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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8995 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.

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).

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