Debunking False Stats On MTF Sexual & Physical Assault Rates

[CleopatraSelene]

I sometimes go on the UK trans reddit to see what the new 'evidence' they are brandishing is, and recently I saw several studies doing the rounds which give suspiciously high sexual & physical assault rates for MTFs. I thought I'd link them here to debunk- I checked & can't find them on previous threads, though I may have missed..

It’s not ‘minimising sexual violence against trans people by weaponising unconfirmable data’

We are disputing the analysis and presentation of the data, not minimising it.

Stop trying to pretend that exposing the lies about trans people is detrimental to women.

I don’t think there is any validity to the claim that men who identify as women are not ‘socially visible’.

They couldn’t be much more ‘socially visible’ if they tried.

'What their vulnerabilities do NOT mean is that they get put in with women'

Exactly. It is really important that studies are done so that informed decision making is prioritised over emotionally driven decision making that might be based on misinformation.

When sloppiness becomes replicated as that sound bite has been, it is not allowing 'informed' decision making.

I noticed at least one other paper linked that a vague comparison was again made to increase the significance that people should give the study. It referred to a comparison between people with transgender identities and people without transgender identities and was footnoted with three reference points. The comparison was that people with transgender identities were at higher risk than those without transgender identities. More of an 'of course this group is more at risk' type sentence but footnoted. I couldn't actually see the relevance of the three reference points and that point the author made. Then again, I could not get access to one of the three mind you. But the three references were not papers comparing people with transgender identities to people without a transgender identity. They were important papers, but not comparative ones.

It was just one sentence and it was not really relevant to the conclusion of that paper. But it was there.

When I saw the topic of the link, I had wondered why the OP had linked it. Then I saw this one sentence. It is this accepted confirmation biased repetition that this group of people are more at risk, or at higher risk than women or men that is the issue. The paper didn't need that sentence. The information in the paper was important and didn't need to be supported with any comparative vague reference. But that repeated messaging is harmful. It really is supporting that 'victim' aspect. No wonder some people with transgender identities feel under attack when there is this pervasive messaging that doesn't seem to be supported by fact when analysed.

Totally agree @BundleBoogie extremely visible. And vocal.
Trans identifying men are not 'average women' howse- far from it

Two points that stood out in the Williams Institute paper:

Transgender women and men had higher rates of violent victimization (86.1 and 107.5 per 1,000 people, respectively) than cisgender women and men (23.7 and 19.8 per 1,000 people, respectively).

So actual women have a higher rate of violent victimisation than actual men with a difference of 3.9 per 1,000.

When you look at ‘transwomen’ vs ‘transmen’, (obviously they transposed the sexes in these figures - another dishonest sleight of hand) the ‘transmen’ (also women) also report a higher rate of violent victimisation with a difference of 21.4. But it is significantly higher.

The big question, when these trans identifying females often hang out, fairly exclusively, in ‘trans’ circles putting themselves into vulnerable situations with often older men who identify as trans (with mental health issues and openly expressed sexual fetishes), so WHO is causing the far higher rates of abuse of these young women?

“One in four transgender women who were victimized thought the incident was a hate crime compared to less than one in ten cisgender women.”
This statement is also interesting. They must have different definitions of hate crime in the US as in the UK, women are not included under hate crime law so cannot report a hate crime against them. These men with mental health issues and an apparently high prevalence of narcissistic traits were far more likely to think that they were victims of a hate crime than women. So were these even hate crimes? If you only think something is a hate crime, that is not necessarily the same as it being a hate crime. Yet another sly and misleading statement. And that’s before we get into the female socialisation and conditioning mentioned above where women routinely experience all sorts of abuse and harassment and don’t bother to say anything because it’s so horrendously common.

Headline summaries of this study seem to have missed the bigger picture - the abnormally high level of abuse suffered by (predominantly) young women (identifying as trans) who hang out fairly exclusively with older men openly expressing sexual fetishes. Are we surprised?

Truth has a way of slipping out despite their best efforts.

I agree instances of thus are disgustingly high.

But when studies use 'sexual assault' aren't they generally referring to rape?

I expect they believed the hate crime was not due to being 'women' but due to being trans, so it would've been recorded as transphobic not misogynistic.

There was a weird thread I'll link to here where the poster apparently made a thread on here with all these studies. It was deleted due to their 'goading'. They claim that they weren't (ofc) and that it was deleted due to MNetters apparently not being able to refute the studies.

Thus seems highly unlikely given that as we're see they're very easy to debunk. Most obviously, they're all American not about the UK.

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1dzj88t/so_i_left_a_post_on_mums_net/

Tbf I think in their personal lives probably a lot of TW do try to conceal that they are....usually men luckily realise but not always..

Are they? Without it being clear or traceable back to a reference that clarifies, I am not making assumptions.

In fact, here is a definition from rape crisis. “Sexual assault happens when someone either touches another person in a sexual manner without consent or makes another person touch them in a sexual manner without consent.”

This is what I have always believed it was.

https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/types-of-sexual-violence/what-is-sexual-assault/#:~:text=Sexual%20assault%20happens%20when%20someone,someone's%20genitals%2C%20breasts%20or%20bottom.

It's interesting that the words 'four times as likely..' is now a warning that the piece it appears in is unreliable.

It's like 'intersex people are as common as redheads' - a big flashing red light that the writer hasn't done their own research and is just copying and pasting from a source that copied and pasted from a source.....that copied and pasted from a 2000 source so discredited that even the original author, Anne Fausto-Sterling, admitted it was mistaken.

The size of the transgender population experiencing victimization in the survey (approximately 0.1%) is concerning. US surveys suggest that overall the population above 13 is approximately 1% trans identifying.

If the trans and non-trans populations had similar rates of victimization then you would expect to see this reflected in the size of the two populations i.e for 435,000 non trans people you would expect to see 4,350 trans people. The survey records about 10x less than this.

I'm not that sure why this would be but two possibilities are

• trans people are 10x less likely to report victimization
• trans people are 10x less likely to experience victimization

The survey then looks at the two populations and their rate of reporting in isolation. The comparison of these two rates gives the four to one head line whilst ignoring that the trans population is 10x smaller than expected

A better summary of the report might be

Trans people are ten times less likely to report victimization than the rest of the population . Those trans people that do report victimization report it at four times the rate of the rest of the population

Equally, as you can't tell if it is reporting or experiencing this could be true

Trans people are ten times less likely to experience victimization than the rest of the population . Those trans people that do report victimization report it at four times the rate of the rest of the population