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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I generally find the 21st Century Salonnière’s (also known as Dolly) writing to be thoughtful and insightful, despite the controversial arena she roams around in. Back in April (I have a terrifying reading backlog, ok?) she published the post Sexual Offenses Are More Common Among Transwomen Than Men, a title as provocative as it is unambiguous.

Using prison data from both the UK and the US, Dolly finds that about 50% of trans prisoners are there for a sexual crime, in contrast to 11% - 19% of the general prison population. Hopefully it’s obvious that prisoners are overwhelmingly male by a huge margin, especially for violent offenses, and that the number of trans prisoners is so miniscule as to be almost a rounding error (in the UK there were only 142 trans prisoners out of a total prison population of 92,949 as of 2017).

Dolly’s overall argument is structured thus:

Premise- Trans prisoners are more likely to be there for a sexual offense

Conclusion- Trans people are more likely to commit a sexual offense

I’m not the only one who noticed some glaring omissions in this argument, and a few commentators pointed this out. I would hope my criticism is seen as constructive, but the main feedback I would give is to be more transparent about implicit assumptions. To be clear, Dolly’s operating assumptions (whether stated or not) may be perfectly reasonable, but the discussion is clouded when they're kept shelved away.

The two main assumptions implicitly made are:

  1. Trans prisoners are representative of the trans general population

  2. The amount of law enforcement attention spent on any particular crime is representative of that crime's frequency

I might be missing others, but those are at least the most important. Setting aside the validity of the prison statistics (I’m assuming they’re legit and have no reason to think otherwise) I remain skeptical these are reasonable assumptions for many of the same reasons “And I for truth” listed in their comment to the post:

It could be the case, for instance, that transwomen commit non-sex crimes at lower rates than other males but sex crimes at the same rates. It could also be that males in prison for sex crimes are more likely to claim a trans identity in the hopes of getting transferred to a woman's prison, either for nefarious reasons (access to women in prison) or self-protection (recognition of the higher risk that other male prisoners might commit violence against them). Both of those situations are consistent with the data you cite.

I’m also skeptical based on my experience as a public defender.

Sex criminals are by far the people treated the worst by the criminal justice system, both by the legal punishments but also informally by retribution from other inmates. When I'm dealing with a sex offense case, I make informal requests to the prosecutor and the judge to not read out their charges out loud, or to take their case last when the courtroom is emptier. Those same clients routinely ask me to not give them any paperwork about their case for fear that it would be discovered by others. All of this is done to protect them, by limiting the number of people who find out about the nature of their charges.

Inmates in general are almost by definition more violent that the general public, and beating the shit out of someone accused of a sex crime is the kind of violence most likely to be implicitly condoned by the powers that be. Correctional officers genuinely have a thankless and very difficult job, and the last thing on their mind is worrying about kiddie diddler getting shanked. Didn’t see it happen, and even if they did, it was self-defense because the rapist provoked it. So yes, the idea that someone accused of a sex offense is more likely to identify as trans once in prison solely for the purposes of better accommodations makes a lot of sense to me. This says less about the authenticity of trans gender identity and much more about the horrific conditions our criminal justice system casually tolerates.

There would also be an added filter at the investigation stage. Sex crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute, absent clear evidence of violence or coercion. Law enforcement is put in a very difficult situation because they WANT to be receptive of complaints, but they often can't do anything with them due to shoddy evidence. In most of the rape cases I've handled, there is rarely any dispute whatsoever that the people involved had sex, but then the only evidence of a crime is conflicting testimony from the only two witnesses (he said she consented, she denies it). For example, I once had a case where a guy in his 40s had a friends-with-benefits relationship with a 21 year-old for at least two years. The day she reported a rape to police, she was also seven months pregnant with his child. I am not at all saying it’s impossible to rape someone you’re in a relationship with (no matter how casual), but good luck convincing a jury of that beyond a reasonable doubt.

Prosecutors are thus more likely to pursue charges like this if there are other factors to tip the balance. In the case above, the guy had a domestic violence history from a very long time ago. I also have to assume that their age gap also played a role in moving the needle towards “prosecute”. It would not be surprising if a sex crime garners more lurid attention from the law enforcement apparatus just because the suspect is trans. Prosecutors openly advertising their preferred pronouns does not disavow them of any potential bias against trans people they may harbor, and either way they can only file charges when a beat cop or detective cares enough to forward a report. We’re not pulling from a progressive crowd here.

The overall methodology is complicated by the severe dearth of data on a population this miniscule — how many conclusions can you draw from a sample that is 0.15% of the population? This is further hampered by the relatively incoherent framework of gender identity, particularly when it melds into non-binary territory — how do you determine who should be counted in this group?

One of my hobby horses is being a spoilsport for when someone tries to hoist a heavy conclusion on some flimsy stilts. We can shore this up with some figurative gravel — perhaps some reasonable assumptions to close the gaps, but these should at least be stated outright and explicitly. Short of that, sometimes we just don’t have enough evidence to come to a conclusion, and it’s ok to admit when we don’t and can’t know something. This isn’t a call to give up on trying to answer questions, because even a failed attempt to resolve an inquiry can leave us with a useful blueprint for the future.

My first thought is that transwomen are probably over-represented in sex workers, especially biologically male sex workers.

Does "sex crimes" include things like prostitution/solicitation etc.?

Second thought is that transwomen might be less criminal than males overall, but normally criminal in sex crimes.

It's possible that transwomen are more rapey than cis males, but it would very much surprise me. Either way, this evidence doesn't do much to disentangle what they mean. "Sex crimes" is a big category, remember. Even "registered sex offender" can mean anything from hardcore child rapist to college kid caught pissing behind a dumpster.

I see everyone arguing over "well if you make trans-women go to men's prison they'll get raped" vs "well if you make trans-women go to women's prison men will claim to be trans-women and then they'll do the raping", and these seem both pretty obviously true.

The core issue is clearly that-- in spite of the fact that prison inmates were only ever sentenced to prison, not to repeated rape and beatings-- we nevertheless tacitly allow (what you might think of as) these extrajudicial punishments to occur, and have never bothered to build any effective safeguards against that happening.

I joke with my wife about how if we really thought that prison rape should be part of the punishment for crimes that send you to prison, we should (1) make the judge explicitly add that to the convict's sentence, in those specific words, and (2) said judicially-mandated prison rape should be performed by a generously-pensioned and fundamentally disinterested civil servant on an explicit schedule.

It is, after all, hardly less barbaric to have that same punishment levied completely at random based on how physically strong or weak the prisoner is relative to their would-be rapists.

overall argument, implicit assumptions

Wouldn't "trans people are less likely to commit a non-sexual offense" be sufficient to explain the observations, without needing to invoke any differences in their rate of committing sexual offenses at all? This makes some intuitive sense, too, as I'd assume we are mostly talking about MtF rather than FtM so they are depressing their testosterone levels and thus violent tendencies. Moreover, transitioning is costly and mostly depresses your social status (except for some weird and not particularly highly-incarcerated subcultures), so it stands to reason that out of the "sex, status, money" triad of motivations for crime, trans people would disproportionately have sex figure in their value function to the exclusion of the other two (though this of course could also explain them being more motivated towards sex crime than an average person, to the degree we are willing to assume that "will to engage in gender self-expression" and "will to sexual activity" are positively correlated).

"less likely" compared to what though? Saying something like "trans people are less likely to commit a non-sexual offense" doesn't really tell us anything about their overall criminality, which is useful information to have. Dolly's overall conclusion is that they're more likely to commit a sexual offense compared to men, but she doesn't try explaining why that might be the case (I assume that would delve into armchair psychology, implicating AGP and whatnot).

I was going off of your quote,

Using prison data from both the UK and the US, Dolly finds that about 50% of trans prisoners are there for a sexual crime, in contrast to 11% - 19% of the general prison population

(...)

Premise- Trans prisoners are more likely to be there for a sexual offense

Conclusion- Trans people are more likely to commit a sexual offense

which does not imply, mathematically, that trans people are more likely to commit a sexual offense compared to men. (It does imply that they are more likely to have committed a sexual offense conditional on being in prison.)

For example, imagine you have a base population of, say, 1000 cis men and 1000 trans people. Of the men, a total 15 commit sexual offenses, and another 85 commit non-sexual offenses (and get imprisoned). Of the trans people, 1 commits a sexual offense, and another 1 commits a non-sexual offense. Then the following are simultaneously true:

  • 50% of trans prisoners are there for a sexual offense.

  • ~15% of the general prison population are there for a sexual offense.

  • Hence, in particular, trans people are more likely to be there for a sexual offense. (P(sexual offense|trans and there) > P(sexual offense|cis and there))

  • trans people are less likely than cis men to commit a sexual offense. (0.1% to cis men's 1.5%)

I'm of course not saying that this is what the numbers are, but if you only know the first two points (which I assumed "trans prisoners are more likely to be there for a sexual offense" is supposed to gloss), this scenario is not ruled out. Therefore, the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

A post on the old site also examined this issue, and included additional data sources.

Oh, solid. I missed it back then but a lot of the same points are brought up.

Would the transgender tendency to document absolutely everything online factor in to the odds of their getting convicted for an inherently difficult crime to prove?

Now, my priors are that transgender people are probably underrepresented among violent criminals, disproportionately likely to use some drugs but not others, and probably more likely to face ‘stop being weird in public’ type charges that rarely result in a serious punishment.

100% of the trans people I know IRL do not match the Very Online Trans Person archetype at all. Admittedly, it's a very small sample size, but still. I don't think we can be sure that they all document everything online. I would expect them to be more online on average, but I'm not sure by how much.

Would the transgender tendency to document absolutely everything online

It may be a legitimate demographic tendency, idk, but this is like drawing the conclusion that all plastic surgery is botched because the plastic surgery one notices is botched. Sampling bias. The people who document and publish their lives online the most are the most visible.

Yeah, she needs to double check her mathematical reasoning; she can't make that claim without knowing the size of the transwoman population. By her logic, according to this data, women are twice as likely to commit drug offenses as men, and are almost as likely to commit violent offenses, which obviously is not true

This is a really good point, I'm embarrassed I didn't think about it.

It seems perfectly reasonable that more women than men are in prison with their most serious offense being drug-related, simply due to men being more likely to be charged with violent/weapon offenses.

I know someone who worked in a woman's prison. I don't think she knew anybody there who wasn't convicted for either "Battered wife/girlfriend who turned on her husband/boyfriend and killed him" (or some less severe version of that) or there for some drugs offence or for pimping.

Of course, maybe they were lying about the "battered wife" part, but all the violent criminals had killed/mutilated/etc. their partners. And they were a small minority of the overall prison population.

That's not to say that there aren't women who commit armed robbery etc. Just none at this particular prison.

Yes. It's also always worth remembering that, in a huge proportion of domestic violence cases, alcohol is involved.

Yes, of course. That is the point that the author of the article does not understand. The data she looks at show the propensity of women to commit certain crimes relative to their propensity to commit other crimes, but say nothing about the propensity of women to commit any crime relative to the propensity of men to commit that same crime.

It seems clear to me that there's an obvious incentive for a male rapist to identify as a woman in order to go to a women's prison. That alone would explain the higher rate.

(with all due respect to people who consider themselves transsexual.)

Also don't we find the same bias against men generally as compared to women?

"It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002

we're supposed to take people at their word

The debate over self-ID is one of policy, not necessarily of 'fact'. That is to say, even though it is obviously possible to lie about gender identification/dysphoria, one could nonetheless argue that as a matter of policy self-ID is the best approach because there is no more acceptable alternative. Thus, one could perfectly consistently make exceptions to a self-ID policy, such as in sport (I mean, no-one advocates 'instant' sport self-ID) or in cases of an apparently bogus case of identification in the justice system, as the policy of self-ID in other areas was one adopted from a position of pragmatism, not because literally everyone who claims to be trans must be telling the truth.

As far as I can tell that's how society wants us to operate in every situation except for looking at crime statistics,

Even there: journalists are apparently fine with women eventually being blamed for a larger and larger percentage of sex crimes due to them reporting "transwomen" who commit such crimes as women with often little or late clarification. What is the headliner reader going to assume as there's more headlines of "she exposed herself to so-and-so"?

So they're not against making that specific sort of mess with self-ID.

If this is being done to women, commonly understood to represent half the population...well, what's good for the goose...I see no reason why transwomen should be exempt.

I think it's fair to hold people to their own professed standards. Also fair to consistently criticize other people's standards when they're incoherent.

Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.

A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.

Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.

Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.

A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction,

Maybe they collapse the distinction because they have to.

First of all : the point that surgery being the barrier excludes most transpeople is true.

Second: if we go with the "'gender dysphoria" theory of transness as opposed to the "gendered soul" theory of transness this creates real awkwardness. Trans will forever be tied to a medical condition which means it will always be subject to the charge of being a medical disorder.

After all: what is a "gender identity"? Why is this being projected on everyone as opposed to the mentally ill (what else would you call wanting to mutilate your body as your greatest hope of relief)? After all: we do not project a "skinny identity" on everyone and say that anorexics are the ones whose body doesn't their skinny identity or a "cripple identity" and say that people with alien limb syndrome simply have a mismatched identity with their healthy body so let's cut off their hand.

If dysphoria is our marker then we're talking about people with a legitimate psychological condition combined with a propensity for comorbidities like autism and narcissism. Much harder to use the same "it's the social stigma" argument gay rights used.

That is the irony about this entire movement: it depends heavily on the alleged huge suicide rate of transpeople to leverage sympathy yet this line of argument is very susceptible to trans people simply being mentally ill. I'm honestly surprised how successful tap-dancing around the contradictions are, but that might be because nobody dares to actually challenge constructs like "trans kids"

it will always be subject to the charge of being a medical disorder.

This is true, but I don't see why this a 'charge' rather than merely a fact that is not at odds with viewing medical transition as something often legitimate and necessary. After all, it may be, and in my view is, the case that transition is simply a/the treatment for, yes, the disorder of gender dysphoria.

You're not thinking like an activist. It poses a few problems:

  1. Trans identity would then be behind the gates of doctors which prevents self-definition (a central value on the left) and - more cynically - limits the numbers of "transpeople" and thus the demands one can make in their name. It's a founding tactic of the "LGBT movement" to seek strength in numbers.

  2. IMO this argument can easily slide into trouble, not least because it implies the metaphysical claim that TWAW is nothing more than a tool to manage/mollify mentally ill people and not fact. This immediately raises concerns about how far we should go in accommodation or how much you can judge a person for not playing along. They much prefer the deontological view implied by TWAW.

  3. What if we continue to study this condition and discover something...embarrassing that doesn't fit with the narrative (e.g. autogynephilia as a motive which doesn't really fit the narrative).

If activists are going to be allowed to take the maximal stance that allegedly avoids all of the problems (even if it places it on others) then why wouldn't they take it and avoid awkward issues?

After all, it may be

It may indeed be. But would this be the phrase used for allowing anorexics to starve themselves? We would need absolutely overwhelming evidence before we allowed this, especially with children. Do we have this for transpeople, especially the younger cohort that are unlike the previous generations?

See: this is what I'm talking about. I think there's been a rash of less-critical behavior around this precisely because it isn't just seen as treating a medical disorder but the next fight for human rights/dignity. This is why activists talk about "trans kids" and not "kids suffering from dysphoria, most of whom will likely desist after puberty unless on puberty blockers". The latter has far less force.

At this point Finland, Sweden, the UK have all rolled back and criticized some elements of childhood medical transition. America and Canada are not on the same boat and apparently are going full steam ahead. Would everyone have gone this far for a minority that was purely recognized as mentally ill?

As a society, we treat psychological problems (faulty software) with psychology (reconfiguration of internal reality) and psychiatric problems (faulty wetware) with medications.

Gender problems are treated by a combination of heavy body-altering hormones and vivisectionist plastic surgeries ala The Island of Dr. Moreau. Psychological treatment (“conversion therapy”) is illegal in many jurisdictions. This is considered the most humane treatment because of the high, high statistical likelihood of suicide at every stage including after transition.

Meanwhile, I personally know someone whose lifelong body dysmorphia was resolved with a single moment’s realization he’s described to me in detail. He was a species dysphoric furry, an amputee fetishist/wannabe, and an autogynophile-type trans-null-gender whose Erotic Target Location Error was seeing the essence of womanhood as penislessness, not vagina-having. He said that, up until that moment, he wished thousands of times he could just have “nullo” surgery to remove the hateful appendage, without a constructed vulva in its place. But because nullo is “unnatural,” he figured no ethical surgeon would have done it and never investigated it. Now he’s perfectly fine with being a four-limbed human man with functional male genitals.

It scares me to think that if nullo surgery (with hormone-replacement for the missing balls) was the societally approved genital transition for his issue, which turned out to be psychological, he’d be regretting it now after that realization, possibly suicidally.

Not actually included, good eyes!

He told me he used to always change in the toilet stalls in locker rooms at school and at pools because he was shy and didn’t want anyone to watch. His father confronted him once about not being a real man if he was afraid of being seen nude, and he remembers thinking, “Well, then I don’t want to be a man” with the finality of a decision.

It was that moment he remembered when he was pondering why he wanted to see a film about trans people. He said a hundred things clicked together at once and then fell away like a curtain. He told me that after that, he kept trying to feel the old dysmorphic ache for a different body for a year, like probing an empty tooth socket reflexively with your tongue, but it was just gone.

You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.

That is true if all one cares about is the culture war. If one cares about formulating sound public policy, esp about such an important issue as crime, not so much.

If you care about sound policy you need to use the same definitions on both sides of the equation to determine ratios.

If anyone in the not convicted of a crime side is allowed self-ID and only accused (or convicted?) can have that status revoked externally your numbers won’t work.

In the situation where trans women convicted of crimes can have that status revoked, you are automatically biasing your numbers away from criminality in that population.

If your true ratio is A:B and you change that to A-0:B-X the ratio automatically gets larger. Assuming of course X>0, but if it isn’t, it’s kind of a silly argument anyways.

That’s the math part. The politics part is there has been an argument from the beginning that if self-ID is the only requirement then there will be bad actors. We should not use it for this very reason.

Originally the the response was that no one would lie about this so we shouldn’t be concerned.

Now it feels like the response is of course those bad actors couldn’t really mean it, so we shouldn’t count bad people on our side, they’re on yours.

I have tried to make clear that whose "side" the bad people are on is not the issue I am concerned about. It is who actually commits crimes. In order to determine that, we have to look at their identity at the time they committed the crime.

If every gang member who is put in prison foreswears their gang in order to get benefits (as supposedly some inmates claimto be trans), would you infer that,because no one in prison is a gang member, gang members do not commit a disproportionate number of crimes, and hence the authorities shouldn't worry about those gang members downthe street? Of course not. Yet you seemto be advocating for the use of the same absurd methodology re trans criminals.

Nope, I’m saying that you have to remove liars from both sides.

It’s not absurd if your goal is accuracy.

Actual:Actual is reasonable.

Actual + Fakers:Actual + Fakers is reasonable.

Actual + Fakers:Actual

Is not.

I do care about formulating sound public policy, which is precisely why I think that a) making self-ID the legal standard is a policy which will backfire horribly for the trans movement and b) I don't support allowing any male convict who identifies as a woman to be housed in a female prison, without any guardrails being imposed at all.

My point is that you can't have it both ways. Trans activists demanded that anyone who declares that they are a woman must be legally treated as a woman. That's the policy they sought. Having succeeded in having that policy implemented (at least in certain jurisdictions), they cannot then turn around and say "No no, Karen White is only pretending to be trans!" The policy they themselves called for draws no legal distinction between a person legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria and someone like Karen White.

You're confusing policy with statements of fact here. Just because someone might argue that self-ID is the best policy response to the issue of the status of transgender people, this does not mean that someone is arguing that everyone who self-IDs as trans must be telling the truth. So I could credibly argue that, in general, self-ID is desirable but that there may be exceptions in which a more rigorous standard could appropriately be applied.

All well and good, but the law in the country in which I live currently permits no such exceptions. Any male person who identifies as a woman is a woman in the eyes of the law, for all intents and purposes.

Yes, I understand your point. My point is that, if we want to combat crime, we need to understand it, and you are advocating for intentionally using incorrect data. Let's replace transgenderism with autism. Let's suppose there were some benefit to claiming to be autistic in jail, such as better services or some such. So, huge numbers of inmates falsely claim to be autistic. The result is that, superficially, it appears that people with autism are extremely crime-prone. Would you advocate ignoring the fact that those inmates are lying when trying to develop anti-crime policy? I wouldn't think you would.

you are advocating for intentionally using incorrect data... Would you advocate ignoring the fact that those inmates are lying when trying to develop anti-crime policy?

If "autistic person" was legally defined as "a person who claims to be autistic, no diagnosis required", then the only data we would have would be the data obviously skewed by bad actors.

I acknowledge the existence of people who falsely claim to be transgender (or falsely claim to be experiencing gender dysphoria). The law in the country in which I live explicitly does not acknowledge their existence. The legal concept of "self-ID" makes it literally impossible for a person to lie about being transgender: declaring it makes it so.

Again, everyone knows that Karen White isn't really transgender. Before self-ID became law, anyone who pointed out that the proposed legislation created a perverse incentive and a honeypot for bad actors was smeared as transphobic. Now that the (foreseeable! foreseen!) downsides of self-ID have become too obvious to ignore, trans activists are trying to turn around and say "but those people aren't really trans!"

Sorry, not having it. Anyone who was in favour of self-ID has to take the L and admit that it's their fault that malingering sex offenders are now housed in female prisons. If you support a policy which defines transgender people as "anyone who claims to be transgender", you don't get to pick and choose who will make such a claim.

You actually aren't disagreeing with me. Of course it is their fault that fake transwomen are in female prisons. But when trying to figure who commits crimes, we can acknowledge that while simultaneously noting that the crimes those people committed were not committed by transwomen, just as we can acknowledge, per my hypothetical, that autistic people do not commit a huge pct of crime, even if a huge pct of prisoners successfully claim to be autistic and thereby game the system. We can blame the autistic rights folks for the latter, even while doing the former when formulating criminal justice policy.

Sound public policy requires that the movement that pushed such grotesquely unsound policy be vanquished, lest it continue to impose unsound policy on us. As such, the single most important thing that can be done in response to this is what @Folamh3 is doing.

You're trying to convince him to put out a fire while the kid with matches and a can of gasoline is still right there going nyuck nyuck nyuck. I get it, the fire is a problem, but putting it out doesn't help until Mr. Pyromaniac is down for the count.

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So now that it hits an in-group, to paraphrase Sartre, you "loftily indicate by some phrase that the time for argument (regarding the self-ID question) is past"?

My point is that, if we want to combat crime, we need to understand it, and you are advocating for intentionally using incorrect data.

That is quite explicitly what @Folamh3 is not doing.

  1. Trans people are hardly my in-group; I find them rather tiresome.

  2. That was indeed what Folamh3 was doing in their initial post, which was what I was referencing.

In that case I must apologize; it really did read to me like you were trying to deflect.

On the other hand I do still think that @Folamh3 wasn't initially saying "let's use incorrect data", but "using correct data has become radioactive because of trans activists, doesn't this suck", which is, of course, downstream of your own observation (and which you've noted).

Sound policy is incompatible with self identification. Because people can lie or be wrong about their own nature.

This was and still is one of the major objections against the standard.

I submit that what you conceptualize as sound policy about crime is an oppressive norm, in fact.

I don't know what oppressive norm you are talking about, but the fact that people can lie or be wrong about their own nature is exactly my point. For example: People charged with crimes commonly claim to be mentally ill, in an attempt to mitigate punishment. If we want to know the relationship between mental illness and crime, we don't want to take those people at their word; rather we want to look at people who are actually mentally ill, or at the very least who claimed to be mentally ill before they committed the crime. Yet, re transwomen, the OP is advocating doing the exact opposite.

If your policy on sentencing the mentally ill is "they count as mentally ill when they say so", then that has to be the standard we use when analyzing what's wrong with the policy. That is not currently the policy for the mentally ill; it is currently the policy for trans people.

If we want to know the relationship between mental illness and crime, we don't want to take those people at their word; rather we want to look at people who are actually mentally ill,

And there it is, this is oppression. Because you're imposing your view of reality on them, using the cover of the idea that there is such a thing as "actually mentally ill", a doubly made up concept which is nothing but power.

At least that's quite literally what Foucault would say.

The current progressive philosophical paradigm is not equipped to deal with this problem, because subjective feeling is explicitly more important than objective reality in its hierarchy of concern. And if it was not so, transpeople wouldn't get the privileges they are afforded today.

Asking for coherence or some sort of standard to deal with the ground level problems generated by this view is never going to work or make sense within the paradigm because those problems are all assumed to be stemming from oppression in the first place (blame Rousseau for this one). And you are hence condemned to be a conservative, one who seeks to slow the bulldozer but ultimately is powerless to stop it or change its course.

Yes, I am sure some people would say that it is oppression, but who cares? You know, the American Political Science Assn just had its [annual conference]9https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/apsa/apsa22/), and although a search of the conference schedule for "oppression" turns up 71 hits, a search for "modeling" turns up 447. And while the division on Critical Political Science had 9 sessions, the division on Conflict Processes had 56. There are, by the way, 56 divisions. I have been to that conference, and the people talking about real issues go the entire 4 days not caring what those other people are talking about in their little bubbles. So, yes, it is perfectly possible to determine whether people who identify as trans before going to jail and conveniently discovering their identity actually commit more sex offenses than average, or if they don't, regardless of whether some people deem that a form of oppression.

Much as it is in litterature, the people studying politics are some of the least likely persons to actually engage in it in any meaningful level.

You're coming at this issue from some sort of liberal issue based framework. But that's utterly ill equipped to deal with the issues of today. You're not living in a world where everyone shares that framework anymore, and in fact you live in a world where it's so thoroughly hacked that you can be used to produce anything up to the inversion of your ideals if manipulated correctly. Experts say. Sources confirm. New study shows.

I've seen it happen too many times now. If the stats are favorable they will be promoted, every redditor will quote them to you at the first chance. If the stats are not favorable, you'll be banned for even mentioning their existence.

All this quality scholarship about what we ought to do were we good little managers? It's all mere justification.

All this is really about is power. Which neither of us have.

It doesn't matter how many people get hurt by policy. It doesn't matter how well you can spin it either way in very respectable papers. This is just the process to legislate what has already been decided by those who can make the exception.

So a persons word isn't the only factor in determining their true gender identity, an external investigator is needed to probe it?

Doesn't this invalidate the self-ID doctrine?

Self-ID is not a 'doctrine' but a policy. I very much doubt you can find any politician etc. of any prominence who argues that it is impossible to lie about gender ID. Obviously it is, the argument is that in some/most cases self-ID is the best choice even if there is a potential for lying, just as advocating for a more stringent system does not mean one believes that no genuine trans people will be erroneously denied a legal change.

It seems like we have enough evidence now though to finally state that, in fact, Self-ID is not the best choice, it's harmful and unjust. The only way at this point for activists to try to argue for Self-ID is to cite marginal benefits while excusing massive harms. And if that's the standard, than anyone can play that game, nothing's off limits.

What does that have to do with what I said. Again, I don’t care about the trans issue. I am talking about the data issue: Either mentally ill people are unusually crime-prone, or they are not, and we can know that only if we look at people who are actually mentally ill when they committed the crime, rather than people who claim mental illness after the fact. The same applies to transwomen. So, as I said initially, if you care only about the culture war stuff, then "they made their bed" makes perfect sense. If, OTOH, you care about crime policy, it doesn’t.

If, OTOH, you care about crime policy, it doesn’t.

Crime policy is "you look at people who claim to be trans and count them".

Surely the culture war is interested in whether issues like these are sound precisely because they are influencing public policy around such important issues?

In which case:

Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.

This doesn’t read at all like “we should tolerate criminals”, but “progressives advocated for these paradigms; now that they are seen to be damaging, progressives should take the hit to credibility for supporting these paradigms.”

Your comment is truly an interesting rhetorical invocation of “privatising the gains and socialising the losses”.

No, my comment was meant to indicate that there are other issues at play other than what gains and losses might accrue to trans people. I.e.: our ability to get closer to understanding the causes of crime, which is compromised if we intentionally miscategorize those who commit crimes.

Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.

And the point of the original commenter was that the progressive position of self-ID is in contradiction to getting to these "other issues, i.e. our ability to get closer to understanding the causes of crime, which is compromised if we intentionally miscategorize those who commit crimes", as the progressive position is to deny the possibility for there to be such a miscategorisation in the first place.

A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.

Taking the broader progressive movement in mind, then, one cannot on the one hand take seriously gender self-identification as the sole marker of gender, then on the other hand ignore the predictable negative effects of that, and chastise other people for focusing on that this policy creates these negative effects - after all, there are "bigger issues" at play greater than mere self-ID!

That is simply rank hypocrisy.

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