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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8644 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"

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.

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.

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.

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