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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8940 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.

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"

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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