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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10268 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.

@Celestial-body-NOS, while sensible enough to recognise that putting male inmates in the women's estate is a bad idea

That is not an accurate representation of my views. A separate facility for trans-women was an offer of a compromise, and I do not appreciate the repeated assertions that agreement with the 'gender-critical' position, or whatever you call your side of the argument, is a prerequisite for being considered 'mature' or 'sensible'.

So in your ideal world, where no compromise was required with people like me (or those uppity women who would prefer not to be raped during their prison sentences if it's all the same), how would inmates be housed?

As an aside, don't you find it the least bit interesting that, for all your talk about the necessity of housing trans-identified males outside of the male estate in order to protect them from the "ghastly fate" that would otherwise befall them, trans activists cannot dredge up even one example of a trans-identified male being murdered in a British prison in the last twenty-five years?

I do not appreciate the repeated assertions that agreement with the 'gender-critical' position, or whatever you call your side of the argument, is a prerequisite for being considered 'mature' or 'sensible'.

I'll be more than happy to stop, if you'll stop implying that I'm a pervert for disagreeing with gender ideology. A simple trade.

So in your ideal world, where no compromise was required with people like me (or those uppity women who would prefer not to be raped during their prison sentences if it's all the same), how would inmates be housed?

Transgender women could be housed with the female population only if they’ve had bottom surgery, otherwise they go into protective custody in the male wing. I believe that’s the law in many countries right now including the UK, and it seems quite reasonable to me. What would your objections be to that?

The fact that male people are so much stronger and more aggressive than female people, even after undergoing bottom surgery.

Sucks for someone like me who got beaten at arm wrestling by mildly athletic women even before transitioning, had female range grip strength even back then, and never tried to hit or slapped someone, like even when getting sexually assaulted I just froze and waited for it to be over. It doesn’t feel great to hear I don’t deserve being protected from rape because of the way I was born.

But on the hand, I recognise that I won enough at the birth lottery being middle class in a wealthy European country in the 21st century and that this is just me feeling slightly down at hypothetical scenarios that I am exceedingly unlikely to face.

You do deserve to be protected from rape, just as everyone does. But even though protecting trans-identified male inmates from rape and assault is a valid and noble goal, I think housing male inmates in the female estate is a bridge too far, and would be unlikely to pass a cost-benefit analysis. In the hypothetical scenario in which you were sent to prison for a non-violent offense, I would hope that you would be housed in a minimum security prison along with other non-violent offenders. I would also hope that the prison warden/governor would recognise that, owing to your appearance and anatomy, you are especially vulnerable to being violently victimised, and take proactive measures to prevent that outcome (such as placing you on protection if necessary).

I don't think it's really fair for you to equivocate between "if sent to prison, I don't think you should be housed in the female estate" with "you don't deserve to be protected from rape". I'm sure you don't think a slim, petite cis gay man (that is, a twink) who gets sent to prison ought to be housed in the female estate, but I doubt you'd appreciate it if I summarised that opinion as "twinks don't deserve to be protected from rape in prison".

I don't think it's really fair for you to equivocate between "if sent to prison, I don't think you should be housed in the female estate" with "you don't deserve to be protected from rape"

Sure but the female estate is greater protection without the needing to be on constant protection, which is generally considered a punishment. Otherwise why have female prisons at all, just put all of them in the same building and have the women confined to their cells 23h a day.

I'm sure you don't think a slim, petite cis gay man (that is, a twink) who gets sent to prison ought to be housed in the female estate

A petite cis gay man doesn’t have a female body that’s going to attract the same kind of attention as a passing post-op trans woman in a male estate. The risk for the latter is equivalent to a cis woman in the same situation, maybe with greater violence depending on the inmates attitudes or the belief that they can “get away” with more since a trans woman will attract less sympathy.

So I do feel sad that in your worldview, I don’t deserve the full extent of protection from rape and violence some other people do, because I wasn’t born the right kind of human. I hope I never get in trouble with the law or falsely accused of a violent crime, abused by a partner and need a DV shelter, become homeless, etc, and that I can maintain my nice comfortable middle-class existence.

Or… I can live in a country that has laws that I consider reasonable (and it does seem that most western countries consider bottom surgery sufficient for most of the above - even the Reform Party justice minister spoke in favour of not automatically housing trans women in male wings), surround myself with people for whom being trans isn’t a big deal (which is honestly a much bigger number than I thought), and just live my life with a bit less stress.

I can live in a country that has laws that I consider reasonable (and it does seem that most western countries consider bottom surgery sufficient for most of the above - even the Reform Party justice minister spoke in favour of not automatically housing trans women in male wings)

If the UK is making housing trans-identified males in the female estate conditional on their having undergone bottom surgery, that's news to me.

So I do feel sad that in your worldview, I don’t deserve the full extent of protection from rape and violence some other people do, because I wasn’t born the right kind of human.

Yes, but as I pointed out, in your worldview, some people deserve greater protection from rape and violence than others, because they weren't born the right kind of human.

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