Bang! to Rights
The weaponising of prison statistics for anti-trans propaganda
Content warning: discussion of statistics for rape and other sexual offences. Also transphobia, antisemitism/Nazism, racism, Islamophobia (though not in specific or graphic detail, and all after the introductory ‘nutshell’ section below).
In a nutshell…
There are countless examples of “gender-critical” (i.e. anti-trans) activists citing prison statistics for transgender people, as part of their campaign to oppose trans rights. Their false argument is that:
a) these stats show that trans people are disproportionately criminal
b) they should therefore be stripped of their existing rights (e.g. use of gendered spaces) and/or denied further rights such as self-declared legal gender recognition.
This is a fundamentally malicious and bogus argument:
- it is fearmongering and smearing the innocent majority of a group based on the crimes of a handful of its members; a propaganda technique applied to marginalised groups throughout history;
- it has no credible moral, ethical or legal basis; human rights aren’t dependent on the crime stats for a minority group, just as they aren’t dependent on whether you live in a ‘high-crime postcode’; the vast majority are law-abiding even from the worst possible angle on the data;
- some of the rights they want to remove (legal gender recognition under the Gender Recognition Act 2004) are unrelated to crime, safety or gendered spaces;
- it is a classic “won’t somebody think of the women and children?!” moral panic, often using arguments like “even one case is too many, can’t be too careful!” which are deployed highly selectively to deny rights only to the minority group, not to everyone else;
- in many cases the statistics they use are irrelevant, selective, biased, decontextualised, misinterpreted and presented deceptively;
- these often aren’t even actually crime stats — they are imprisonment stats, which is not the same thing at all when you are trying to claim that a group is “inherently” more criminal; the connection between crime and punishment is tenuous and complex…
- …and marginalised groups often have much higher rates of incarceration due to systemic bias in every stage of the justice system, and wider society; one cannot take such numbers at face value without adopting (e.g.) blatantly racist beliefs. Prison stats can (and do) vary dramatically (e.g. due to changes in policing), demolishing the idea that they measure “inherent” qualities of a group.
History of hate
The reason that anti-trans groups focus on crimes, particularly sex crimes, is obviously to fear-monger and dehumanise, and justify discrimination, under the age-old pretence of “protecting women and children”.
George Lakoff, professor emeritus of linguistics, writes:
“What is hate speech?
…Hate speech attributes to that class of people certain highly negative qualities taken to be inherent in members of the class…
The method of defamation typically includes:
Salient exemplars — that is, using highly rare and very ugly individual examples that have been sensationalized by the media and taking them as applying to the whole class.”
There is a long history of this propaganda tactic against marginalised groups. Notoriously, the German tabloid Der Stürmer targeted Jews from 1923 onwards by relentlessly reporting their crimes (or alleged crimes, regardless of verifiable evidence), particularly alleged sex crimes against “Aryan women and girls”, or “blood libel” (ritual murder) crimes.
Der Stürmer also specifically targeted Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Institute for Sexual Research, which was later attacked by the Nazis and its library publicly burned, destroying much of the early research into trans people and their medical transition.
Similar tactics continue to be used against Muslims by the far-right, by focusing exclusively on crimes committed by Muslims (or people assumed to be Muslim due to ethnicity), compiling collages of mugshot photos, and focusing on very specific crimes where a particular ethnicity appears to be over-represented (particularly “grooming gangs”), carefully ignoring categories where there’s no disparity or where white offenders are over-represented, or misrepresenting the evidence.
The same tactics are repurposed against trans people: compiling collages of mugshots (sometimes even cis criminals who were supposedly cross-dressing), and publishing lists of crimes by trans women (and sometimes cis women falsely assumed to be trans). This forms part of a wider “groomer” moral panic against LGBTQ+ people.
Whilst these crude tabloid tactics continue on a daily basis, exploiting statistics rather than individual cases is a slightly more subtle approach, providing a figleaf of apparent ‘reason’ and ‘objectivity’.
Lying with Statistics
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”
— origin unclear, popularised by Mark Twain, who attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli
If you think that prison stats are relevant to the human rights of any minority group, you need to explain why your argument is any different from that of white supremacists in the US, who use the slogan “13/52".
As explained here by the ADL, this is a racist dogwhistle:
“…a shorthand reference to racist propaganda claims by white supremacists against African-Americans to depict them as savage and criminal in nature.
…the number 13 refers to the purported percentage of the U.S. population that is African-American. The number 52 refers to the alleged percentage of all murders committed in the U.S. that are committed by African-Americans.”
The rate of incarceration for Black Americans is six times higher than for white Americans overall, and twelve times higher in some States, they receive more serious charges, higher bail, fewer plea bargains, and sentences almost 20% longer for equivalent cases. Indigenous people in Canada make up less than 5% of the population yet 50% of the women in prison — ten times higher than expected. Similar factors are seen in Australia.
In the UK, 3% of the population are black, but make up 18% of “stop & search” records (6x over-represented), 13% of prisoners (4x) and 32% of child prisoners (10x). A recent study commissioned by the Crown Prosecution Service found they are charged significantly more often for comparable arrests.
If you think prison rates indicate “inherent” criminality and justify curtailing human rights, you logically cannot wash your hands of the racist “13/52" narrative above. If you instead agree that systemic bias, discrimination and poverty can cause these massive disparities, then you cannot use prison rates to justify disadvantaging other marginalised groups. Beyond trans people, LGB people in the US are three times as likely to be incarcerated. Some studies find that lesbian and bi women are as much as 10x over-represented in prison numbers.
[Some transphobes deny that trans people are marginalised at all, sometimes even claiming they are privileged over cis people. This is so ludicrous it barely deserves consideration, but see evidence in employment, healthcare, education and crime, for example, along with the constant anti-trans slant in much of the mainstream media]
The argument above applies even if the statistics are technically “correct”, because it relies on decontextualising these numbers to ignore the centuries of systemic racism underpinning them.
“Lying with statistics” is a well-known phrase precisely because one can be dishonest without actually fabricating the numbers; decontextualising is just one of many deceptive techniques. We will explore more in the examples below (a mixture of prison, conviction and prosecution stats).
The “Swedish Study”
“Gender Criticals” (GCs) often cite the so-called “Swedish Study” by Cecilia Dhejne et al to claim that trans women have “male pattern offending” (i.e. a tendency to violent crime, rape etc). This misrepresentation is dealt with concisely here by Gemma Stone, here in Parliamentary evidence by Ruth Pearce, and very thoroughly here by jane fae, but in summary:
The author herself has repeatedly debunked this claim, stating that the “male pattern” disappeared in more recent data as poverty and social stigma fell:
for the latter group (1989–2003), differences in mortality, suicide attempts and crime disappear. This means that for the 1989 to 2003 group, we did not find a male pattern of criminality.
Note again that these are rates of conviction not rates of crime and are subject to all the biases discussed earlier.
And astoundingly, the “male pattern criminality” analysis was based on just 8 events between 1973 and 2003 (30 years!), none of which could have been rapes by the UK definition. Statistically this is incredibly weak.
As an aside, it was discovered that the “evidence” submitted to Parliament by GC campaigners on this study was plagiarised.
MoJ 2017: the proportion of sex offences
One of the stats frequently cited was obtained by Fair Play for Women (an anti-trans hate group) from the Ministry of Justice via a Freedom of Information Request. It disclosed the number of known trans prisoners (125), and the number convicted of sex offences (60). The raw data are not in dispute, but many of the interpretations of them (e.g. “Half of all transgender prisoners are sex offenders!!”) are misleading, as fact-checked by the BBC and the Bent Bars project, and explained here by Rebecca Gellman, because:
- The data are incomplete — we don’t know the true totals. The survey only counts prisoners who have had a formal case conference (and do not have a Gender Recognition Certificate);
- These are likely to be prisoners serving longer sentences, so the data are skewed toward more serious offences;
- Proportions of the prison population are largely meaningless for drawing conclusions about the entire population (more on that later).
Another minor point is that prison stats (rather than actual crime stats) are skewed by length of sentence. We’ve already seen that marginalised groups are charged more severely and receive longer sentences for the same crime, which means you’ll count more prisoners at any given moment, for the same number of actual crimes.
Jailed for serious offences!
Articles in outlets such as The Telegraph and The Daily Mail complain that “70 per cent of transgender prisoners are in for sex offences or violent crimes”.
OK? If we’re going to jail anyone, surely it should be for serious offences against the person? What would the “correct” percentage be?!
Naturally none of the articles compare against the percentage for inmates overall, which is (depending on exactly which categories you include) about 65%. Barely any difference at all. Wonder why they didn’t mention that?
This percentage is presented as a reason that trans women should not be detained in women’s jails. Except that they already aren’t, if they’ve committed sexual or violent offences, as The Mail’s article later admits.
Even the well-known anti-trans source interviewed by The Mail then says that “transgender people are not inherently violent and that the vast majority live crime-free lives”
436 women charged with rape
According to the Crown Prosecution Service, 436 individuals recorded as women were charged with rape between April 2011 and March 2018.
Transphobes seized upon this data to claim that all of these alleged crimes must have been by trans women, because in UK law rape requires a penis (Note: there is an equivalent offence, in the very next section of the relevant law, of Assault by Penetration, carrying the same maximum sentence, which does not require a penis).
However, this is both wildly implausible, and flatly untrue: because another law (Accessories and Abettors Act 1861, and equivalent in Scotland) is also in force, and The Times in particular eventually had to print a correction:
So cis women can be (and are) charged with rape. When West Midlands police checked their rape cases, they were all cis females charged with rape as an accessory, not trans women. Further detailed analysis by jane fae can be found here, and revisited more concisely here.
The 2015 spike in women’s prosecutions
Starting around 2015/2016 there was a jump in the number of women prosecuted for sexual offences, which GCs have alleged is due to trans women self-identifying, and being recorded as female criminals.
Mallory Moore analysed this claim, and found that:
- Police forces started recording under self-identified gender long before the jump, and there was no spike or increase at the time;
- The jump is due to “sexual activity” crimes, usually crimes relating to grooming activity towards a minor — women seem to have simply not been prosecuted at all for these, before 2015!
Exploiting census data
One of the difficulties with discussing statistics for trans people in the UK was the lack of reliable population numbers. When the 2021 Census collected these data for the first time, trans advocates predicted that transphobes would misuse them for propaganda. And so it came to pass…
The following image has been circulated recently by anti-trans accounts (along with various others of similar intent):
Firstly, the title is misleading — this is based on prison data, not crime data, with all of the accompanying problems discussed already. We’ve already seen that incarceration rates for marginalised groups can be ten times higher than the baseline.
Conversely, criminologists find that cis women are treated more leniently than men. It is estimated that there may be as many at 64,000 woman paedophiles in the UK, with reports rising recently to around 600 cases per year, yet only 103 woman sex offenders in total are in prison at the time of this dataset. Studies in the US show that 21% of child sexual abuse is committed by females, despite them only being 1% of the sexual offenders in prison. Surveys indicate prevalence rates of female sexual offenders six times higher than official data. As we saw previously, the UK justice system simply ignored some kinds of sex crime by women until recently.
There is a critical distinction between offending and conviction — the graphic claims that 395 men per million commit sexual offences of any kind, yet surveys find the number of college men who admit to rape is staggeringly high — in the region of 40,000 to 160,000 per million. And that number doesn’t even include any other, less serious sexual offences. Over a million people are victims of sexual assaults per year in the UK. The graphic is wrong by a factor of at least 100x in this regard.
The graphic also maliciously misgenders trans women by calling them “men who identify as women”.
Despite being dated 2023, it uses the figure for sexual crimes of males (11,660) for June 2021 from the government data. But the figure used for women (103) does not match the government data for females, which says 119.
It does not cite any source for the number of trans women sex offenders, or any breakdown of the types of sex offence. The most likely source I have found appears to be a Parliamentary answer in January 2022.
The graphic also visualises rates (of groups with wildly different sizes) using icons (normally used to display a tally of actual individuals) which is highly deceptive: it portrays 92 trans individuals as if there were 1916 of them, but 103 cis individuals as if there were just 3 of them. “Lying with visualisation” is another form of “lying with statistics” even when the numbers themselves are (somewhat) true.
To exaggerate the apparent crime rate, it also uses the smallest possible population estimate for trans women, only including those with a specified binary (man/woman) trans identity. Many binary trans people opted not to provide this information (and almost 3 million people did not answer the gender identity question at all). From the census numbers it appears very likely that there are at least twice as many trans women than the number used in the infographic — which would halve the incarceration rate.
And the breakdown by age suggests an even larger population of trans people as younger generations, free of Section 28, feel more able to come out — perhaps four times the estimate used in the infographic, thus quartering the incarceration rate:
It also uses numbers excluding children under 16 for trans people, but total population numbers for everyone else, further distorting the proportions since about 17% of the population are under 16, and young children would be under the age of criminal responsibility. Thanks to ShantiPixie for pointing this out.
So, the data have multiple likely biases, several of which change the result by a large factor in the ballpark of 4x, 6x, 10x, meaning the graphic could be misleading by a factor of 20x, 30x, 40x or even more.
Even setting that aside, what do these numbers mean in a practical & political context? Firstly, you are more likely to encounter a cis woman sex offender than a trans woman one — even using the heavily biased figures above. Secondly, 99.9% of trans women are innocent; none of this statistical scaremongering remotely justifies any restrictions on rights.
Come and see the violence inherent in the cistem
One assumption of the “gender critical” argument is that criminality is innate, and tied to “biological sex”. If so (and if we also accepted their assumption that convictions represent criminality) the ratio of men and women’s crimes would stay broadly constant.
What we actually see from data in Sweden is that it fluctuates dramatically. In recent decades women are being convicted increasingly (assault), and/or men decreasingly (theft), so the gender gap is narrowing over time:
If you think incarceration reflects inherent “criminality”, you also have to explain the fact that the UK prison population has grown four-fold since the 1950s despite a population increase of only 35%.
Crime and punishment
One final point that I don’t think is widely appreciated is that the extremely low conviction rates (for rape in particular) leave huge scope to selectively target minorities and create wildly disproportionate stats, due to the very different group sizes.
People are assuming that more convictions must (at least approximately) imply more crimes, but that simply isn’t true when almost all crimes are currently being ignored. You could have 10x, 20x, 50x more convictions by… not ignoring the crimes.
Police recorded 70,330 reported rapes in the year ending March 2022. Charges were brought in just 2,223 cases, with 1,733 convictions — just 2.5% of the reported cases).
So a minority group making up 0.5% of the population would (all being equal) have about 350 such reports, with about 8 convictions.
But if they are disproportionately investigated, charged, convicted and sentenced due to systemic bias, even if just 20% of them are imprisoned, then they’d be almost 9x over-represented in jail (70 vs 8).
It’s even worse than that, because most rapes are not reported, so convicting even a tiny percentage of minority group crimes would be enough to cause a large over-representation in jail.
Thus it is straightforward to create huge disparities in imprisonment simply by the justice system doing their job a little more enthusiastically when the criminal is in a marginalised group. They can dramatically increase the conviction rate for that small group, by pursuing just a few dozen cases, for a tiny fraction of the effort required to budge the stats for the vast majority.
If the justice system already convicted 90% of rapists, it would be impossible to boost the stats much for any selected group. When they only convict 2% (probably much less in reality) it is easy to do so.
Prison data doesn’t measure rate of offending. Or “inherent” criminality. Or determine what rights you “deserve”. It just measures imprisonment.
Beware of fear-mongering propaganda.
