"Trans women are perverts"; or, how to lie with statistics
Posted: Tue Mar 21, 2023 3:31 pmHere is an infographic I've seen making the rounds lately:
Transphobes are sharing it as a justification for anti-trans legislation. And it looks real, doesn't it? Shocking, but if it's true then they have a point yeah?
Except its bullshit, and even if it weren't they don't have a point.
Item 1: the offense stats for men here are insanely low. Far far far lower than reality. For instance, only 1.6% of rape cases in England and Wales lead to a charge: https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... -and-wales
and likely more than 80% of rapes go unreported:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/c ... 61636.html
That meshes also with the evergreen study mentioned here:
https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2 ... predators/
where in an anonymized survey of 1882 male college students, 6% admitted to rape and 4% admitted to being serial rapists. Even granted that male college students are probably more likely to offend than the bulk of men, that is a far higher rate than less than the 0.04% rate given by the infographic.
Item 2: even if the offense rate for "men identifying as women" is 100% true and accurate, it's still a less than 0.2% rate of offense. In what world is it okay to legislate against an entire minority population of 48,000 people (note: this number also seems too small but whatever) because only 99.8% of them are law-abiding people? That is some straight up Nazi shit. If someone said this about a racial minority ("Well 0.2% commit violent crimes so we should pass legislation against all of them"), people would call them a bigot, and rightly.
TL;DR don't be fooled when transphobes post stats like this. If they're not cherry-picking the data, they're lying about the implications.
Transphobes are sharing it as a justification for anti-trans legislation. And it looks real, doesn't it? Shocking, but if it's true then they have a point yeah?
Except its bullshit, and even if it weren't they don't have a point.
Item 1: the offense stats for men here are insanely low. Far far far lower than reality. For instance, only 1.6% of rape cases in England and Wales lead to a charge: https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... -and-wales
and likely more than 80% of rapes go unreported:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/c ... 61636.html
That meshes also with the evergreen study mentioned here:
https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2 ... predators/
where in an anonymized survey of 1882 male college students, 6% admitted to rape and 4% admitted to being serial rapists. Even granted that male college students are probably more likely to offend than the bulk of men, that is a far higher rate than less than the 0.04% rate given by the infographic.
Item 2: even if the offense rate for "men identifying as women" is 100% true and accurate, it's still a less than 0.2% rate of offense. In what world is it okay to legislate against an entire minority population of 48,000 people (note: this number also seems too small but whatever) because only 99.8% of them are law-abiding people? That is some straight up Nazi shit. If someone said this about a racial minority ("Well 0.2% commit violent crimes so we should pass legislation against all of them"), people would call them a bigot, and rightly.
TL;DR don't be fooled when transphobes post stats like this. If they're not cherry-picking the data, they're lying about the implications.
