QT: If crime stats list crimes against transgender people as crimes against men or women only, how is it possible to accurately report crimes against transgender people?
Submitted June 28, 2020, 11:01 p.m. by NommeNommeNommeQT argue that transgender people are murdered at a much higher rate than anyone else. The usual gender critical response is to quote the only available statistics, such as GLAAD's annual report, which reports fewer than 30 murders of transgender people per year in the U.S.
This number seems extremely low for a country with 330 million people. It is several times lower than the murder rates for cisgender men and women as listed by the FBI in its annual crime reports.
Should transgender people be tracked as a separate category by police departments in order to get a more accurate picture of the rate of violence against the transgender community?
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What would that data change in law enforcement?
Where crimes happen geographically matters. They can move cops and patrols around. How do they adjust resources if transgender people are a popular target for theft? Assign a bodyguard to all transgenders?
I'm talking about national crime statistics.
Currently, as far as I know, violence against transgender people is not tracked by local police departments (which is then compiled by the FBI, which releases an annual report). Therefore it is hard to accurately report.
Ok, so let's pretend the start tracking this accurately. I don't disagree that it is currently inaccurate. We then find out transgenders are assaulted at 2x the rate. Now what? What do we then do with that information?
If we do something with it then causes more questions. Let's say they provide a special victim service or something. How can we then keep the information accurate? All it takes for me to be transgender is calling myself so. They don't check what pills I take, look under my skirt, or check my psychiatrist notes. I get hit, tell the cop I'm a transwoman and bam, stats reflect a trans assault and I get the special service.
If you want, say, hate crime legislation, you'll need concrete data to back it up. I don't doubt there are more than 30 murders of transgender people per year. Unfortunately, there is no current way to verify that information.
Canada passed hate crime legislation without data.
You can say it's worse to assault someone while misgendering them. That decision can be made if it happens 1 time or a million times.
I don't understand why it's unimportant to document violence against trans people.
If GC are going to argue that transgender people are disproportionately victims of crime, there has to be some way of measuring that proportion.
In a non judgemental way, TRA's constantly bring up how much actual violence there is against trans people and a way to quantify that is to measure it. Why do you not want accurate and recorded data about issues that face your community so you can come up with a solution? Maybe that solution is legislative or training for police or something but people, especially those that don't agree with you, aren't going to take your word for it.
Why are you against accurate reporting of data for transgender people? Is it unimportant to you?
I am not convinced we can accurately report who is a transgender. There does not seem to be a stable definition beyond self-labeling as transgender. People can change in and out from the label. If it's a murder, who gets to decide if the victim is transgender? Maybe they were closeted or de-transitioning.
Ah. I misunderstood your perspective initially. I understand where you're coming from now. Great point.
First I have to make a comment on the statistics of that because stats are very easily to misinterpret and I want to clear it up. What's written is "30 people of 330,000,000 people were murdered" that is technically correct but not a useful or appropriate representation.
How you should state such a stat is as the number of trans people murdered per 100,000 people, now compare that to the number of cis people murdered per 100,000 people in a given year. This is not how I think you should, but this is the academic standard.
As for you question, yes and no. Transgender people's murder should be reported under their legal gender, and then separately under "transgender." Trans should be it's own category tracked in murder rates, just as race and age are.
Currently, there is no feral (USA) collection of data on the murder of trans people, their deaths are sometimes unreported, reported under the wrong gender, and the fact that they're trans is not recorded or known at all. This leads to a huge gap in knowledge, the very statistic you've listed is certainly incorrect because the data is not recorded what you have is from media reporting obviously making up a small portion of deaths. There are indications that the murder rate is higher than average, trans people exhibit many risk factors. One of such is that trans people as a whole are more likely to be involved in sex work which is the most dangerous profession (violence and murder wise). Another risk is trans people experiencing higher rates of intimate partner violence, it's very well known that such violence predisposes the victim to a greater risk of murder by their partner. On top of all this is the risk of hate crime both transphobia and misdirected homophobia.
I would also be remiss if I left out that transgender women of colour (particularly black women) overwhelmingly face the most violence of all people within the trans community. This is a product of intersectionality, seen for example in the higher mortality rates of black vs. white women in the USA, where black women are four times more likely to die during childbirth than their white counterparts.
How do you know? The only statistics I could find were from GLAAD, which is an organization that embraces queer theory.
Agreed
Ok, how do you know that?
How do you know this? Is it anecdotal? Intuition?
In order of appearance:
**Its not my stat you'll have to ask the OP. How do I know it's not an appropriate or useful representation? What does it tell you and how can you use it? It doesn't tell you if trans people are more likely than cis people to be murdered. It doesn't allow you to easily compare countries or years. It is a huge number not easily divisible thus doesn't lend itself to simple percentage calculation. That's why the standard is X per 100,000 people, again it's not my standard but the academic standard.
**Fitzgerald, Erin (2015). Meaningful Work: Transgender Experiences in the Sex Trade. National Center for Transgender Equality.
**Brown, Taylor Intimate partner violence and sexual abuse among LGBT people (2015) UCLA School Of Law
*Are you asking me to justify saying "homophobia and transphobia exist? that's absolutely wild, here's some info about the levels of transphobic violence
https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/HRC-AntiTransgenderViolence-0519.pdf
**https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5551619/ That's my source, I also stated my own opinion as OP asked it was formulated based on the above sources.
I absolutely object to this. No, statistics care about sex which is immutable. Having a category that shifts with time (well, beside age) is absolutely a nightmare and I don't see how it can work well. Discrimination is also sex based, ehich makes any gender issue pretty pointless
What is the advantage of recording things based on gender rather than sex?
Many recorded pieces of information about people are subject to change with time: religion, marital status, children, level of education, etc. Change with time is not a justifiable reason not to record a piece of information, the purpose of recording any of these is to better understand the person, knowing who they were when they died is far more useful then what they were possibly decades ago at birth.
Furthermore if a person changes their sex in the legal system, they are legally, for all intents and purposes that sex. You're asking government bodies investigating crimes to report legally inaccurate information - that is an extremely dangerous precedent.
A minor thing, I said "legal gender" what I mean by that is either male or female as recorded on their legal documents. That is legally considered "sex" not gender, if you want to argue with that concept take it up with your local lawmakers not me.
If you want to make an argument that deaths to disease should be recorded based on AGAB because males and females have different risk factors and responses (excluding those associated with estrogen and testosterone because of HRT) I'd be open to that. I've never looked into how that data is recorded for trans people, however I imagine doctors have created a system for such instances.
Finally, I'm assuming you are objecting to the recording of the trans person's sex not the recording that they are trans? If thats not the case, I'd suggest you read the source I linked in another reply detailing the difficulty analyzing trans deaths to know why I recommended it be listed specifically.
Yes
Tbh i am opposed to having gender on your documents, the same way you don't record religion or all the other things you mention that can change over time. Just checkex my passport, it says 'sex' not gender.
Gender doesn't give you any actually useful infomation
Religion is also tricky because for many religion is their culture or even their ethnicity (jewish). So in a way that it matters it cannot be changed. If you are born in a religion you are going to be that religion until you die. Self report would be different than the more 'official' religion.
You do realise that how these things change is also dependant on age, right? The way you approach these would be based on age because it is assumed 18 year olds are going to have a different number of children on average than 50 yo.
Socioeconomic status is probably a mutable factor that is not based on age. And health. Yes, many factors you could measure are mutable.
BUT still, all these factors are understood to be snapshots in someone's life. Sex? No, it's immutable. It is understood to be a category that can't change. This means a lot when interpreting and analyze data.
Measuring something is based on whether you think it makes sense. We categorize sex because we think it's meaningful because there are more or less standard biological differences and because of social factors (discrimination is sex based). If you can move in and out of the category, what's the meaning of it?
For instance, let's say we want to record the number of abortions for public health purposes. Should we do that by gender? Because then you are going to have a few men who had abortions. You know what also isn't useful? The fact that now you have this incredibly small category. What will happen? Either put together with women, or just discarded because you don't have the power to do any test. If you just want to record the number you can add another box for being trans, but that is a different category - the person would be 'female' first and then 'trans'
But why? I would be way more open at seeing if transmen are killed at the same rate as women or men, then we can decide. But even with that is not optimal since you are confirming the numbers post analysis.
That is why saying 'just sex' is so so much easier. And if you really wanted to just record gender, then transmen (ftm) and transwoman (mtf) should be the categories. But then good luck with not being called transphobic because excluding 'non binary' and whatever gender they want
Gender isn't on any document, only "sex" is recorded. Legally your sex does not have to be that which you were assigned at birth. In the country I live in, and I know many other countries you can apply to change your sex on your birth certificate (provided you meet a specfic criteria).
Next, you are only X religion so long as you believe in that religion. I'm not going to talk about Jewish people here because that is a very unquie case, I'm not personally Jewish and I don't feel informed enough to speak to their experiences. I was raised Christian but don't believe in God anymore, it would not be correct to classify me as Christian now just because at age 4 I was. Some people convert to a religion later in life, clearly religion is not fixed.
You made the argument that we shouldn't record the trans person's current legal sex but instead that which they had at birth, specifically because it changed and we shouldn't record things that change except age. I disagree, clearly we record pieces of information about a person regardless of whether they are subject to change, if it's relevant we record. You'd think it's absurd to record their birth weight as their weight on the report of their death "it's not what they were when they died!" this is no different.
Next, yes we record sex as it's useful. I already gave you a case where you'd record the sex of a trans person assigned at birth rather than their legal sex - disease deaths. I fail to see how the legal sex they had at birth is more relevant and should be listed instead of their legal sex at the time they were murdered when discussing murder rates. You're asking to represent legally inaccurate information on government records, in a way that obscures relevant details about murder, and is disrespectful to the victim, you need a better excuse than "but at birth!"
Your example of abortion rates, why on earth would you bother recording the sex of people getting abortions? What use could the sex of people having abortions possibly have? The use of recording sex in murder statistics is predominantly to track the success or failure of initiatives put in place to protect women from violence. If you didn't record the victim's sex that would be impossible to track. If there was 0 sexism in the world - nobody was ever killed because of it then they probably wouldn't bother recording sex if it wasn't ever relevant.
Actually no, trans men do not face the same level of violence trans women do, they face less. And I already said I have problems with the numbers listed I believe that's the minimum there are far more murders than recorded. The number 30 you gave is what trans advocates track based on news reporting not an official statistic by any crediable body.
Tracking legal sex makes far more sense, check the victim's ID and record what is written. Your current name, age, address, height, weight, etc. is recorded sex should not be exempt.
This is what I have a problem with. You can't change your sex. The only possible case is for someone who is intersex and finds out their condition later in life and realizes that they got the wrong sex assigned. Outside of that, you cannot change your sex. As they say: born male, live male, die male.
But we approach those categories knowing they change. They also actually change. When you go from married to single again (officially) you are not stuck in a limbo where your body is actually still married but your brain is not. Yes, you can be divorced, but that is an extra detail that does not matter if the category is split in a binary way between married and not married (the same way if the category was born female vs not born female, transwomen would never classify. We are not talking about more detailed subsections)
In self report i am an atheist, but officially i am still christian. This might depend on country, but i know several countries where your religion is documented and to change it officially is very hard
Consider whether it would be useful to change language for women's health and abortion to reach out to transmen or dysphoric people. Trans activists cannot say that 'pregnant people' is good and then be shocked if then you would have to record the sex of people getting abortion.
It might be relevant to understand the health effects of taking hormones for a while and stopping, or taking hormones for a short while, etc.. if you want to advance transmen health you are going to have to start recording these things
Actually no, trans men do not face the same level of violence trans women do, they face less
Do they face violence as women or as men?
Do transwomen face violence as women or as femenine men?
So I actually did calculate out the murder per capita rates for trans people, based on an estimated trans population of 700,000 (smaller than some estimates but I wanted to stay conservative to yield the highest possible murder rate).
Based on my numbers, you have to triple the current trans murder rate to get anywhere even near a ballpark of “epidemic” levels as claimed by the HRC, and you have to quadruple it to get the number anywhere near th me murder rate of the American black population.
Here’s my napkin math:
Generic/Generous Trans Murder Rate (rounding up to 30 as the highest murder rate and 700,000 as the lowest population count)
30 / 700,000 * 100,000
Trans murder rate per capita 4.2
Actual 2015 Trans Murder Rate
21 / 700,000 * 100,000
3
Actual 2016 Trans Murder Rate
21 / 700,000 * 100,000
3
Actual 2017 Trans Murder Rate
25 / 700,000 * 100,000
3.57
Actual 2018 Trans Murder Rate
22 / 700,000 * 100,000
3.14
Actual 2019 Trans Murder Rate
26 / 700,000 * 100,000
3.7
Total US population murder rate (using 2018 population and murder data)
14,123 / 327,536,552 * 100,000
US general population murder rate 2018: 4.3
Black murder rate in 2018 (population stats from wikipeda)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans
7407 / 40,916,113 * 100,000
US black murder rate 2018: 18.1
Male murder rate in 2018
https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/demographic-statistics
10,914 / 138,053,563 * 100,000
US male murder rate 2018: 7.9
Female murder rate in 2018
3,180 / 143,368,343 * 100,000
2.2
A few problems here, first is the choice of the trans population 700,000 you said you choose it to be conservative. The best information I can find is based on a 2016 paper by the Williams institute (UCLA law school), the number you've picked is based on a 2011 survey with a far more limited data pool. According to the Williams paper trans people make up 0.6% (1.4 million) of the US adult population. The next issue is what you've used for your total population, the trans population is adults it discounts any minors, comparing it to the adult & minor population would be inaccurate. According to the cenus in 2019 22.3% of the population is under 18, that brings the population total down significantly.
Now comes the data collection issues, both the total count of trans people and as I've explained (and sourced) extensively the murder count itself are dubious figures. I had minor problems with the format of the statistic yes, but dress them up even in the best suit, but they're still bad data. Quoting them as if they're not ("actual") is extremely reckless, these are murder statistics it's serious, it matters that there are an people who've lost their lives that we don't know about. Again I want to point out black trans women make up 4/5 of known trans murders, as black women they're underserved by the police, more needs to be done to protect these women.