MN had a funny five & (well, rather more than five…) & this thread has only just reappeared in my threads I’m on.
Thank you to the posters who, in my absence, explained about the power differential between men & women meaning no, this isn’t just like a man complaining about a news piece on women; reiterated my point from the OP about this not being about a single article but the overarching narrative (&, you know, the harm said narrative does to vulnerable trans people); &c.
As I said in the OP, the quoted stats on hate crimes are inaccurate. That is because - feck knows why - “non-crime hate incidents” are rolled in with them. TRAs have made a concerted effort to report everything they conceivably could as a NCHI; & multiple police forces have actively encouraged this. We are talking “I saw a sticker I didn’t like” goes in along with someone being battered. No other group reports in that way; so while some NCHIs may be recorded, there aren’t many & unfortunately they’re often brought in as evidence when something does meet threshold as an indictable offence. Simply footnoting the stats would provide clarity; instead a meteoric rise is presented. The police are of course partly to blame there, but with their ideas on record keeping (why record an offender’s sex? let’s hand over all our addresses to dissident Republicans - our handful of Catholic Officers can just take their guns to Mass, it’ll be grand) that’s hardly a shocker.
The actual report admits their “over 600” respondents were mostly white males. So a minuscule unrepresentative sample - but they’ve still gone on to make recommendations on the basis of what they found out. They’ve made their own stats meaningless when they try to look at compounding factors eg disability - opening an initial survey more widely & then following up with those who ID’d as LGBTQ would have provided helpful comparative data & helped unpick which vulnerability (as it were) is at play. (Almost certainly would have provided a larger sample size, too.) The report authors utilise the highly offensive term “transmisogyny” - the clue is literally in the name - & not only do they for some reason drag in people with DSDs, they do so using the term “intersex” & give an inaccurate definition. The definition they provide is one used by TRAs to claim having PCOS makes one “intersex”. “Gender assigned at birth” is of course used incorrectly too 🙄
”We need to do more research because we didn’t make the best use of our funding this go round…” Maybe they could instead look at another vulnerable group, or anything else; & within that do ticky boxes at the start about your sex & if you have a gender identity. That way the experiences of the LGBTQ community can be captured within the research, which is important. Just as it’s important to try to capture as much of London’s hugely varied demographic as is possible.
In the introduction to the report, it says that research in 2022 “identified that certain transport users were at greater risk of victimisation than others”. One would naturally assume that this research is a result of those findings. No. If it were, this report would be about the “young people, women, BAME and disabled transport users [who] were at the greatest risk of victimisation”. You have to question how the decision was made not to focus on any of those groups; & indeed why the introduction contains a phrase that will, unless you have read the previous research, make you think LGBTQ people are at most risk of being victimised on public transport in London 🤨
Some of the report recommendations are excellent - notably, encouraging signposting by transport operators, the Met & BTP to specific resources for LGBTQ victims. But much of it they’ve had to stretch to make it about LGBTQ people. They’ve also already committed to measures like not leaving people stranded - it’s padding, basically. The ever-popular “everyone must swear allegiance to the progress pride flag” crops up, naturally. (No, it does not literally say that. Just my wee joke about the very clear subtext.) And I realise I have heavily stressed this point, but I am absolutely staggered by “yeah, we did this research instead of research into the groups we actually identified as most vulnerable; & now we want to do MORE research into this same group”.
(For anyone interested, London Travel Watch’s assorted research is available here & it is - unsurprisingly, given it comes from the Mayor’s office - quite a mixed bag. They’ve upped their out & design over the last couple of years, presumably, in part, because if you’re releasing that kind of report with a push for external people to read it you don’t want it looking like GCSE coursework.)