Do trans women ‘retain male pattern violence’?

Obviously not. But lets look at the claim, the evidence for it and see if we have any evidence to disprove the claim anyway. You know, for shits and giggles.

This claim is thrown around online an awful lot, especially by a lot of the TERFs I talk to. It’s their ultimate GOTCHA! as to why trans women should be considered men and kept out of muh female safe spaces, such as bathrooms. If there is a significantly increased risk of violence against women because of trans women, then they’ve got a good basis on which to continue arguing for sex segregated spaces.

So where did they get this idea from? It comes from a Swedish study which looked at a cohort of trans people across years to measure their outcomes. It’s the infamously misquoted and misrepresented Karolinska Institute study.

This study is so over misquoted and misrepresented that the author herself had to come forwards and give an interview to try and dispell the myths surrounding it. More on that later, first lets look at what the study actually says about violence regarding trans women.

regarding any crime, male-to-females had a significantly increased risk for crime compared to female controls (aHR 6.6; 95% CI 4.1–10.8) but not compared to males (aHR 0.8; 95% CI 0.5–1.2). This indicates that they retained a male pattern regarding criminality. The same was true regarding violent crime. By contrast, female-to-males had higher crime rates than female controls (aHR 4.1; 95% CI 2.5–6.9) but did not differ from male controls. This indicates a shift to a male pattern regarding criminality and that sex reassignment is coupled to increased crime rate in female-to-males. The same was true regarding violent crime.

In short what this paragraph says is that the crime rate amongst trans women doesn’t change compared to male controls, however the crime rate amongst trans men does in fact increase to be a lot closer to male controls. Both are significantly higher than female controls. The study also posits that this is linked to sex reassignment, however it doesn’t discuss what the link is.