Guardian: increased hate crimes against transgender people

[PorcelinaV]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/05/record-rise-hate-crimes-transgender-people-reported-england-and-wales

The Home Office said the overall fall in the figures could be linked to interim guidance published last year which “may have led to greater scrutiny of the threshold of what constitutes a criminal offence of public fear, alarm or distress”.

However its report noted: “Transgender issues have been heavily discussed by politicians, the media and on social media over the last year, which may have led to an increase in these offences, or more awareness in the police in the identification and recording of these crimes.”

...

“These statistics show there has been an overall reduction in hate crimes recorded by police, and the numbers of sexual orientation, race and disability hate crimes all fell.

“Whilst the increase in transgender hate crime may be due to a genuine rise, the biggest driver is likely to be general improvements in police recording.”

Considering a woman was investigated for taking a picture of a sticker, you do have to wonder what the threshold of reporting a “hate crime” is.

My impression is violent blokes like to go for anyone who looks weird or different (provided they don't look too scary). In this regard like the bizarre parody of womanhood holding the flag in the picture probably isn't particularly sensible if you want to keep yourself safe - and I've noticed these crazy costumes are on the rise. If there was a big uptick in people walking the streets dressed as Smurfs you'd probably see a rise in "anti-Smurf hate crime". Meanwhile I shudder to think what would happen to a real woman out and about in such ridiculous get up.

I think you've proved the point. No one is being hateful here, yet you're defining the comments here as hateful.

That is the problem with hate crime, it's not well defined and as long as someone claims it is hateful it can be classified as such.

I could classify your comment as hateful, do you see the problem here?

@PaperWalkAndTalk are you being serious? No one is being hateful? Mocking and minimising the idea of transphobic and homophobic hate crimes.

I’m GC but find this thread really disturbing.

.....as they come?

Yes, I'm being serious. When you have policies whereby it is considered domestic abuse if a wife does not want her husband to spend all their money on a sex change, or that saying "a man is man" is consider hateful speech, then it is not mocking of minimising hate crime, it is showing how weak the classification of hate crime now is.

a gc woman was reported to the police because she took a photo of a gc sticker which was put over a trans privilege sticker. the police investigated it. Actually this should have been recorded as harassment of the gc woman but instead it was recorded as a hate crime. perhaps common sense prevailed and it didn't go into the stats but the police are allowing themselves to be used as a men's rights activists tools. that's why people are sharing concerns. what's hateful is misogy not being recognised as a crime.

to be clear, I am anti actual harassment and hate towards trans people. but saying a TW is not a woman is not hate and should not be recorded as a crime. I don't believe the stats are meaningful because the police are so misogynistic.

I think any "minimising" was probably aimed at the reliability of the statistics which even the Guardian article acknowledged issues.

I have no doubt that stories like the one in the BBC article do happen, and they are disgusting. As someone mentioned, some people will bully anyone that is an easy target or stands out. I hope for some karmic justice, because unfortunately people get away with that behaviour in our society.

I would like to see a definition of what constitutes hate crime. Something that hurts your feelings isn't a hate crime is if? It shouldn't be.

Telling a transwoman they're a man: Hate crime

Killing your daughter for being raped by a relative: Not a hate crime

Throwing acid on a woman's face because she defied you: Not a hate crime

Several high-profile cases within the past few years of police raping, sometimes killing random women with impunity: Not a hate crime

I could go on... so I will, just one more

Teenage girls gangraped by roving packs of entitled, disgusting scrotes: Not a hate crime, barely a regular one.

I think at this point, and I say this about my own country too, we need to organize women to check on each other, make rounds in our own roving packs. If one of us is fucked with, we all are.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hate-crime-england-and-wales-2022-to-2023

The report. I was amazed to find out they do seem to be talking about actual crimes, not “non crime hate incidents” which are so often lumped in with actual crimes for the sake of alarmism. (Acknowledging that we’ve seen examples of how chargeable offences can be manufactured out of thin air when certain protected characteristics start complaining.)

There are some alarming nuggets in that report - for example, targeting a disabled person simply because their disability makes them vulnerable is apparently not an anti-disability hate crime, so disabled people often think they’ve been victims of hate crime but cops disagree. And the most common outcome for hate crime cases is that the victim refuses to give evidence. It doesn’t say why but presumably due to intimidation - but I can’t help thinking that an explanation for that would be much more valuable than this meaningless census of criminality.

I was agnostic about hate crime laws but after reading this report I strongly suspect they create useless and counterproductive bureaucracy which misdirects resources and does not help police effectiveness.

At the point I saw the video from a woman who is black and lesbian explain that she had approached the police to report being racially abused, (quite extremely) and abused on the grounds of her homosexuality, and not only could tick all the boxes of perceiving she had been offended but had video evidence of both, and the police shrugged and said they weren't interested because those hate offenses had been committed by male people present in the name of TQ+ identities (and in part because she was in a public place with a group of women defending their rights) -

I thought fuck this. I'm not taking anything seriously that is not equal and reciprocal. I agree, the whole hate crime thing is a lot of bollocks gesture politics, the kind of bullshit that Blair and co's government excelled at creating that just made a lot of paperwork and achieved bugger all except to make things a whole lot worse.

Me, neither. Are other crimes love" crimes?

And it's pretty meaningless if it includes calling a man "he".

It does depend how you define 'hate crime'; and and as we know the definition of that is and continues to be used in the most hair trigger ways. When everything that is disagreeable is termed hate than a lot of things are going to be deemed 'hateful'

There are always people coming on here to post about how much we supposedly "hate" trans identified people - even when all that is occuring is a discussion into the conflict of rights that is inherent in trans ideology, or pointing out the many varied reasons why people decide to 'transition'.

However, on an everyday level out on the street - obviously cross dressing men are now quite a common sight in our towns and cities - and inevitably the general public doesn't fail to notoce this. You will always, inevitably, get 'white van man' shouting comments from the window at traffic lights.

Whether or not these people think they 'pass' is another matter; or even if they identify as trans at all - but men in make-up and skirts etc is still an unusual sight and people do respond.

I'm going to download the data and take a closer look today, but it's worth noting that the highest proportions were 'public order offenses' and 'stalking and harassment'. It also includes criminal damage.
So that'd be misgendering, being insufficiently respectful on twitter and stickering.
Actual violent crime is a far, far smaller percentage and seems in line with what you'd see on sexual orientation.

I've been hate crime'd quite a few times, as happens in my identity group, but there was one time when it was punished. An older kid in class kept calling my dad a "prairie n-word," I was a green dirty handed monkey, I needed to decide if I was a man, he told me I liked girls bc I must have man parts. My mom was an Irish/Mexican maid and I missed school sometimes when she needed help, and he asked how much it cost for me to miss school to scrub his toilets. I had to wear secondhand clothes that were donated by the moms of girls at my school, and he told everyone. It continued for two years, constantly, and escalated to my kitten being hanged, the crows my dad and I were taming all shot with air guns and their heads twisted off, and a dog beaten to death.

I had NO social connections to this kid outside of being in a class with him, these things he did to me centered around the same abuse that was leveled against other mixed or non-white, non-straight kids, by a group of boys whose dads signed them up into the KKK as legacies when they were little. We were targeted because of what we are, not as a random or personal crime. It's a specific kind of crime that needs specific legislation, otherwise kids are charged with simple harassment, then assault, then theft, so on until they've escalated to killing the pets of minority kids and making some of them drop out of school. When you harass minority kids until they can't continue their education, that's an act of destruction against their community.

It would be interesting to know how many people this involved as well as how many incidents eg one person reporting several crimes. It’s quite obvious from SM that some people tend to report everything they deem hateful.

The power of the censor was one of my topic for a lecture at uni. It's one of the very few lectures I remember well and in detail.

My lecturer made a point of saying that he thought we were all leftie and we'd probably quite like to ban the Mail.

He said one day you will be grateful for the balance and protection it offers by having a different point of view.

And he said to be careful of the censors, and who controls the censors and what transparency there is of censors and what recourse the public has against censors.

He died more than ten years ago, at a fairly young age. Probably cos he smoked like a bloody chimney. He was a bit of an arse in some ways but I really liked him being he challenged how I thought at the time (I was something of a ban all the bad people on the internet when I was age 18).

And he wasn't wrong and it's stayed with me.

'Hate crime' is exactly the same. And ultimately it's either a crime or it's not. And we should be treated on that basis.

Thank you! The comments on this thread are horrible. Whatever happened to live and let live?

The crime of hurty words.

Oh the horror.

Saw this covered on the BBC news last night. The usual breathtaking bias with lots of coverage about transphobia (even when they then cut to an interview with a gay man about homophonic harassment) and a screenshot of a tweet saying trans people are not human, with a cockroach emoji. This OBVIOUSLY unacceptable and awful, but no mention at all of the tsunami of horrific, graphic, violent abuse that gets hurled at women who want to retain their right to single sex spaces, every single day. And the role that might play in entrenching opinions on this.

Thank you! The comments on this thread are horrible. Whatever happened to live and let live?

Does this live and let live you propose extend to women and girls?

@piesforever Why are you all being so hateful? Hate crime is literally a crime reported to the police and logged as such. Nobody is going to the police about toilets.

I believe Suzy/Eddie Izzard did. Reported two teenage girls for laughing at them (rich, middle aged, once very well known as a man) in a woman’s toilet. Young girls, in the right toilet for their sex. Who is the hater there do you think?
I am being careful with pronouns because misgendering can be a hate crime.

Was that recent, Meh? I hadn’t heard anything about it, I don’t think, though I haven’t been watching these boards as much recently.