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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8734 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.

[Yes, it's my monthly post about my hobby horse.]

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

If you have a large enough family, trans issues are going to happen to you at least once.

  • One of my cousins became trans in high school. She didn't show any sign of being masculine as a child, was a very picky eater, wanted to marry a lead singer of a boy band to the point where she plotted killing his wife... and then a year later her mother was dying and she decided that men are better able to handle such awfulness and transitioned into a boy, hormones and all.

  • We once pooled resources with my husband's friend to rent a house together and one of our friend's sons married a transwoman who dressed in a way that was really inappropriate all the time.

  • Another of that friends' sons is super autistic, didn't finish high school, and decided recently that he's a woman.

  • The last of that friend's children was raped as a teenager and decided to become a man in response. All three of these young adults suffered obvious physical and mental health challenges that were exacerbated by their belief they could improve their lives by trying to live as another sex.

  • Now I have a family reunion coming up on my husband's side, and my sister in law messaged our family to say that her oldest son was transitioning, that her husband still used masculine pronouns and my sister-in-law used female pronouns, my nephew was still using the same androgynous first name and was wearing androgynous clothes, and it was up to us how we want to prepare our children to see their cousin.

Trans people are everywhere and each individual has to figure out what to do about it. How do you address them, do you encourage them or discourage them from transitioning, do you even feel a gender? A small group of people can't just change how all of society thinks about sex and language and think, "Why do people keep talking about us?"

I have a very large family and trans issues are entirely theoretical, just some weirdos that come from other, worse, families. Ditto for my in laws.

How old is your family? What percentage is under 25 years old?

You've never even had a coworker change gender on you?

Four of my examples are from Washington State, but one is from Texas.

Going back four generations. Probably roughly a third 20’s and younger. Keeping track of exact ages is a woman thing, thats a best guess.

You've never even had a coworker change gender on you?

No? Is this a common experience? I don’t work in big tech, I don’t think I’ve ever had a coworker transition.

No? Is this a common experience?

Yeah kinda. A software developer who is ill fitted to their position changes gender and then for a year becomes unfire-able.

Am I just really unlucky here?

It does seem to be a tech thing, but not necessarily un-fireable; at the same time James Damore was the big public firing from Google, a less publicised case of a transman, Tim Chevalier, getting let go also happened (they tried bringing a case against Google but I think the employment contract was held to apply). Chevalier tried to claim they were being persecuted for being queer, disabled, trans, and speaking out against racism and sexism and the rest of it, but the facts seem to be that Chevalier spent more time being active on the internal chat channels being activist than doing actual work.

Chevalier actually spent a good deal of time policing the internal chat channels and making complaints against wrongthinkers. At one point he was going after people (partially successfully) for asking the wrong kind of questions at the "TGIF" company presentations from the founders and upper management. I suspect his firing was mostly because many of those on his side realized he would turn on them sooner rather than later.

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