So, the other day, I ran across a new anti-trans group here in Alberta (shocker, I know). This one calls itself "Women and Girls Alberta". As you might expect, they make the usual assortment of arguments as to why transgender women have to be shoved out of society.
Now, a few things caught my attention, and I think warrant a moment or two of my time to comment on.
First is their discussion about crime and in particular violence towards women.
The opening assertion here is that recognizing trans women somehow erodes women's safety. I want to be clear here: I don't think anybody is here to discount the impact of violence on women - least of transgender women. There's a "yabbut" here though: they are going to proceed to claim that transgender women present unique dangers to women because ... they had a penis once.
There are a series of claims made in this type of argument to establish alleged danger, and I'm going to go through them and explain the problems with the claim and the evidence upon which that claim is based.
Claim 1: Males are more likely to engage in violence
Alright, one can use criminal statistics to establish that it's far more likely for a male offender to have committed a violent offence than a female offender. That's a fairly easy correlation to establish. Certainly more men are incarcerated than women in our prisons, and a higher percentage have committed violent crimes. There are plenty of papers that demonstrate this.
Claim 2: Transgender women are more likely to engage in violent criminal behaviour
Here, we run into the claim that transgender women are more likely to have committed violent crimes, and in particular, violent sexual crimes. Superficially, this appears to be borne out by Corrections Canada's report on Gender Diverse Offenders published in 2022 (MacDonald, Smith, Cram, Garrel, & Derkzen, 2022). Similarly, an often cited Swedish cohort study from 2011 makes a similar observation:
Second, regarding any crime, male-to-females had a significantly increased risk for crime compared to female controls (aHR 6.6; 95% CI 4.1–10.8) but not compared to males (aHR 0.8; 95% CI 0.5–1.2). This indicates that they retained a male pattern regarding criminality. The same was true regarding violent crime. (Dhejne, Lichtenstein, Boman, Johansson, Långström, & Landén, 2011).
Fair enough ... but we have to be a bit cautious here around making a correlation fallacy error. There are numerous well known problems with the so-called "Swedish Study" by Dhejne and colleagues (2011), and its criminality analysis is at best a peripheral aspect of the overall study - so the first thing to take here is that it is unlikely to be definitive in the area of discussion.
The Corrections Canada study (MacDonald, Smith, Cram, Garrel, & Derkzen, 2022), while interesting, does not address a host of relevant (to this discussion) questions. First, it does not interrogate whether the offence(s) occurred before or after beginning to transition - this is more important than you might first think. Second, it does not examine issues of potential bias in the criminal justice system resulting in a higher rate of certain types of conviction resulting in incarceration. Third, although it presents a set of statistics that describe the incarcerated population, there is no examination of whether the statistics apply in any meaningful sense outside of the incarcerated population.
All of the above questions merely point out that the Corrections Canada study is intended to inform policy regarding transgender inmates, and does not provide any insight into the population of transgender people in general.
Claim 3: Transgender Women Are Likely Sexual Predators
This is an implicit claim that stems from Claim 1. Basically, the logic is this: If you saw a man in the women's bathroom, you would assume that they are there for prurient reasons. Since a transgender woman was born with a penis, they assume that the person is a man, and therefore should be seen as a danger.
If this seems a bit of a leap to you, it's because it is. First, it relies on a twofold claim: namely that transgender women aren't really women (they're just men wearing dresses), and that men commit the majority of sexual predator crimes.
This is, of course, a set of unsubstantiated claims. The first part involves rejecting the transgender person's statement of their identity as valid. The second part involves drawing on the reasoning that if the identity is not valid, then the person before you is in fact a predator. There is no evidence in the research literature that I have examined that suggests that this correlation is in fact substantiated.
At a guess, I would suspect that transgender women in particular are subject to accusations of being sexual predators at a far higher rate simply because of the construct I have just described.
Claimed Harm 1: Women Are Uncomfortable With Transgender Women
There are two claims made to buttress this allegation. First, is the assumption that all transgender women basically look like "hulking men in a dress", and are therefore intimidating to the physically smaller women around them. Second is a claim that so many women have been traumatized by male violence that even the presence of a transgender woman is a reminder of that violence.
This is often cited as a primary reason for banning transgender women from washrooms and changing rooms. The problem with it is this: it holds the transgender person responsible for other people's reactions to their presence. As a transgender person, how am I responsible for what another person has experienced or their reactions to me?
Let's take a look at a few things.
First, in what other circumstances do we hold a person responsible for the emotional state of others? I am going to argue that in reasonable law systems, that simply isn't the case. Further to that, this rapidly descends into "body policing" - the person who isn't "gender conforming enough" finds themselves subjected to scrutiny and outright hostility even more so because of rigid linking of gendered behaviour and bodily appearance (Schilt, & Westbrook, 2015).
The second part of this is the idea that as a whole, transgender woman must bear some global responsibility for the impact of male violence perpetrated against women. Again, this hinges upon a generalized invalidation of the transgender woman's identity and tying it to their presumed bodily structure. Again, in the research literature, I have seen no evidence that transgender women as a group are necessarily more likely to commit sexual violence against women.
Claimed Harm 2: Transgender Women Are A Danger To Other Women and Children
In the absence of any direct proof that a transgender woman is an actual risk, the next claim is that even being in the same room as a transgender woman is somehow dangerous. This one is a bit perplexing, since it is rather devoid of actual evidence to support it.
Does exposure to a transgender person have any actual adverse impact on others? Not that I can identify. It seems to me that this is pure fear-mongering. I periodically hear arguments that boil down to "but I might see a pen*s". This is, of course, little more than a return to the idea that somehow that organ is the root of all evil in women's worlds.
Claimed Harm 3: Erosion of Women's Rights and Safety
This gets into a discussion of "competing rights". If you take the position that transgender women are not valid women, there is perhaps some validity to this claim. However, there is a distinct lack of evidence to suggest that there is a widespread problem (or any problem at all). Most of the arguments are, at best emotional supposition claims that are not borne out by any kind of meaningful research.
For example, as Schilt and Westbrook (2015) point out, the odds of a transgender woman being assaulted in a washroom are far greater than the odds of that transgender woman being a sexual predator and attacking other users of that space.
The argument gets made that "self-id" means that any man can decide that he's a woman and prance on into the women's room and do whatever he likes. This rapidly gets extended to "then the sexual predators will start putting on dresses so they can gain access to women" ... except that hyperbolic claim is so rare that I cannot even find any examples of it occurring. I'm pretty certain that the psychology of a sexual predator is such that "cross dressing to gain access to prey would be symbolically castrating themselves" - so it's not merely unlikely, it would be so rare as to make transgender people seem commonplace. In either case, the complaint about self-id makes the fundamental error of holding transgender women accountable as a group for the actions of predatory men - we already have laws for that purpose.
I must point out that while the current anti-transgender panic has been at full boil for the last 4 or 5 years (depending on where you look), transgender women have been safely using "female only" spaces for decades without there being problems.
Prisons and Sport
There are areas of argument such as prisons and sport where I think any "erosion" has to be dealt with on an individual basis using appropriate policy instruments.
Sport
I have written about the issue of transgender women in sports many times on this blog. To put it kindly, absolute claims that "transgender women have huge advantages in sport" simply don't hold up to scrutiny, and further to that, there are significant public policy questions around the goals of sports and participation that need to be considered.
Absolute bans are, ill-informed policy that ultimately causes unnecessary harm without anywhere near enough evidence to justify the action. At so-called "elite" levels, there might be a case for highly individualized assessment but that has to be done on with respect to the individual athlete, and not simply on the basis of "belonging to a category of people".
When the last Canadian Census showed that 0.33% of the Canadian population was transgender (Statistics Canada, 2022), one can surmise that the numbers of transgender people participating in sport (especially organized sport) is vanishingly small - I doubt that in Alberta you could find more than a handful distributed around the organized sports, and I have seen no evidence that they are "dominating their sports" whatsoever.
Prisons and Incarceration
This is a thornier issue, and again I am going to argue that it has to be treated situationally. Inmates have to housed in a manner that is appropriate and reflects both their needs as well as the legitimate needs of those whom they would be housed with.
A blanket "transgender women must be housed in men's prisons" is simply creating an environment which would inevitably result on those prisoners becoming repeated victims of sexual assault, or forced to endure long periods held in isolation from other prisoners who actually would be dangerous to them.
On the other hand, transgender prisoners whose record includes violence against women need to be housed away from those they might victimize again. Now, here I have to raise additional questions because we have to recognize that there is such a thing as a female predator that victimizes other women, and how are they housed in the correctional system?
Individual characteristics also matter. Someone who has been socially and medically transitioned for a long period of time is a very different case than someone who is incarcerated shortly after beginning to transition (or begins transition while incarcerated). Those are different situations with legitimately different factors to be considered.
Again, remember that the numbers here are small. In a period covering 2018, 2019, and Q1 of 2020, Corrections Canada had a total of 99 transgender prisoners. This is a relatively tiny number and reasonably processed individually.
Given that the numbers of transgender people involved are very low, and the science around the key factors in both sport and criminal justice domains is at best limited, I argue that blanket approaches which do not consider the individual involved are sufficiently problematic that they in fact would cause harms that are not justified in the situation.
Closing Thoughts
Claimed harms from transgender women using "female only" gendered spaces really aren't borne out by actual evidence. Mostly, they boil down to emotional arguments that simply are fears whipped up by the anti-transgender lobby that simply have no real basis.
Blanket bans will have significant perverse consequences not merely for transgender individuals, but also for society at large. Those consequences have been observed before when specific populations are targeted for segregation and isolation, and the scope of those impacts is far greater and more corrosive than actual inclusion.
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