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Notes -
Lies, damned lies and the Washington Post
Substituting a common-sense statistical metric for a less obvious and intuitive one is almost always a red flag for deceit and obfuscation
With the introduction of its Notes feature, Substack appears to be making a pivot towards being a
TwitterX competitor, the management perhaps having detected a gap in the market following the Elon Musk takeover. While one can question the wisdom of that decision, I commend them wholeheartedly for differentiating themselves from X in one key respect, namely avoiding the echo chamber dynamics which plague it and essentially every other major social media platform. Given how social media algorithms usually work, one would expect my Notes feed to be a nonstop deluge of gender-critical posts and anti-woke one-liners. On the contrary: in addition to plenty of nature photos and boomer dad jokes, I see the full spectrum of political opinions represented, from beliefs I wholeheartedly endorse to ones I would never consider in a lifetime. This is good, because being exposed to contrary opinions is healthy (“he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that” and all that), but also because I'm an argumentative, pedantic “to play devil's advocate” type by disposition, and find it hard to resist the opportunity to pull someone up on a weak argument or erroneous factual statement. (In a previous post when I described leftists as “ornery, confrontational types”, I meant it as a sincere compliment. It's possible, even common, to get so good at “reading the room” that you forget how to write.)One such Note shared the graphic below, which claims that there has been a sharp increase in hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ community in schools across the United States, and that states with “anti-LGBTQ” laws have seen larger spikes than states without. The graphic was accompanied by a couple of paragraphs expounding that such an increase was both foreseen and intended by the homophobic, transphobic lawmakers behind the legislation.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a493866-434c-4ba2-aa31-96aedf51e5a8_598x747.png
The graphic itself is based on an article in the Washington Post from a few weeks ago. It features interviews with LGBTQ teenagers and their parents, describing the bullying and harassment they’ve experienced at their hands of their heteronormative peers, and contrasting these anecdotes with public statements from conservative politicians and lawmakers. The journalists more or less explicitly claim that LGBTQ people living in states with these kinds of legislation are at greater risk of being victimised because of their identity than LGBTQ people living elsewhere in the US.
I have a lot of thoughts on this article. The number of column inches dedicated to implying that Dagny “Nex” Benedict died as a direct result of transphobic bullying is unseemly (even if the article begrudgingly acknowledge that Benedict’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide).1 Some of the laws the journalists characterise as “anti-LGBTQ” are farcical. The most common type are those which “restrict trans student access to sports”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “forbids male students from competing in female sporting events”.2 Given that male athletes competing in female sporting events is manifestly, transparently unfair to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with sexual dimorphism, I support such laws without qualification. Oklahoma passed legislation in 2020 requiring that schools “teach that ‘a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait’ that cannot be changed”: given that this statement is unambigously true, I find the law no more objectionable than bans on public schools teaching creationism or geocentrism. The journalists clearly expect me to be horrified about a Virginia law requiring schools to notify parents whenever the school uses sexually explicit instructional material. Guys, seriously: if you want people to stop throwing the “groomer” accusation around left and right, you’re going to have to meet them halfway.
But my biggest problem with the article is its core thesis, as represented by the graphic above. I’m always deeply suspicious of statistical claims about “fastest growing” or “biggest increase”. Of all commonly quoted statistical observations, it seems like the most susceptible to random noise: if you’re measuring a value that started at a low baseline, some noise within normal variation can be truthfully (but misleadingly) claimed to represent a massive increase when it may be indicative of no such thing.
It also strikes me as a uniquely bad metric for the specific task of comparing which of two regions is the more dangerous. Imagine two neighbouring countries A and B, each with a population of 5 million. Last year, there were 100 murders in Country A and 5 in Country B. This year, there were 110 in Country A and 10 in Country B. It's unambiguously true that Country B’s murder rate increased by 100% year-on-year, while Country A’s “only” increased by 10%. It's also plainly true that you're 11 times more likely to get murdered in Country A than in Country B. If you were planning to book a holiday in either Country A or Country B and you were wondering which was safer, “murders per capita” will tell you far more than “rate of increase of the murder rate year-on-year”: there’s a very good reason that the term “the murder rate” refers to the former metric rather than the latter. In light of the above, if I read an article which tried to make Country B look bad by pointing out that its murder rate had increased by 10 times as much as Country A’s, I’d immediately wonder if the journalist had any undisclosed financial ties to Country A’s tourism board.
My suspicions thus raised, I decided to carry out a deep dive to check how accurate the narrative presented by the journalists was. Conveniently, the journalists based their statistical claims on FBI hate crimes data, which is a publicly available dataset. I downloaded the data and filtered it to only include hate crimes targeting the LGBT community and which occurred in the years 2015-22 (excluding 2020, as the journalists did). I then sorted these hate crimes based on whether they took place in a school or elsewhere, and whether or not they took place in a state with restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues.3 Armed with the necessary data, I was ready to jump in and test the article’s key claims and suggestions.
It will come as no surprise that what I found departs from the narrative presented by the article rather sharply.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools
To back up its claims, the article divides the fifty states of the union into those which have restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues and those which don’t, which I shall hereafter refer to as Restrictive States and Non-Restrictive States, respectively. While you could be forgiven for assuming that all the Restrictive States are Republican strongholds (a misconception the journalists do little to discourage), the category includes a number of states with Democratic governors, including North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota and Arizona, the latter two of which voted for Biden in 2020.
The article then sorts anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools (hereafter referred to as School Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes or SALHCs) based on whether they took place in Restrictive States or Non-Restrictive States. This is where they derive their headline claim that Restrictive States have seen a larger increase in SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States since 2015
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d715b42-3316-4d06-adcd-6392505bcdba_1008x506.png
That specific claim appears to be true. But at a glance, you’ll notice that Restrictive States report significantly fewer SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States in absolute terms, in both 2015-19 and 2021-22. (The authors are honest enough to acknowledge this, with caveats, which we’ll come back to later.)
I presumed that the higher rate in Non-Restrictive States was an artifact of the differing population sizes between the two regions, and that the two regions would have similar rates of SALHCs once you controlled for population; I even thought that Restrictive States might have more SALHCs per capita. But apparently not: according to the 2020 census, the two regions have a conveniently symmetric share of the total US population, with a difference of less than three million people. When taking this into account, not only are there more SALHCs in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States in absolute terms, but Non-Restrictive States have significantly more SALHCs per capita as well: 0.052/100k versus 0.037/100k, or about 40% higher in the former than the latter.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa74370f6-125d-4a7f-aa4b-8efaed8bb9ee_1762x734.png
But maybe this is a population artifact of a different kind. Intuitively, I would expect that a higher proportion of the population openly identifies as LGBTQ in Non-Restrictive States when compared to Restrictive States. If anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are only reported as such if the victim openly identifies as LGBTQ, it stands to reason that regions with a large LGBTQ population will see higher rates of such hate crimes than regions with a smaller LGBTQ population, all things being equal. The journalists themselves gesture at this interpretation: “In addition, it’s possible more kids are public about their identities in more liberal states, creating more targets for bullies, said Lanae Erickson…”.
To check this, I looked at this report from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which estimates the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) living in each state. This is an imperfect metric, as SALHCs includes anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and therefore most likely includes some number of hate crimes in which the victim was under 13. It’s also likely that that some of the people who were victims of hate crimes in a school were not themselves children or young adults (e.g. an openly gay schoolteacher’s car gets vandalised by homophobic students). The report is also from September 2020, and I imagine the number of young adults openly identifying as LGBT has changed significantly since then. These caveats aside, I think the estimate is good enough for our purposes.
Unfortunately for the journalists, not only do more LGBT young adults reside in Restrictive States than in Non-Restrictive States (a difference of about 50,000 individuals), but Non-Restrictive States still report more SALHCs per capita than Restrictive States. The gap is even wider than in our previous table: 8.866/100k versus 5.969/100k, a difference of 49%.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47fba205-1476-4ead-8175-72729bb4abad_1772x736.png
I really don’t know that I’m saying anything terribly controversial here. Put yourself in the shoes of the parent of an LGBTQ child. Obviously you’re going to be concerned about your child getting bullied in school, and would prefer to send them to a school where they won’t be bullied on account of their sexuality or gender identity (or at all, for that matter). When assessing which school to send your child to, which of these two metrics would be most important to you: the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying at the school per capita, or how big an increase the school has seen in the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying over the last few years? I find it hard to imagine any circumstance in which a sensible, caring parent would prefer, all things being equal, to send their child to a school which had a high rate of homophobic bullying over a school which had a dramatically lower rate of homophobic bullying, but which had recently seen a significant increase.
In fairness to the journalists, the article isn’t quite as one-sided as I’m making out, and they were balanced enough to include one interview with a California teenager who’s been bullied because of their gender identity. But there’s something so dishonest about including this anecdote alongside paragraph after paragraph of editorialising about how cruel the legislation is in Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi - without even acknowledging that California reports about three times as many SALHCs per capita than Virginia, Oklahoma or Mississippi.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F36d47c09-c935-42db-aa0c-008958cdf75e_1762x637.png
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes more generally
Zooming out from SALHCs to hate crimes against the LGBTQ community generally is no more favourable to the journalists’ position, and here we veer sharply from the realm of “claims which are technically true, but misleading” to “claims which are outright false”. The journalists write “The FBI data shows serious incidents against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise, particularly in the more than two dozen states that have passed laws targeting LGBTQ+ students or education.” The word “particularly” implies that the states which have enacted legislation saw steeper increases in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes than the states which did not. Note that, unlike the section above, this sentence refers to serious incidents against LGBTQ people in general, not just incidents in K-12 schools.
My analysis of the data shows the exact opposite: between 2015-22, states without restrictive anti-LGBTQ laws have seen a steeper increase in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes than states with such legislation. This isn’t just a statistical fudge, this is an unambigous falsehood.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9bcd80c5-609d-4acd-9a35-10881f3b0167_1751x672.png
For completeness’s sake, I will also calculate anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita in the two regions. In 2021-22, Non-Restrictive States reported more than 4 times as many anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita than Restrictive States.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F030433e6-4f2d-409d-b8d3-2820db594587_1752x692.png
… and per capita LGBTQ.4
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcf6182cd-da63-4885-99c8-63cdc102b574_1757x759.png
To sum up:
When comparing states with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education with states without such legislation:
And what is the reader intended to take away from all of the above? That it’s uniquely difficult to be a young LGBTQ person living in a state with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education.
Conclusion
I feel more than a little resentful for having to go to the trouble of carrying out all this statistical analysis, because I know I’m double-jobbing. I’m extremely confident that the journalists who wrote this story have already carried most or all of the calculations listed above. They pitched this great story to their editor about a surge in hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people following the passing of anti-trans legislation. They went into this dataset with high hopes, confident that it would back up their thesis, plain as day. Then they dug into it and found, to their horror, that the data painted precisely the opposite story. I can almost see their brows furrowing in confusion and panic as they go down their wishlist of statistical metrics in order of preference, discovering that none of them paint the desired picture. Hate crimes more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes in schools more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes rising faster in Restrictive States - nope.
But they can’t just kill the story, not when they’ve already written hundreds of words and secured interviews with an impressive collection of intelligent, articulate teenagers. Without hard data to back up the testimony of the interviewees, the story is relegated to mere anecdote - it’s not serious political journalism, it’s just a culture piece, a human interest story. So instead, they spent ages digging through this dataset, twisting it, contorting it, pleading with it to give them any relevant-ish metric which would back up their narrative. And this was the best metric they could find. Stories like this don’t exist because of honest mistakes: they only come into being through deceit and manipulation.
As I mentioned above, the journalists were honest enough to acknowledge that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools are more common in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States, in absolute terms. They’re quick to explain away this inconvenient finding by claiming that it’s a reporting artifact. Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people are more common in Restrictive States, they argue, but are more likely to go unreported because of a culture of silence, whereas LGBTQ people who’ve been victimised because of their identity in Non-Restrictive States are more likely to report it to the relevant authorities.
I’m sure this is a contributing factor to the differing rates of hate crimes reported in the two regions (although I very much doubt it’s sufficient to explain the disparity on its own). At the same time - come on. Does anyone really doubt that if the data had told the story that the journalists wanted it to tell - that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are more common in Restrictive States than Non-Restrictive States - they wouldn’t be shouting that from the rooftops? No way in hell would they be claiming that a higher rate of reported hate crimes in a region is good, actually, if the shoe had been on the other foot. But the data didn’t give them the answer they wanted, so they’re forced to play this tiresome game of “Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are higher in blue states than in red states - and that’s a good thing.”
Why does this article exist? Personally, I very much doubt that any would-be criminal hears a story on the radio about his state congress banning male students from competing in female sporting events, and immediately thinks to himself “Boy howdy, time to beat up some queers!” I doubt that even the journalists really think that any kind of causal relationship exists between legislation like this and the incidence of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, so why use such a weak argument when the data don’t support your conclusions? I suspect that they’re practising what Scott Alexander calls fake consequentialism. The journalists obviously think that trans girls should be allowed to compete in female sporting events, but this is a very difficult policy to defend: doing so requires one to deny the very concept of sexual dimorphism and differences in strength and speed between males and females (something which is obvious to toddlers) - the denial of which makes you look like a crazy person. Instead, rather than getting into a debate over whether males competing in female sporting events is fair (which they’re sure to lose, because it isn’t), they shift the conversation to the consequentialist claim that banning male students from competing in female sporting events causes a spike in hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. But as I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, even this argument doesn’t check out.
Maybe I’m mind-reading, maybe this isn’t what the journalists are doing at all. But regardless of their motivations, they made at least one provably false assertion and a batch of true-but-misleading ones. This article is an insult to their readers’ intelligence, it’s bad, and they should feel bad.
1 A police officer interviewed Benedict in the hospital after the bathroom fight which was initially cited (erroneously) as the cause of death. The bodycam footage reveals that a) Benedict admits to having started the fight; b) Benedict freely responds to the name “Dagny” and seems entirely at ease being referred to with female pronouns; and c) Benedict never requests to be addressed as “Nex”, or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. This bodycam footage was released several weeks prior to the Post’s article, making the journalists’ decision to use Benedict’s death as an example of the harms wrought by transphobic bullying all the more distasteful (particularly given that certain journalists working for the Post almost certainly knew that Benedict’s father is currently serving time for repeatedly raping her as a prepubescent child).
2 The journalists know full well that their readers will hear about laws which “restrict trans student access to sports” and will think “oh my god, trans high schoolers in Mississippi are actually banned from playing sports!” as opposed to “male students in Mississippi may not compete in female sporting events, regardless of how they identify”. No matter how many times I encounter “respectable” journalists brazenly attempting to hoodwink their readers like this, I never feel any less insulted or disgusted. Truly, have they no shame?
3 To ensure I was looking at the same basic dataset as that on which the journalist based their findings, I performed a quick sense-check by comparing the total number of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in schools according to my dataset and according to the figure cited in the article: the two figures were almost identical. Why “almost”? Well, the Post article asserts that 251 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2022. According to my dataset, the figure was 245. I don’t think the discrepancy is an error on the part of the journalists, and assume the figure of 251 was accurate at the time of writing. I think what happened is that the FBI’s database is constantly being updated, and some crimes are either removed from the dataset (e.g. the victim withdraws their complaint) or reclassified as something other than a hate crime (e.g. further investigation determines that the perpetrator of the crime was not motivated by homophobia). In other cases the figure in my dataset matches the figure cited in the article exactly e.g. I found 114 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2018, just as the journalists did.
4 The figures in the third column are the sum of the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) in each state, and the number of LGBT adults in each state. The latter figures are drawn from a separate report by the Williams Institute, which was published in December 2023 and is hence likely more up-to-date than their report on LGBT young adults. This report contained some surprising findings, particularly that, as a share of the population, more adults in the South identify as LGBT than in any other region of the US. Not surprisingly, California has the largest adult LGBT population of any state, so we don’t need to retire those jokes about San Francisco just yet.
Did you or the writer attempt to control for the actual crime rate between these different states?
I expect a school bully who actually gets charged with a crime to have more than 1 target and get in trouble for other things than the very specific 'LGBT hate crime' category.
This could all just be a series of coincidences. States with LGBTQ-specific laws are more likely to have concentrated pockets of D-voters, with a minority of very criminogenic constituents, and also anti-law-and-order rules on the book. More crime -> more 'LGBT hate crime'
There is a certain tension between different progressive imperatives.
The LGBT bastion is probably the last holdout of 'true believers' for white Democrats. After all, once married to a white man, a heterosexual white woman might rethink her political affinities if her own family is discriminated against.
As the LGBT agenda is the only race-blind item on the list, it may become very uncomfortable to simultaneously support it and the rest, including :
I didn't. As an experiment, I tried comparing the 2022 figures for anti-LGBT hate crimes/100k in each state with the intentional homicides/100k for that state. I'm not sure if I did it right, but it appeared there was no correlation.
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Red states, as a general rule, have higher crime rates than blue states.
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Uh, I'm not defending the LGBT activist narrative, but how sure are we that California schools don't just document anti-LGBT bullying better than Oklahoma schools?
We don't know that but just assuming it's the case and using that assumption to reverse the implication of the pattern in the actual data we do have is terrible practice for journos and for everyone else.
Sure, reversing causation on that basis would be begging the question. But I do think it probably makes the data of questionable value.
If so, that's a problem with the original article, not with my response to it.
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I acknowledge that that may be a contributing factor to the disparity in the article. I'm sceptical that it fully explains the variance. Not a chance the journalists would have considered that possibility in the other direction, had the boot been on the other foot.
Another possibility is that "non-restrictive states" have been ahead of the curve on documenting anti-LGBT bullying for many years or decades, whereas the "restrictive states" were behind the curve but recently started catching up due to increased nationwide awareness of the issue. So the sharp rise in reported rates in restrictive states could also be related to a change in reporting.
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'Given that african savages are manifestly, transparently incapable of civilization and self-rule, it's dishonest to say that enslaving them is a racist policy'.
Yeah these are anti-LGBT laws dawg. You can claim that they are anti-lgbt and justified, if that's the hill you want to die on. But writing a law with the sole purpose of restricting a right from a specific group is 'manifestly' anti-that-group.
I think there are plenty of people who are ore likely to commit a crime if they think they can get away with it; if that weren't true, there would be little purpose for having laws and law enforcement in the first place.
And while I suspect it's just true that police in those state are actually less likely to punish you - or will punish you less harshly - for that type of crime, I'm confident that a good portion of the people who want to commit those crimes will hear about their local government passing anti-lgbt laws and take that as a sign that the law is on their side and will treat them kindly if they go ahead.
I take it, then, that you think biological men competing in female sporting events is fair.
I think you're missing the whole reason that women's sports exists. (No, I'm not talking about Title IX.)
It's because for most sports, if you just had an open competition, at the highest levels, no women will win, ever. There are some exceptions, but in general, women's sports exists because they will do worse otherwise, at least, against other athletes.
This is not surprising; the need of the woman's body to be able to provide for pregnancy and childbirth places is something of a tradeoff against physical ability, whereas men's bodies hardly need to do that at all.
Okay, so maybe, sure, it's fair to have them compete, but the whole point of the existence of the category is equity rather than fairness, in one of the rare cases where most people agree that that's a good thing. Having trans activists in it gets rid of the equity (as then we're back to the point where ordinary women are no longer represented among the elite) and still limits the fairness, because it excludes men.
Okay, then. A quick syllogism.
This is anti-LGBT (provided by @guesswho)
This is good (most agree that this is true)
Some anti-LGBT things are good. (logically follows, by existential generalization)
This is valid.
Maybe you don't agree with premise 2, but it's very common, and I've briefly argued for it above. You at least are arguing that most normies should believe they think that some anti-LGBT things are good.
Only if moral truth rests upon democratic majority, in which case, I have several questions. Chiefly, do different things become good depending on where you are and local sentiments, or do we need to take the majority of the global population? Or do we need to go even further and take the opinion of all people that ever lived? Does ultimate truth require us to know the opinions of all future people as well?
The only place that I see you would be getting democracy from is in the last part, so I assume you're addressing that.
I was assuming my second point; he is of course free to reject that.
I was not trying to argue for truth by democratic majority. (That would also have some other, weirder implications: it would make ethics non-local, though I suppose that might already be true. Would angels/demons or far-off aliens get votes, should either exist? You can't exactly poll them. You would also have the fact that many in history would affirm beliefs that are currently rather unpopular, (yes, yes, precisely the point is that popularity isn't what matters), like that (post-birth) infanticide is fine.)
But I was figuring that guesswho might not like the statement "most people (even in the west) agree that some anti-LGBT policies are justified," and so I was trying to show that that followed.
Why might he not like it? Because I think the original purpose of describing it as anti-LGBT was to try to indicate that we're just some weirdos who have beef with LGBT people, or something, and this policy is an outworking of that, but when it's a fairly broadly conceded view, it becomes far harder to present one's opponents as crazy when even some of one's allies might agree with them.
And I figured he'd prefer to say that people are against a sports policy (in a way that doesn't say that most, even some of the left, are sometimes anti-LGBT) than affirm that they are sometimes anti-LGBT more flatly. That is, arguing that anti-LGBT things are democratically preferred. Since both sides like to think themselves as part of the majority in a democracy, and to have the mandate of the masses (should such a thing exist), I figured he wouldn't like that too much.
Yeah, I get that that isn't exactly a rational argument, and I'm not even sure to what extent it succeeded in what it was trying to do, but the aim (though not quite so explicitly formulated in my mind at the time of typing it) was to adjust what dialogically made sense.
That, of course, is not an argument that means that guesswho must be wrong.
Funnily enough, I described this argument and (what I imagine to be) the motivations behind it in my last effortpost before this one. Like you, I acknowledged that the fact that an opinion is popular doesn't imply that it's right. But it's still annoying to have your opinions mischaracterised as crazy fringe extremist views when they enjoy a high level of popular support.
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A law can be both farcical and Anti-X.
As one hypothetical, imagine that there was an activist that promoted the right to bear arms and self defense. If he started pushing for the rights of prisoners to carry concealed weapons (prison is one of the most dangerous places, after all), then I'd call it farcical.
I wouldn't bother mentioning that my opposition is (by a strict definition) anti-self-defense. If anyone (accurately!) defended it on those grounds, then they're farcical too.
I don't think OP was saying the laws are farcical, I think OP is saying it's farcical to call them anti-LGBT.
Sorry, let me retry.
A law can be Anti-X and highlighting that fact can still be farcical.
As one hypothetical, imagine that there was an activist that promoted the right to bear arms and self defense. If he started pushing for the rights of prisoners to carry concealed weapons (prison is one of the most dangerous places, after all), then I'd call it farcical.
I wouldn't bother mentioning that the law prohibiting prisoner concealed carry is (by a strict definition) anti-self-defense, even though it is.
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Yes, that's what I was saying.
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Saying men have a competitive advantage over women in physical sport is the same as saying blacks are genetically uncivilized?
Not sure you want to nail that comparison to your mast.
Which right is that, exactly?
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TIL that it is a right for a boy to compete against girls. Just like the right to life.
Let's take the case of Andraya Yearwood, one of the trans athletes whose rights you are so vigorously defending. After getting into college due to the publicity around being a trans female runner in high school, Andraya promptly gave up sports. So no Olympic future there! To be fair to Yearwood, they seem to be genuinely trans*, but it's also pretty clear that taking the easier option of beating the girls and thus getting the victories to plump up the college application was part of it. Did Yearwood take a place away from a cis female runner who would have gone on to compete in the Olympics? I have no idea, but I don't think this can be ruled out, either.
*Now identifying as an Igbo-American Trans Womanist involved in LGBT+ activism.
If you want to play weird semantic games about the word 'right', replace it with 'liberty' and the sentence still works fine.
And, oh no, one trans woman won a competition one time. Since no cis woman has ever won any competition, obviously this represents the existence of a categorical advantage.
Statistical analysis or bust, as per usual.
Friend, the transwoman who won the competition was doing it on fair grounds and wasn't being a howling lunatic over demands to accommodate her even if she made no effort at all to pass as a woman. That kind of trans person is going to fit into normal society.
The spa flashers and prison rapists won't, but they are the people you are so hell-bent on defending. I think at this stage, you're the one who has to put up or shut up: do you really believe the spa flashers and rapists are Real Women and should be in women's jails and women's spaces, or not? And if you do, how are you going to protect women from the guys who want to show off their feminine penis around eight year old girls? Because that's on you, just as much as you like putting responsibility on "people like Rowling who want to genocide trans people" if any trans person gets attacked or harmed or insulted.
You can keep trying to assign me positions I haven't ever taken for as long as you want, if it brings you comfort. But it's not actually an argument.
The laws being passed are about athletes, not flashers and rapists. Rape and sexual assault have been and remain illegal whether you're a 'real' woman or not, the question is immaterial to those cases. Cases like that are bludgeons that one side occasionally trots out, but the bailey here is and continues to be normal trans people trying to live normal everyday lives.
You say that the athlete 'is going to fit into normal society' and therefore isn't the issue at hand, but the laws being passed today are targeting them and how they live their normal life, and they are the living the type of lifestyle that speakers at Republican national conventions are talking about 'eradicating'.
I agree that this would be more convenient for you if the debate were only about the rapists and flashers, and your opponents were for some reason defending them. But that's really not what's happening, no matter how many times you say it.
Right, I'm rollling my sleeves up here.
You're crying about "The boy who competed in the boy's races last year is being brutally oppressed just because he's now going by "Jamie" instead of "James" so he can win the girl's races". That's the same logic as "this guy with a dick is really a woman and should be in the women's prison not the men's prison".
The fact that you can't bring yourself to say "yeah, the rapists and flashers are not, in fact, Real Women" is the problem as to why the likes of me and J.K. Rowling and the TERFs can't accept "oh just let the guy with a record of domestic violence into the women's shelter, now she's got a wig and is wearing pink leggings".
The majority of normal trans people trying to live normal everyday lives are not gaming the system so they can get cushier accommodation in prison or win undeserved sports victories for personal gain, even ego satisfaction. If the trans athletes accept that Jamie has to wait two years until her hormone levels and strength advantage are in the same range as cis women, then fine. But Jamie wants to switch from the boy's races six months ago to the girl's races now, while Jamie is still in possession of an unfair advantage.
It's a legitimate problem of trying to be fair to everyone, but so is it a legitimate problem when the crazy edge cases get away with blue murder instead of being slapped down as "yes, this is not what trans means". And until the defenders of trans rights grapple with those exceptions, then the most of the rest of us will continue to object to "male-bodied individual trying to compete against female-bodied individuals, get into spaces for female-bodied individuals, and force themselves onto female-bodied individuals".
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Cynical answer: if women getting raped by men in prison is what it takes to bring attention to the general issue of inmates being raped by stronger inmates in prisons...
If I remember right, the law claims there is no such thing as consensual sex in prison. It's just selectively enforced by the wardens to minimize the effort needed to maintain control. Having a zero tolerance policy for prison rape creates more work, so is naturally opposed by the wardens.
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It seems that it depends. Some women did bring cases, some of those cases were successful, others were not.
After all, it is terribly unfair to separate trans paedophile lovebirds who found one another in jail and married, just because they're probably stoking each other's interest in child porn!
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I'd say it's rather not cynical to consider that "if" to be at all possible.
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If you're so confident that cis women are handily winning competitions against trans women, it shouldn't be so hard for you to cite some specific examples of some to win me over. I notice that you haven't cited any, just like the last time this topic came up.
I remain unconvinced that the burden of proof rests with gender-critical people to demonstrate that male athletes do have an essentially insurmountable competitive advantage over female, as opposed to with TRAs to demonstrate that they don't. TRAs, after all, are the ones demanding that male athletes be allowed to compete in female sporting events. Normally it's the people who want to radically change institutions who are required to demonstrate that their proposed changes are good ideas.
???
Every competition in which a trans woman competes and doesn't win is an example of this. That's every case in existence that's not the handful of anecdotes your side keeps recycling.
You still didn't cite any.
There's a trans woman who plays at our local boffer combat realm, my wife beats her in like 90% of duels, is that good enough for you?
You're asking for 'dog bites man' statistics here, I don't know the names of random trans athletes ho haven't won anything because that's not newsworthy, which is the whole point.
I had to look up what boffer was. Ah yes, completely comparable to competitive swimming!
But don't worry, there's a gender studies professor who is in total agreement with you:
Can somebody direct this lady to historical images where women did not shave, wear makeup, or pluck their eyebrows? Granted the women in them didn't cut their hair and didn't wear men's clothes, but still - they kind of don't look like men.
Gee, Grandma, since you don't pluck your eyebrows, I can't hardly tell the difference between you and Grampa!
Is this a Land Girl or a Land Man? They're wearing trousers, how am I supposed to be able to tell?
One of these coal mine workers is a man, but how can I pick him out of the line up? Nobody is wearing makeup or shaving their underarms!
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But no, not L, G or B. I'm sure some transwomen don't at all like these laws. Almost all LGBT people aren't transwomen.
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If you mean to imply that "the average male is stronger and faster than 99% of females" is as obviously ridiculous an assertion as "African savages are incapable of civilization and self-rule" - well, I don't know what to tell you. That you're wrong? That you're exactly as wrong as the last time as we talked about this stuff, when you offered some extremely weak arguments in favour of the hypothesis that "trans women have no competitive advantage over females", I pointed out (at length) how weak your arguments were, you said you were going to reply and then didn't?
To be pedantic, these laws mostly seem anti-T, not anti-LGBT. The only ones which maybe could be classified as anti-LGB are the ones about sex ed, and even then it's a reach. Good luck explaining to me how gay men are negatively impacted by bans on male athletes competing in female sporting events, or lesbians by bans on males using female bathrooms. There are quite a few lesbians who support laws banning males from using female bathrooms, if you haven't already noticed.
I'm curious where and when it was decided that everyone has the "right" to compete in sporting events which accord with that person's claimed gender identity. On the contrary: everyone has the right to compete in sporting events for their sex, and legislation of this type does nothing to restrict the ability of trans women or girls from exercising that right.
If commitment to being an "ally" requires me to pretend that there's no innate difference between male and female athletic ability, and all of the female athletes complaining about being ruthlessly outcompeted by male athletes who "discovered" that they're trans all of five minutes ago - those uppity women just need to stop whining and Git Gud: then yes, this is the hill I want to die on, thanks for asking. The idea that any policy which is marketed as pro-LGBTQ is automatically a good policy is such a silly and juvenile way of looking at the world.
Curious, then, that states which didn't pass anti-LGBT laws saw far greater spikes in anti-LGBT hate crimes during the period under discussion than states which did. As I went to great pains to demonstrate in the post that you're replying to.
I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is. Likewise, a law that restricts blacks to chattel status is an "anti-black law" regardless of whether it's actually true blacks can't govern themselves. Trying to say "A law that restricts X group isn't anti-X, because X should be restricted" is incoherent.
Misconstruing the focus of an analogy is a failure mode of debate I'm glad not to see too often here.
As far as I can tell, that was brought into the conversation by guesswho. A law can be both anti-X and farcical. For example, promoting the right to self defense by giving those most likely to face violence (prisoners) the right to defend themselves (by carrying guns in prisons) is a terrible idea, and I'd have no problem laughing it out of the room.
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Then we may as well say that a law that restricts shoplifting is an "anti-thief" law regardless of how good the law is. Oh no, imagine saying that robbing and stealing are bad things! I'm denigrating the culture of people who have different traditions around the concept of property ownership!
"You don't get to take what is not yours" is the underlying principle, be it snatching drugs off pharmacy shelves or deciding you're really a girl so the medals belong to you.
Shoplifting laws are definitely anti-thief laws. (
andthatsagoodthing.jpeg) Lawmakers do not want people to act as thieves in the context of the shop; in Texas, lawmakers do not want men acting as female ('being trans') in the context of sports.The reason that anti-trans laws are controversial is that the "underlying principle" you speak of is not agreed upon in society. Two sides cannot agree on whether a biological male entering a female space is a 'thief' taking what he is not due, or a female taking what belongs to her.
I think it's fair to say laws against stuffing iphones in your pants are, in fact, denigrating the values of people who would do that if it were legal. Likewise, I understand that, to a MtF, I really am pissing on their sacred values when I block the door to the women's restroom. That the shoplifter and the MtF are in the wrong is an entirely separate question from whether I am opposing them; I am opposing them. I am making an anti-thief/anti-trans action.
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This whole debate seems like a textbook example of the worst argument in the world.
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This is only true if (as I stated in my reply) one accepts the premise that everyone is entitled to compete in the sporting events which are designated for members of a particular gender identity. I don't believe female sporting events were ever intended for "people who identify as women" but rather for "female people".
The argument that everyone is entitled to compete in the sporting events which are designated for members of a particular gender identity also logically implies that the absence of a dedicated non-binary category in a sporting event is directly infringing upon the rights of any non-binary athlete who wishes to take part.
It is a ticklish problem because genuine trans people who want to compete in sports will have to wait until the strength or whatever advantage is gone and they're down to general female levels. But that may take a year or two, and for elite sports, the years tick by very quickly, and being out of competition in your prime years may be a setback you never recover from.
However, I think that is a different case to the 'trans' athletes who demand that they be allowed maintain their usual level of testosterone or whatever because it's sexist/transphobic/medical gatekeeping to expect them to reach normal female ranges of hormones. That's not about fair competition, that's about "I'm so special I deserve this medal".
Someone needs to do a proper detailed meta-analysis on this question. The evidence I've seen has not been remotely favourable to the idea that puberty blockers and/or HRT bring trans women's athletic performance down to within a typical female range:
Agreed that I will never be persuaded that it's fair to allow males who haven't suppressed testosterone etc. to compete in female sporting events.
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By that definition, most laws are "anti-human". I'm not generally opposed to strict, literal interpretations, but this definition seems to go quite strongly against common sense understanding of "anti".
Sure. I would say that goes unsaid for the same reason that it's the "Department of Education", not "Department of Human Education"; or "Department of Labor", not "Department of Human Labor".
There's no question that journalists calling laws "anti-trans laws" are implying a negative valence. But Folamnh3 called the idea they're anti-trans laws "farcical", which is a bit off when the description seems literally quite defensible. Which was the point guesswho's analogy tried to draw out.
Strictly speaking, I called the idea that these laws are "anti-LGBT" farcical: only trans people are impacted by bans on male students competing in female sporting events, not gay men, not bisexuals, not lesbians. I moreover argued that describing such laws as "restricting trans student access to sports" is knowingly misleading: trans students are not being prevented from competing, they're just being prevented from competing in opposite-sex events.
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Nobody would call a law against drunk driving an "anti-driving law" even though it restricts driver behavior. (And that's actually a better example because only drivers can engage in drunk driving, while it's possible for a non-trans person to try to play in a female-only sport.)
No, but it is an anti-drunkard law.
Not really? It doesn't restrict you from drinking.
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Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"? Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions? Yes white people are more restricted than if they got an exemption from traffic law, but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacists. But this means that describing a law that restricts X group as "objectively an anti-X law" is just a way to smuggle in assumptions about what laws are reasonable. I think Folamh3 assumed the implicit argument was that those laws were unreasonable, not that they were anti-transgender in the same way that "Chinese-Americans need to pay income tax" is anti-Chinese, because otherwise the argument doesn't make sense.
Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.
Certainly, if it removes the right of red-light running to whites specifically.
Still anti-white, because it's legislation that removes a previous privilege from that specific group.
In a hypothetical universe where whites had a historic go-on-red privilege, its revocation would certainly be seen as anti-white by white supremacists. And they'd be correct. Even though such a change would be a good idea by my books, removing a specific white-held privilege is an "anti-white law". Likewise, restricting MtFs from female sports where they previously had access locally is an "anti-trans law", even though I agree it's a good idea.
When the system of female-only sports was first created, the restriction against men joining was definitely an "anti-male rule". Identifying which groups a rule targets is different from condemning the rule.
You can argue that consistently using "anti-X" to refer to any restriction on X, even if the restriction is the lack of a special privilege and is something the speaker thinks is justified, would be a more objective way to use language. But it is not the standard way to use language, guesswho isn't out there talking about people arrested for dangerous driving as being "arrested under an anti-white law", so it seems understandable for Folamh3 to interpret guesswho as making a bolder and less semantic claim.
I don't think it would really be a better way to use language either, because it's so impractical to do consistently that nobody would do it. Nobody is going to use it for every hypothetical special privilege that could exist, at best it would be influenced by status-quo bias based on what laws already exist, and realistically personal bias would creep in immediately. It would just create a natural motte and bailey where people would use "anti-X" in some cases based on their biases, and then retreat to "it's a restriction on X so it's anti-X" when challenged.
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Laws which reaffirm sex segregation in sports do not remove the right to compete in female sporting events from trans women and girls in particular. As I stated in the OP, they ban all male athletes from competing in female sporting events, including the minority of male athletes who identify as women.
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Ok, so now apply that to the laws in question:
Ok, but those laws are not applied specifically to trans people, so they can't be declared anti-trans (let alone anti-LGBT)
This seems like the opposite of how we talk about laws? I've never seen removal of privilege be declared anti-[group] because they remove privilege. In fact I've seen plenty of the opposite - declaring discriminatory policies aren't discriminatory, but merely removing privilege.
For one, you're already admitting only white supremacists would see it like that, and in that case I agree, those laws aren't anti- trans, opposition to them is trans-supremacist. But the other issue is that historically trans people had no such privilege.
So the sports leagues that never allowed it in the first place are not anti- trans?
So in the case of MtFs, the laws are mischaracterized, as they are still targeting men, not trans people in particular. FtMs have a better claim, since they'd be dinged for doping.
It is, because people call privileges "rights" when they support them, but they call rights "privileges" when they oppose them. I am a neutral looking from the outside on a ridiculous scenario, and can clearly see "whites can run red lights" is a privilege. In the hypothetical universe where a whites-can-run-red-lights law exists, people opposing the change would holler hell about their natural rights being infringed.
This is exactly where we find ourself with letting MtFs into female spaces. Pro-trans think their "rights" to be treated as female are being infringed; anti-trans are denying that those rights exist.
The situation may seem comical, but during the abolition of slavery and feudalism, slave-owners/feudal lords complained bitterly about their property rights being infringed. Things like that are only ludicrous in retrospect.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
The intent of the law is going after trans entryists, specifically, even if the language of the law is framed generally.
Certainly this is obnoxious. The motivation by journalists to generalize actions against tiny minorities with a broader interest group is the same thing behind blacks becoming BIPOCs. If you criticize calling the laws anti-LGBT on these grounds I have no objection.
I am stepping into a hypothetical set by sodiummuffin. The scenario proposed is so ridiculous, if a soapbubble universe where whites could run lights popped into existence, everyone except hardcore white supremacists would wake up to how stupid that is immediately. Our current situation is less ridiculous so people's thoughts are much more confused on the matter.
They were anti-trans in their inception, though there would not be the language to describe it as such. Again, I am not using 'anti-trans' as a synonym for 'bigoted' or 'evil', but merely descriptively.
Yes, but they shouldn't.
guesswho calls this an anti-LGBT law because he's deep in the middle of calling things "rights" inconsistently depending on whether he supports or opposes them. But when called on it he denies this and just claims he's being literally truthful.
I think it's unlikely that he refers to drunk driving laws as anti-driver, compulsory school laws as anti-child, and laws against robbery as anti-minority (for a minority that disproportionately robs), even if he thinks they can be literally described that way. It's a motte and bailey where the motte is "see, that's what it literally means" and the bailey is that he's using the words to imply something negative.
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X is being restricted from conducting political assassinations?
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