Trans People and Crime: The Facts Behind the Disinformation Campaign
Right wing news outlets have repeatedly sought to link the trans community with violence and criminality. But what do we actually know about trans people and crime?
Analysis, by Mira Lazine
Opponents to transgender rights love to claim that trans people are violent, irredeemable criminals.
Take, for instance, a New York Post article sensationalizing an individual transmasculine sex offender. The phrasing of the headline and the emphasis placed on the individual’s transgender status are center points of the article, likely the main reason that it’s even on the New York Post to begin with.
A single person’s crimes are used to speak for an entire group, and while it isn’t explicitly said here, a casual viewer would likely come away with the impression that ‘trans people are mostly sex offenders.’
This can be seen in stories by Fox News, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and many more. The point of articles like these is not to showcase the facts, but to sensationalize either individual cases or cherry-picked statistics that might not support the claims in question.
Never mind the high rate of sexual abuse against cis female prisoners by other cis female prisoners and by staff, the safety of women prisoners isn’t the point. Making people afraid of trans women is.
We can see the political implications of this mindset when it gets expressed by public officials, such as Ohio Rep. Bill Dean (R), who called trans people “perverts.” Even worse is when public policy begins to mirror this rhetoric.
What is needed is a look at the actual evidence of transgender crime rates. Not sensationalist overviews of anecdotes or low quality data, but a sober, scientific look at what we know, and what we don’t.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much great data on that topic, especially not from representative samples. What is known is that the crimes trans people are more likely to be incarcerated for are ones like sex work, loitering, and drug use - not violent or sexual crimes. Stories on trans people in prison often employ tricks such as comparing trans people incarcerated for lengthy sentences (typically the most serious offenses, and the ones where trans people are most likely to be recorded as trans) with cis population data that includes shorter sentences and much more minor crimes.
We also know that trans affirming bathroom laws do not increase the rates of any crime.
Most studies on this topic are flawed due to small sample sizes, sampling bias, and numerous technicalities that limit generalizability of the data. This is seen with an infamous 2011 Swedish study that is frequently cited by anti-trans activists who claim it shows that trans people are more inclined to commit crimes and more inclined to commit suicide, even after gender reassignment surgery.
Erin Reed and Dr. Ruth Pearce in the UK have responded to these claims in depth, but to summarize them both, the Swedish study utilizes a rather small sample of trans people and only shows a higher likelihood of crime for one subgroup, and only a marginal risk at that. The authors of the study do not even support anti-trans conclusions - it’s a study that’s widely misrepresented.
In fact, when actual crime experts are brought into the picture, quite a different picture begins to emerge.
For instance, a common claim among the anti-trans crowd is that trans people are more likely to be mass shooters. However, as the Associated Press has shown, there are only a handful of examples of trans mass shooters, while there are thousands of cisgender mass shooters. There is, if anything, an underrepresentation of trans mass shooters as opposed to cis mass shooters.
And, no, testosterone does not cause transmasculine people to become mass shooters.
Cherry picking and misrepresenting social science data is rampant in right-wind coverage of this area as a whole. Take a study done from Canada’s federal prison system: Right-wing headlines claimed that the paper demonstrates a higher rate of sex offenders and violent offenders among trans prisoners. And yet, the study shows no such thing, and is much more cautious in its interpretations.
The study generally makes no comparison to cisgender individuals because they have no data on cisgender people. The data they do present - representative data of cisgender people and not directly comparable data - suggests the trans people in the sample serve, on average, longer sentences than cisgender people. Since trans people typically only out themselves to request accommodations during long sentences, they’re likely vastly overrepresented among the most severe offenders.
Also of note in this study is that 94% of offenders committed their offenses while they were living as their assigned gender at birth. This means that, whatever may be going on with this population of offenders who come out as trans while in prison, this has little to say about whether and at what rate out trans people commit crimes.They study also found that many of the trans people were requesting accommodations specifically in response to violence, and that few had their requests granted by the prison system.
One last example of this kind of analysis comes from the trans exclusionary radical feminist group, Fair Play for Women. They have made notorious claims that half of all incarcerated trans people in the U.K. are especially violent or are sex offenders.
However, this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. As an article by the BBC and an article by sociologist Kaylin Hamilton both point out, we do not have an accurate idea of how many trans people are incarcerated.
Trans people have many reasons they may not disclose their gender to prison staff, including fear of discrimination or being victimized. Those that do, primarily those that receive a case consultation for special accommodations, are the ones who get counted. As discussed with the Canadian study, these are typically those serving very long sentences, which normally means they’re imprisoned for more serious crimes.
Further complicating the situation, transgender people face an extremely high risk of being victimized by police - much higher than the cisgender baseline. Transgender people are more likely to be mistreated by police, and are more likely to be mistreated in the legal system by being disproportionately subject to laws surrounding HIV and laws criminalizing sex workers and homelessness in particular.
When we consider the intersection of one’s transgender status with race, we find that transgender Black and Indigenous people of color are much more likely to be targeted by police, and as such are overrepresented in jails and prisons. Remember the Canadian prison study? Indigenous people were overrepresented in it, and indigenous Canadians are known to be targeted by police.
Trans people are also more likely to be in poverty and homeless, which can lead to an involvement in criminalized sex work and drug use, with upwards of 14% of trans people having been arrested at some point in their lives. This can lead to fear in the prison system and, as discussed previously, incarcerated trans people are more likely to hide their identity for fears of safety. Trans people are also four times as likely as cisgender people to be the victims of violent crimes, and this includes sexual crimes.
Trans people who are on the sex offender registry are more likely to be incarcerated, face stronger police presence, and are even more likely to be charged for sodomy. These individuals also face much higher rates of violent victimization while behind bars.
Despite this, discussions about trans people and crime are almost always centered around cisgender individuals, prioritizing the alleged risk they face when confronted with transgender individuals. Transgender people’s marginalization and victimhood is ignored.
If we’re going to have honest discussions about transgender crime rates, then we need to center some of the most forgotten victims of physical and sexual assaults - transgender folk, in prison and outside.
Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist covering transgender issues, politics, and science. She can be found on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky, @MiraLazine
