be able to produce throughout your life is a small one

Skill issue.

Your continued insistence on trying to imply that, by virtue of being gender-critical, I'm therefore a sex pest obsessed with the genitals of complete strangers

I do not accuse you of acting out of carnal desire. However, the fact that you are not thus motivated does not change the fact that other people's organs are none of your business. The reproductive system is considered especially private in most societies, but you would still be out of line if you insisted that people use bathrooms corresponding to the configuration at birth of their heart or kidneys.

If someone wants access to your medical records, do you think they should need a Good Reason, or is the fact that they are not touching themself sufficient justification?

If some wants to know the PIN for your bank card, not out of an intention to use it for fraud, but because they think it relevant whether it is a prime/square/triangular number, does the fact that they are not technically a thief mean that they are justified in prying it out of you?

your contention that the configuration of the genitals belonging to [trans-women] are some kind of jealously guarded secret

I do not contend that all trans-women keep the state of their genitals secret, so much as that an individual trans-woman ought to have the right to decide for herself whether and when to disclose it.

Skill issue.

Sincerely – what on earth are you talking about?

If some wants to know the PIN for your bank card, not out of an intention to use it for fraud, but because they think it relevant whether it is a prime/square/triangular number, does the fact that they are not technically a thief mean that they are justified in prying it out of you?

If the PIN for my bank card was tattooed on my forehead in 60pt characters and I didn't wear a beanie or a burqa, it would be meaningless to demand that people respect my privacy.

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