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On the other hand, consider this report (I've been linking to it a lot lately) which found no statistically significant differences in the rates of violent offending between males who had undergone gender reassignment surgery and the general male population.
This is quite interesting. I find no obvious problems with the design except the unavoidable (large CI, now randomisation, etc.), so it does move the needle quite a bit for me. The only possible issues I can see is that I'm not entirely convinced that criteria i) strictly requires an actual surgery to take place, that the large CI can still hold some surprises (0..3-2.1 ranges from "almost female-pattern criminality" to "holy shit even higher than male-pattern criminality") and the usual troubles with selection effects.
It's very weird that somehow FtMs have male-pattern criminality, while MtFs ... also have male-pattern criminality.
Is that true? I wasn't aware.
According to the paper the report is based on, yes. See there under "Results:Gender Differences".
Armchair hypothesis from someone with no medical training: FTMs who start taking testosterone will see a big spike in athletic ability (testosterone is essentially a PED in this context). Adult MTFs who start hormone therapy will see a reduction in athletic ability, but they've already gone through male puberty and the changes that it wrought on their bodies (bone density, lung capacity) are pretty much hard-coded, so even though they'll have reduced athletic ability, it'll still be a lot closer to the male average than the female. And if you were already a professional athlete prior to commencing hormone therapy (e.g. Lia Thomas) your athletic ability was already dramatically higher than the male average: all hormone therapy will do is reduce it to something approximating the male average (or maybe within one standard deviation below), which is still radically higher than the female average (or even many professional female athletes).
There could be a similar mechanism at play when it comes to violent criminality. Adult FTMs who start taking testosterone will see a spike in aggression and hence become more prone to violent criminality. When adult MTFs start hormone therapy, their testosterone levels will reduce and they will see reduced levels of aggression as a result, but their testosterone levels might still be within one standard deviation below the male mean. Indeed, if you were already an unusually aggressive/violent man prior to starting hormone therapy, it probably meant that your testosterone levels were unusually high, so starting a hormone therapy regimen might only have reduced your testosterone levels to the male average or something approximating it.
The end result is that FTMs on hormones have significantly higher rates of violent criminality than the female average (i.e. more similar to the male average) and MTFs have rates of violent criminality which are maybe marginally lower than the male average, but this cashes out as a rounding error for most intents and purposes.
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I didn't look at those numbers, but someone compiled some stats showing it's actually higher:
https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1831735103082410239#m
Our own @ymeskhout wrote an article arguing that the stats on which this graph is based are being misinterpreted: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/contra-dolly-on-trans-criminality
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