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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.
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"
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.
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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!
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Untrue.
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From the study:
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?
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
Seems like a pretty impartial question that doesn't lean towards wanting either way.
It responds with
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.
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.
Yeah, I would say they can be generally more impartial than the typical human is as long as you don't approach it with leading questions or have their history built up where they know what you want to hear. Especially not anything politically charged. A generic question like mine will get a rather factual answer.
It's not gonna be perfect, but they are a great starting point and there's a reason why people far richer and smarter than us are using them as tools too. Even someone like Scott Alexander will regularly refer to AI for basic questions like that. If the smart people are doing something, maybe we should consider it's a smart thing to do.
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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.
It still requires people in their lives to talk about it and bring it to the attention of reporters (and for reporters to ignore the requests of family to keep details private, which they actually do follow with less prominent cases, journalists aren't complete monsters) and people just don't generally do that. Like I've said, it happens in other cases too like overdoses and suicides. I've literally known people who I'm pretty sure died of an overdose because they were a big drug user not have the drug use and obvious cause of their passing away mentioned even a single time at the funeral and in official correspondence from the family. If you didn't personally know he was a drug addict or get told it by someone who did, you would have no idea he overdosed.
It can make for even dumber consequences too! Not acknowledging social stigma as a factor can lead to stupid shit like this where an old guy dies, the family doesn't want to say why, and it gets turned into some major conspiracy about China killing our scientists or something. Which hey even with a very prominent case turned into an international conspiracy, journalists are still respectful enough to not pry.
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From the study:
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.
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".
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.
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