Reminds me of the police officer Diana Alastair on x pointing out the links no one likes to acknowledge any more. In full below for those not on x..
For anyone who doesn’t know, I’m a law enforcement officer with experience investigating both homicides and sex crimes. When I was a rookie in 2007, there was a clear understanding that crossdressing men in women’s spaces were often there for sexual reasons, and that if we were called to deal with one, he was to be trespassed from the premises if the owner/manager requested it (meaning criminal charges would be filed if he returned), and any women who were in the bathroom with him would be questioned to make sure they hadn’t been harassed or assaulted. After that, assuming no one had been assaulted and wanted to press charges, he would be released with a verbal warning to stay out of women’s bathrooms. When I started working sex crimes in 2015, it was still understood that crossdressers did it for sexual reasons, and common knowledge that transvestitic fetishism is often found in men who display other predatory sexual behaviors. (I would also estimate that roughly 50% of the hard drives containing child sexual abuse material that I had to go through in my time there also contained images or video of the hard drive’s (male) owner dressed in women’s or adult-sized toddler/infant clothing of some kind.) By the time I made Homicide in 2017, you could hear the first rumblings of the impending eruption of narcissism and delusion, if you were paying close attention. I wasn’t, but you know what they say about hindsight being 20/20. Between 2016 and 2018, I went to multiple law enforcement seminars and training events related to sexually motivated homicide, and from 2018-2020, I took classes in abnormal psych through a program my department has established with a local university. At the seminars and training events, if speakers or instructors discussed killers like BTK or Col. Russell Williams (both of whom were crossdressers), they would discuss the rest of the subject’s psychology and case file in depth, but skirt around the issue of their TF with a deliberately casual, deliberately brief comment not designed to invite further questions. When I tried to ask questions about the relationship between a killer’s TF and their crimes anyway (not out of TERFery; at the time, I knew basically nothing about the tactics or goals of the trans rights movement; I was interested only out of professional curiosity) I was either ignored or given the beginning of an answer that sometimes started out strong, but by the end of the reply had inevitably gone off the rails. No answer I was ever given had any real relationship to my actual questions. There was a very obvious reluctance to go beyond recounting the bones of this part of these particular cases, and very little discussion of the part TF played in the motive or the psychology of the killers, a reluctance that was especially obvious when discussing crimes with a clear sexual aspect. Certainly no instructor ever tried to draw a link between a suspect’s TF and elements of the crime. It was frustrating, but I chalked it up to personal feelings on the part of the speakers and instructors, who had clearly been uncomfortable discussing the subject - something I didn’t then understand, and which puzzled me. The link between TF and sexually inappropriate and/or predatory behavior has never been a secret in law enforcement circles, and it seemed odd for them to be so reluctant to discuss what was basically common knowledge. In my first abnormal sexual psych class, it was worse. Any time the subject came up, the professor would say something like “this is what we used to think, but recent studies have proven that TW are no threat to other women and that TF/AGP doesn’t exist/affects natal women also.” (He went back and forth on that one).