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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.
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.
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.
Not the OP, but a couple of points here. I could very easily say:
(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:
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 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?
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.)
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.
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
You can check with other major sources, even the stuff actively calling it genocide won't allege that there is mass murder.
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.
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.
The article also alleges that people have been told, in effect, "go to this hospital on this date and there will be a heart waiting for you", which is the kind of specificity that implies people are being executed.
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