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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2470 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Do the stats on trans people being child abusers pan out ?

More specifically, I am talking about MTF trans people getting into positions of power or supervision (however small, but still) and taking advantage of it for child abuse or sexual crimes in general. The plural of anecdotes is not data, but more than a few anecdotes of a statistically unlikely combination absolutely raises alarm bells.

No value judgement here. Want to start with tallying the numbers first.

According to this report, Table 1: out of 964 registered sex offenders, 7 (0.7%) were transgender. Going off another page from the same org, 0.4% of the U.S. adult population is trans.

That said, the confidence interval for the first survey spans 0.3% to 1.5% due to its tiny sample size. So it may well be an artifact. Notice also that LGBT people are seriously overrepresented on the registry--"almost four times that of a recent national estimate of LGBTQ identification among adults in the United States (5.6%)." It's strange, then, that trans offenders aren't. I suspect this is related to age differences. The average age in this survey was 50, while most trans people are under 25.

Table 2 breaks down reasons for sex offense convictions among the survey respondents. The prevalence of each offense looks pretty similar between straight and LGBT offenders (with the obvious exceptions of sodomy and HIV convictions). Since only 7 of the 192 LGBT respondents were trans, though, I really doubt they change the rates.

LGBT respondents had committed pornography offenses at around the same rate as the general population. But among the subset included in Table 3, they were much more likely to have victims "represented in an image." I'm not sure how to interpret this. Perhaps it excludes cases where the offender never contacted their victims, but includes those which solicited pictures directly?

In short, I think LGBT sex offender stats are driven almost entirely by gay men, just as almost all general crime stats are driven by men. Trans people barely move the needle. The modal offense appears to be a cisgender man abusing a minor, possibly by soliciting pornography, rather than a more elaborate scheme by transgender offenders.

But among the subset included in Table 3, they were much more likely to have victims "represented in an image." I'm not sure how to interpret this.

Is this not evidence in keeping with what I would’ve assumed- that gay men have underaged boyfriends(who they then sext with) while straight men into that see prostitutes?

I think so?

What’s unclear to me is why it doesn’t show up as a difference in Table 2. I would have expected to see more “soliciting a minor” charges. Or more CP charges, but those could be countered by the inclusion criteria for Table 3.

Seeing prostitutes is probably much less frequently caught than other crimes.

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