It’s a little difficult to miss the torrent of anti-transgender hatred spreading about these days. Whether it is street preachers organizing “protests” over transgender people existing, or failed political candidates trying to whip up a mob on Twitter, it seems as though they are everywhere.
The lie is always the same - ‘they’re coming for your kids’. They inevitably conflate issues, linking the existence of transgender people to the content of sex education curriculums. Or complaining that frank and direct material talking about sexuality is somehow “grooming kids”. Anyone with half a brain and a bit of reason understands that is nonsense, but that doesn’t stop the propagandists from continuing their lies.
Then something like this pops up: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-stampede-lawsuit-sexual-harassment-1.6919239
So, for a decade, this guy is literally grooming and sexually assaulting youth. Meanwhile, even when the Stampede Board became aware of it, they turned a blind eye to it. Not for a year, but for multiple years. Sit with that for a moment.
The offender was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to a decade in prison. Five years later, we finally get an admission from the Stampede that they knew about this for years?
If you’re worried about “groomers” and pedophiles, I’m going to suggest that the problem isn’t trans people, it’s elsewhere. Hardly a day goes by where my various news feeds don’t have a headline about someone in a position of power over youth abusing their charges.
Do you know what I never see in those articles? Evidence that the person is transgender. They can be anything else - coaches, pastors, priests, youth group leaders, and on the list goes. These are often respected members of society.
One might come to the conclusion that the motives of the people going after transgender people aren’t as pure as they claim.
9 comments:
Pedophiles will train for years to reach positions of trust with children as teachers, doctors, priests and pastors. And you think no men will claim to be women to gain children's trust? What first attracted you to an ideology that allows men to shower with young girls?
"Evidence that the person is transgender."
That is because there is nothing other than a decision to think they are or a lost feeling associated with being transgender. No evidence can be found for a feeling or thought.
Sex crime is an equal opportunity employer and trans are as susceptible as any. Pro mental health here which looks a lot like anti fantasy to many.
Anonymous @ 4:44
Allow me to point out that transgender women (in particular) have been using the women's facilities for decades - multiple decades in fact - far longer than the current "bathroom panic" bullshit has been in use. Guess what? There isn't a shred of evidence to support your claim that "men will claim to be women to gain children's trust". It's simply false.
I suggest you read the following before yammering on about "predators in the ladies' room":
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1536504215596943
... and consider the following point about sexual predators - their acts tend to be about power more than anything else. Why in hell would they symbolically emasculate themselves by dressing up as their prey?
Anonymous @ 8:04
"no evidence can be found for a feeling or thought"
... um yeah - for someone who purports to be "pro mental health", you clearly do not understand the issues here. Assessment of trans people is difficult, but it can be done, and it is done on a regular basis.
As for "sex crime is an equal opportunity employer, and trans are as susceptible as any", then to justify your position, I challenge you to find the peer reviewed research that supports that claim. More pointedly, I would suggest that in order to justify the exclusion of trans women from these spaces, you need to find evidence that shows a substantially higher rate of such activity among trans women compared to either male or female sexual predators.
... in the meantime, you can expect the deluge of headlines about cisgender sexual predators to continue unabated, and it will continue to reinforce the point of this post, which is that transgender women are not the problem you're making them out to be.
"It’s a little difficult to miss the torrent of anti-transgender hatred spreading about these days."
Even the occasionally-functional "Progressive " blog site that I find you on, also hosts the despicable Dead Wild Roses ... who could also be the anon poster above.
Ten years ago, security would remove any man caught in women's washrooms or changerooms. Thanks to recent changes to the laws, all Canadian single-sex facilities are now unisex. Any man can use women's facilities, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Add to that the fact that men who claim to be women are almost four times more likely to be violent sex offenders than men who don't. A recent Corrections Canada study found that 44% of male-to-female transgender inmates are behind bars for sex offences, compared to 13% of the general population. The vast majority of mtf trans offenders, 85%, were convicted of violent crimes that caused death “or serious harm” to their victims (58% of whom were children or women). This compares with 21% homicide-related crimes in the general male prison population. https://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/research/005008-r442_E-en.shtml
There's absolutely nothing progressive about denying the privacy, dignity and safety of women and girls to satisfy the fetishes and mental health conditions of men.
There’s a small problem with the statistics you’re citing (and yes, I’ve read that report):
1) It only examines the incarcerated transgender population. It does not provide any insight into the overall population of transgender people in Canada.
2) Sample size is 99 individuals. As of 2018/19, Canada’s prison population was some 37,854 adults ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Canada ), making the sample 0.2% of the total prison population.
3) The study itself is a population study in a confined environment, and does not examine the individual cases (nor should it, given the purpose and scope of the study).
4) The study does not examine whether the criminal justice system (especially the courts) is more likely to convict a transgender accused, or to hand out harsher sentences to those accused. (we already know that systemic biases exist in the court system along ethnic lines - especially regarding indigenous persons, so this question needs to be examined)
5) The study does note that where sexual offences are involved, the vast majority of those offences (94%) were committed prior to transitioning.
6) A significant point that the study does not address is how many of the offenders began their transitions while incarcerated, nor does it provide sufficiently robust information about post-release outcomes (due in large part to a very small number of releases occurring during the study period).
Using the study as you have to justify pushing transgender women out of society is inappropriate because it does not demonstrate that transgender women are more likely to offend, nor does it demonstrate that transgender women are in fact more dangerous.
The only thing this study does is assist Corrections Canada with designing and implementing protocols for managing transgender inmates.
Once again, I encourage you to spend some quality time in the research literature examining transgender women and in particular whether any of the studies actually show that transgender women (since that seems to be the target of all the uproar) are:
A) More likely to commit offences
B) That those offences directly endanger others in spaces such as changing rooms and public washrooms.
*Having spent some significant time in the relevant literature, I can assure you that finding applicable studies is very, very difficult.
Of course transgender studies are hard to find. Publishing anything that doesn't fit the activist narrative is as perilous as publishing facts about the Israeli colonization of Palestine. Unless you're near retirement, it's best to keep your head down and research something else, especially if you're a woman who will quickly be dismissed as a "bigoted TERF." https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jan/14/sacked-silenced-academics-say-they-are-blocked-from-exploring-trans-issues
While the study I cited has its limitations, as do all studies, it can't simply be handwaved away. The Canadian prison study is consistent with 2020 prison statistics from England and Wales, which show mtf trans offenders to be 3.5 times more likely to be sex offenders than other male inmates, and 18 times more likely than female inmates:
76 sex offenders out of 129 transwomen = 58.9%
125 sex offenders out of 3812 women in prison = 3.3%
13234 sex offenders out of 78781 men in prison = 16.8%
You complain that prison studies don't tell us much about the general population.
To the contrary, inmates are a subset of the population, and rates of offending are some of the most robust data we have. Unsubstantiated accusations are excluded since convictions were recorded in all cases. If anything, these statistics underestimate risk since we know that sex crimes are underreported and difficult to prosecute.
The Canadian sample size is entirely appropriate as it looked at "99 gender diverse offenders" among 37,854 prisoners. Given the 129 mtf trans inmates among 78,781 male inmates in England and Wales, it looks like the Canadian study interviewed most if not all trans inmates.
As for why 94% of crimes were committed before male criminals claimed to be women, perhaps it's because of incentives in the justice system. As Prof. Michael Biggs states in a study included in a report to the UK parliament:
"It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in as many reasons why people might pretend this. These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information
suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending
very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard." https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/
Given the CSC's own evidence, at the very least it's criminally negligent to put violent male sex offenders (85% guilty of homicide-related crimes) in women's prisons simply on their say-so, and the UK is reversing this policy. As the Swedish study cited in the submission to the UK parliament above found, mtf trans inmates retain the general male pattern of violent offending even after reassignment surgery. They don't belong in any women's single-sex facilities, let alone women's prisons. As Simon Fraser criminologist Neil Boyd wrote in The Beast Within, "Throughout history, the perpetrators of the most vile and savage crimes have always been almost exclusively male." Claiming to be a woman doesn't change that.
Anonymous @ 9:45 AM:
Shorter you: "If the study doesn't say what I want, I'm going to reject it as biased because pOlItIcS". Nice - that hardly suggests that you are open to considering the full picture.
Regarding the CSC study, I didn't "wave it away", what I did state is that you cannot generalize the findings of that study outside of the context of prison populations. In other words, applying that information to the broad population of transgender people who are not incarcerated is simply irrelevant. It's rather akin to saying "since 9/10 sex offenders in prisons are male, we must ensure that men are never in the presence of women and children" ... and thereby making it illegal for men to be teachers, doctors who tend to women, etc.
I wasn't at any point talking about CSC policy and handling of transgender inmates - nor have I ever been. It's you that's been dragging that up, and I keep pointing out that inmate populations do not accurately reflect the general population outside of the prison environment.
Further, I do not propose to suggest that some prisoners may choose to "identify as transgender" while incarcerated in the misguided belief that it will somehow privilege them. The motives of any individual who identifies as transgender are highly individual, and again I must reiterate that even if some percentage are "playing games" in prison, that really doesn't tell us a lot about the general transgender population specifically because of the unique environment that exists within prisons.
I would further suggest to you that the possibilities exist that transgender people are more likely to be convicted of serious crimes in part due to intrinsic biases towards such identities within the overall justice system - including judges, juries, prosecutors, etc. There is some limited evidence of those biases in the American system ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227944/, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/03/02/lgbtq/ ) - so that could be a significant factor in distorting the picture when we look at prisoner populations and try to generalize those findings to non-prisoner populations of trans people.
... again, I invite you to spend some time in the professional literature (e.g. peer reviewed publications) - whether that be in the domains of law, criminology, psychology, sociology and see if you can find actual evidence that shows the broader transgender population is _IN_FACT_ disproportionately dangerous. Just because you have a particular bias that says "trans women are a threat" doesn't make it so.
Post a Comment