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Ask almost any politician any question about gender identity — even if it’s specifically about women’s bodies or women’s rights — and you will inevitably hear the following sentence with minimal variation.
“What we must remember is that the trans community is one of the most marginalised, abused and vulnerable in society.”
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In his much-mocked answer to a question about whether it’s bigoted to say only women have a cervix, Labour leaderSir Keir Starmersaid: “We need to bear in mind that the trans community are amongst the most marginalised and abused communities.”
Asked to give his thoughts on Kemi Badenoch’s reported comments that LGBT activism has gone from wanting freedom to marry who you want, to men wanting to use women’s bathrooms, London MayorSadiq Khanreplied: “The trans community is one of the most vulnerable in our society.”
Liberal Democrat leaderSir Ed Davey, presumably on his own accord, even tweeted that “The trans community is one of the most discriminated against in the UK” in order to condemn a story that the government was unlikely to introduce self ID in order to protect women’s spaces.
It is a shield, provided by their advisors, behind which they cower, and because it rarely receives pushback from informed journalists, it has the magical effect of shutting down the discussion before it even gets started. That’s why politicans love it. It’s the UK equivalent to the“thoughts and prayers”catechism recited by American politicians after every mass shooting.
There’s only one problem with it. It’s not true. It’s not even remotely true.
Let’s begin with the clearest indicator of the extent to which a community is“marginalised and abused”: the murder rate of those within it. Because there is no stable definition of what constitutes a“trans person”, there is no standardised method for recording the deaths of trans people across the UK. However, we know that there have beenjust eight reported murdersof people who defined themselves as transgender, transsexual or cross-dressers in the UK since reporting began in 2008. Even trans organisationTransrespect, which includes people who havecommitted suicideandpeople whose death was originally and erroneously treated as suspiciousin their numbers for“murdered” victims,says the number from 2008 to 2020is eleven.
Note that the UK is not a European anomaly — in Germany there hasn’t been a murder of a trans person since 2008, while 26 countries in Europe have reported no murders of trans people for the entire period.
Even though we’ve seen a sharp rise in the number of people who identify as transgender in the last few years, a trans person hasn’t been murdered in the UK fornearly three yearsand there are, for example, no reportseverof a trans person in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland being murdered.
Moreover, not one of even the eleven people Transrespect says were murdered, were killed due to“transphobia”. The victim in each case was typically murdered by a male sexual partner due to drugs or money issues. None were killed by a woman — and one was killed by aman who identifies as a woman.
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Of the five monitored strands that the police record as hate crimes, the transgender category has, every year, and by some distance, seen theleastnumber of“hate crimes” against it. In fact, religion — the next-lowest — saw nearly three times as many incidents in the last recording year.
Continues: thecritic.co.uk/neither-marginalised-abused-nor-vulnerable/