Eye-opening Mrkhtake2 thread in response to Stonewall T-shirt

[arranfan]

The starting-point for the thread was the recent Stonewall T-shirt:

twitter.com/mrkhtake2/status/1040931947718078464

But Mrkhtake2 goes on to detail just why the assumptions around exceptional vulnerability of some groups are misplaced along with fears that their perspectives are not heard in mainstream media. (The tweets have links.)

They receive a disproportionate amount of funding, compared to other LGB groups

They've managed to get prison safeguarding rules changed, putting vulnerable women at risk

They are competing in women's sports and breaking records without the fairness of this being questioned

They are represented in political parties in a way that women could never dream to be. How many 20yo women have ever been in the same position as Lily Madigan?

They dictate policies in schools, using up valuable money in a system that can not afford it and where other children miss out on things that they need

When the proposed changes to the GRA were announced, only trans groups were invited to give evidence in the initial consultation. Women are only being listened to now after tirelessly campaigning for a right to have a voice.

hey are one of the safest demographics. In the past 10 years, 8 trans people have been murdered, compare that to the 180 women murdered last year alone

twitter.com/mrkhtake2/status/1041054892926885888

It's a handy rebuttal crib sheet in many ways!

hey are one of the safest demographics. In the past 10 years, 8 trans people have been murdered, compare that to the 180 women murdered last year alone

All shockingly good points. A minor quibble is that if the figures for trans people being murdered are being given for 10 years, then the same should be true for women, so proper comparison can be made.

Another quibble. If we are comparing murder rates then it has to be that: rates. Not actual numbers.

Strictly speaking the numbers get trickier because one (overall murders of trans people) is UK (tho' all were perpetrated in England) and the number for women is England and Wales.

Helpful post with more analysis and figures: transcrimeuk.com/2017/11/16/theres-no-evidence-trans-people-are-murdered-at-higher-rates-than-the-general-population-in-the-uk/

Velella there have been past threads on here and it's quite difficult, honestly, to compare, but there's certainly nothing at all to suggest that trans people are at more at risk.

I think the main lines of attack are:

• all the trans kids will kill themselves if you don't chop off their breasts
• nasty men will beat up transwomen if you force them to go into men's toilets
• transwomen will kill themselves if you don't let them in the men's toilets

The murder stuff is just a peripheral piece of propaganda to be wheeled out on the ridiculous 'Trans day of Remembrance', that, absurdly, many councils in random towns in Britain are now celebrating.

The trouble with calculating the rate is that it's not clear how many trans people there are. Transactivists state wildly different figures depending on their motive.

The transcrime article linked above discusses the different estimates, describes the one they adopt and argues:

These crude, estimated figures would appear to indicate that the homicide rate among both a high and a low population estimate of UK trans people is lower than the 10 per million homicide rate for the general population of England & Wales. The trans homicide rate appears to be one tenth of the general homicide rate if we assume 1% of the population is trans, or half the rate if 0.2% of the population is trans. ...

But these estimates of the homicide rate don’t take into account whether there are trans homicides we don’t know about and aren’t documented in the TMM project, or indeed whether those trans population estimates are a) accurate or b) constant at ~1% (or 0.2%) of the population over the decade. ...

what happens if we assume that 1% of the 500-600 homicides that occur in England & Wales each year were, in fact, trans homicides. So if 650,000 (1%) of the population is transgender, therefore we should expect there to be 5 or 6 homicides of trans people every year, rather than the observed 0.7 per year.

Someone on an earlier thread pointed out that actually, there were not 8 murdrers of transwomen in the past 10 years- two of the crimes initially investigated as murder were later ruled to be accidental or non-suspicious.

Of the remaining 6 murders:
3 were sex workers
2 were killed for financial gain
1 was pushed under a train by another transwoman

So none of those crimes can plausibly be called transphobic hate crimes.

And there was 12 murders committed by transgender individuals(male bodied) from 2008 - 2017.

Mrkhtake2 is great. I particularly love, how she dissects chromosomes and the sex binary, that TRA always try to make this grand spectrum. Oh boy, Mrkhtake2 sets them straight, like only Mrkhtake2 can...

So none of those crimes can plausibly be called transphobic hate crimes.

You wouldn't know from the constant online-barrage of 'you TERFs are literally killing us'.

SandyDrawsBadly's response to the t-shirt made me laugh

pbs.twimg.com/media/DnFATiKWwAALxLn.jpg:large

I was surprised by the funding that Mrkhtake2 highlighted.

all the trans kids will kill themselves if you don't chop off their breasts

The facts just don't support that.

My back of a matchbox calculation;
No. of females referred to Tavistock over the last decade ~ 5000-7000
No. of female suicides (10-24 yo) over last decade ~1000-1500

If intervention from Tavistock prevented even a tiny proportion of those YP from taking their own lifes, it would have had a massive impact on the suicide rate. Yet the number of young girls dying from suicide hasn't varied significantly over a decade.(approx 100-150 a year)

Can I add that I am not making light of the suicide statistics as I would like nothing more than to see them reduced for all YP (male and female) But the fact remains, there is no evidence that the £millions spent on gender treatments, medications and counselling are having any impact at all.

Further to the rhetoric about suicide, self-harm etc. - I was struck by Michael Controy's phrasing:

Are you cool with young girls carving the patriarchy into their flesh, binding & cutting, because men like us articulate, through the collective socialisation of our masculinity, an environment in which they know femaleness is a permanent target?

twitter.com/MichaelConroy68/status/1041763739371032578

If intervention from Tavistock prevented even a tiny proportion of those YP from taking their own lifes, it would have had a massive impact on the suicide rate. Yet the number of young girls dying from suicide hasn't varied significantly over a decade.(approx 100-150 a year)

Can I add that I am not making light of the suicide statistics as I would like nothing more than to see them reduced for all YP (male and female) But the fact remains, there is no evidence that the £millions spent on gender treatments, medications and counselling are having any impact at all.

YY. I have also looked into CYP suicide figures as a whole and this supposed high trans child suicide rate is simply not evidenced. "Suicide related internet use" plays a considerable role though so it's important to be responsible when discussing suicide. Unlike most TRAs.

Bumping this as a link to the disproportionate funding for trans organisations v. other LGB groups. E.g., for CIN's grant-funded projects in 2017, 30% of the funding went to groups such as Mermaids, while 70% went to LGBT in general.

twitter.com/mrkhtake2/status/1041054892926885888

Queue jumping demands for NHS care. There was some revolting tweet about delays to "top surgery" because women with cancer were being given priority. Ditto complaints about a year's wait for Tavistock referrals - and hence the need for some dodgy on-line GP service in Wales.

Of my DC was in pain from an injury, taking the sort of pain killers you are only supposed to take for 10 days, and needed surgery. The NHS wait would have been four years.

Just to say that Prof. Michael Brooks has done a very helpful FOI request to establish a verifiable estimate for suicides in trans-identified teenagers.

What is the evidence on actual suicide amongst trans-identified young people in Britain? I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the NHS Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), which serves patients aged under 18 in England and Wales. It provided information from 2016 to August 2018. One patient committed suicide (in 2017) and two attempted suicide. In addition, two patients on the waiting list committed suicide (in 2016 and 2017) and two attempted suicide. This makes a total of three suicides in two and a half years. Each case is a tragedy for the young person and for their family and friends. But the number is hard to square with the claims of Susie Green and transmum.

In sum, we know that four trans-identified children committed suicide in England and Wales since about 2008: one in 2017, two in 2016, and one apparently before 2014. To put these tragedies in perspective, the number of patients seen each year by GIDS increased from 700 in 2013/14 (when reporting began) to 2,700 in 2017/18. Figures for patients on the waiting list are not routinely reported, but we know they numbered 1,652 at the end of 2017/18.

www.transgendertrend.com/suicide-by-trans-identified-children-in-england-and-wales/

I think those figures also concluded that while the suicide risk was higher generally in that age group if the person was trans, the risk was significantly higher still if the person was anorexic, or had depression. It was by no means The Big And Hugely Different Factor making it an emergency needing radically different treatment to any other factor.

And we're still not rushing anorexic kids to slimming world and feeding them diet pills to try and treat their body dysphoria.

I missed this thread first time. Thanks for reposting arran