Anti-Transgender Hate Arguments

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.  

References

Dhejne, C., Lichtenstein, P., Boman, M., Johansson, A. L., Långström, N., & Landén, M. (2011). Long-term follow-up of transsexual persons undergoing sex reassignment surgery: cohort study in Sweden. PloS one, 6(2), e16885.

MacDonald, S.F., Smith, A., Cram, S., Garrel, S., & Derkzen, D. (2022). Examination of Gender Diverse Offenders. Correctional Service of Canada.

Schilt, K., & Westbrook, L. (2015). Bathroom battlegrounds and penis panics. Contexts, 14(3), 26-31.

Statistics Canada (2022). Filling gaps in gender diversity data in Canada. Retrieved July 15, 2026 from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220427/dq220427b-eng.htm

Charter Challenges Of An Anti-Transgender Law

This is part of a series on potential paths of legal challenge for anti-transgender laws in Canada: 

1. Anti-Transgender Laws Are Jim Crow Laws
2. Legal Challenges of an Anti-Transgender Law

In the first post of this series, I claimed that anti-transgender laws are in many respects about segregation and humiliation much like the racist Jim Crow Laws were.  Yes, I realize that the US legal environment is quite different from Canada's - the point here is to draw a comparison that I think is broadly understood by most. 

In this post, I will explore several avenues through which the law can in fact be challenged, both in the presence of, and in the absence of, the invocation of the NotwithStanding Clause (S33).  

Anti-Transgender Laws Are "Jim Crow" Laws

This is part of a series of posts sketching out legal paths for challenging anti-transgender laws in Canada.

1. Anti-Transgender Laws Are Jim Crow Laws
2. Charter Challenges of an Anti-Transgender Law

Laws do not exist in a vacuum - the cleverest of legal arguments are often decoupled from the human experience and day to day lives of people.  Therefore, laws must be understood in the context of the society in which they exist, as well as the legal frameworks in place. 

"Jim Crow" laws were laws passed in various states to create a segregation between white people and people of colour in the United States.  These were the laws that forced black people to sit at the back of the public transit bus, or required them to use specific bathrooms (sound familiar?) or drinking fountains.  They also enabled businesses to refuse service to people based on such characteristics. 

I would hope, that in today's world, such laws are seen as the injustices they are - laws designed to target people based on characteristics - humiliating, segregating, and ultimately criminalizing their existence.  In today's Canada, S15 of The Charter specifically prohibits that kind of legislation.  

Anti-transgender laws are, in this writer's opinion, very much the "new Jim Crow" laws.  Largely they are based on ginned up fears of the "dangers" that the targeted group represents for society.  I'm going to walk through why these laws should be invalidated in Canada, and I will do so by deriving a possible test that could be used to objectively identify a "Jim Crow" law, regardless of whom is targeted. 

About Those "Violent" Trans People

Over at The Western Standard, flag bearer for their anti-transgender propaganda Christopher Oldcorn wrote a column titled "The Transgender Shooter Epidemic - When Ideology Turns Violent". (Again, I'm not going to link to the article, I will provide screenshots of it at the end of this column. 

Mr. Oldcorn subtitles his column as "demanding honest discussion".  So, let's take him at his word for now.  

Well, Mr. Oldcorn, that's nice - you have a list of mass shootings where the perpetrators were transgender.  So what?  That's a handful of events over multiple years - the vast majority of mass shootings are carried out by cisgender, white, males.  Are you also advocating for an "honest discussion" of those events, or is it just about the transgender people? 

Oh, I see - even living with someone who is transgender is dangerous now, is it?  Oh, and watch out for those Furries - that's just one step removed from being transgender, isn't it? 

"... connected to a specific ideology" - that's quite a loaded phrase.  Except what Mr. Oldcorn is referring to is a political canard dreamed up by the political right - specifically "gender ideology".  I've argued repeatedly that gender ideology is largely a straw man construct that the right wing fills with all of their fears, misconceptions and ignorance about transgender people.  Mr. Oldcorn's version of gender ideology contains a specific fear that transgender people are "mentally unstable".  

What he is doing, of course, is whipping up the old bogeyman that anyone who experiences mental health concerns is "unstable" (and therefore "dangerous").  

Here is where I would start with insisting that Mr. Oldcorn provide citations to support his claims, and more specifically to spell out in detail what he means by "other serious mental health conditions", because he's being extremely broad here and making some inferences that may or may not be supported by his claims. 

For example, while we are aware that anxiety and depression occur at elevated rates among transgender people, but we also know that when those same people are treated with kindness and respect (including having access to gender affirming medical care), that concerns around suicide drop off significantly (Allen, Dodd, Moser, & Knoll, 2026).  (See how easy it is to provide actual evidence to support your claims, Christopher?)

We already know that when you start with the premise that the person's stated gender identity is valid, that things work a whole lot better.  But, let's go a little further here, because mental health concerns are much more complex than Mr. Oldcorn's simplistic view of them is.  For example, Mr. Oldcorn implies that if someone says they are transgender that no attention is given to other comorbid mental health conditions is given.  This is simply false.  

Gender Affirming Care (GAC) is about dealing with the experiences of someone's gender dysphoria.  If a particular individual's anxiety or depression symptoms are driven by their gender dysphoria (either in whole or in part), then yes, there is a reason to expect that GAC will alleviate those symptoms to some extent.  However, anxiety or depression are often more complex and driven by multiple factors in the person's life.  So, yes, there are certainly reasons that you would address those issues concurrently with providing GAC.  Unfortunately, Mr. Oldcorn seems to be stuck in the idea that you deal with these things "one at a time", and in his apparent way of thinking, you deal with gender last (because ... reasons?)

Further, Mr. Oldcorn wants us to think that there's an "epidemic" of transgender violence going around.  There isn't - even if I add up all of these cases, they still don't even add up to a drop in the bucket of mass shootings when you add in those conducted by straight, white, cisgender males.  Worse, Mr. Oldcorn has fallen into making a correlation fallacy.  In his argument, the shooters were transgender, and therefore that was the reason for their actions.  Using that same logic, should we not be extremely concerned about cisgender men who are in possession of firearms - after all they are by far the most common perpetrators of mass shootings?  

The tell on the dishonesty of Oldcorns argument is that he hasn't provided a single shred of evidence that tells us that these events had anything at all to do with the shooter's gender identity beyond coincidence.  

Of course Oldcorn has to pull out questions about the characteristics of the victims.  As if mass shooters are picking out targets based on beliefs and ideology.  Again, Mr. Oldcorn might want to spend some quality time looking at mass shooting cases and the motives of the shooters.  

I am not going to speculate on what drove any one person to violence here.  The reality is that every story is unique.  We should strive to understand the broad picture of what is going on that provokes mass shootings, rather than grasping at straws.  As I pointed out earlier, if Mr. Oldcorn is so concerned about transgender shooters, where is his concern about cisgender male shooters who are by far the vast majority of shooters. 

To the best of my knowledge, there is no clinical evidence that supports the idea that transgender identity is in any meaningful way connected to a person becoming violent.  Without more substantive evidence, all Mr. Oldcorn seems to be doing is making a supposition - which really isn't terribly useful.  

Further, one might want to consider the barrage of hate being directed at the transgender community overall, whether that is ill-informed columns like Mr. Oldcorn's which insinuate things about the transgender community that simply don't make any sense, street pastors who spread fear and ignorance about transgender people, or legislatures who choose to attack the transgender community because they make a convenient target to attack that throws a bit of "red meat" to a voter base that demands such.  

While it seems unlikely that the hate itself is a direct cause of the actions of a handful of shooters who happen to be transgender, it does speak to a broad pattern of public hostility towards a small group that is poorly understood.  Perhaps Mr. Oldcorn would like to reflect on the impact of his "oh-so-earnest" protestations that he "just wants a conversation" before he writes his next anti-transgender column. 

References

Allen, L. R., Dodd, C. G., Moser, C. N., Knoll, M. M. (2026) Changes in Suicidality among Transgender Adolescents Following Hormone Therapy: An Extended Study. Journal of Pediatrics 289.  

Appendix - Original Column

This column was published on February 17, 2026 and captured from the Western Standard's website on February 19, 2026.  

Correlation Fallacy and the Tumbler Ridge Tragedy

Yesterday, a person in Tumbler Ridge, BC went into the high school and shot a large number of people, killing 6 at the school, and injuring dozens more.  This is after they had shot and killed two family members in their home. 

Today, we learned that the shooter was a young transgender woman who had dropped out of high school a few years ago.  Predictably, our friends over at The Western Standard jumped on this to argue that somehow transgender identity is therefore intrinsically dangerous. (I won't link to material I consider overt hate literature - a series of screen copies will be provided at the end of this which will contain the offending column).  

The writer, Christopher Oldcorn, has been carrying the "anti-transgender banner" for Western Standard since at least 2022, possibly earlier.  His working thesis here seems to be "well, because the shooter was transgender, clearly gender affirming care doesn't work", or something to that effect.