41%

Partcipate in this debate long enough, and you’ll see the repeated claims that trans people attempt or commit suicide at extremely high rates. It’s used to browbeat opposition into submission. But where does it come from?

That 41% suicide statistic comes from a report done in 2014, based on data from 2008 in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, from the Williams Institute, part of UCLA School of Law. Here is a link to the William’s Institute report. Of course, they debunk their own statistic on the third page of the report. How convenient for me.

“While the NTDS provides a wealth of information about the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming people, the survey instrument and methodology posed some limitations for this study. First, the NTDS questionnaire included only a single item about suicidal behavior that asked, “Have you ever attempted suicide?” with dichotomized responses of Yes/No. Researchers have found that using this question alone in surveys can inflate the percentage of affirmative responses, since some respondents may use it to communicate self-harm behavior that is not a “suicide attempt,” such as seriously considering suicide, planning for suicide, or engaging in self-harm behavior without the intent to die (Bongiovi-Garcia et al., 2009). The National Comorbity Survey, a nationally representative survey, found that probing for intent to die through in-person interviews reduced the prevalence of lifetime suicide attempts from 4.6 percent to 2.7 percent of the adult sample (Kessler et al., 1999; Nock & Kessler, 2006). Without such probes, we were unable to determine the extent to which the 41 percent of NTDS participants who reported ever attempting suicide may overestimate the actual prevalence of attempts in the sample. In addition, the analysis was limited due to a lack of follow-up questions asked of respondents who reported having attempted suicide about such things as age and transgender/gender non-conforming status at the time of the attempt.”

Oh. It’s inflated. Because it was a binary question and may include all self-harm attempts. Studies done on those binary questions have shown that it can completely inflate your results.

Oh.

Worse is yet to come though.

“ Second, the survey did not directly explore mental health status and history, which have been identified as important risk factors for both attempted and completed suicide in the general population (Lasage, Boyer, Grunberg, Vanier, Morissett et al., 1994; Suominen, Henrikssen, Suokas, Isometsa, Ostamo, et al., 1996; Harris & Barraclough, 1997; Bertolote & Fleischmann, 2002; Nock, Hwang, Sampson, & Kessler, 2010). Further, research has shown that the impact of adverse life events, such as being attacked or raped, is most severe among people with co-existing mood, anxiety and other mental disorders (Breslau, Davis, Andreski, & Peterson, METHODS AND LIMITATIONS 4 Methods — continued 1991; Kendler, Kardowski, & Presco, 1999). The lack of systematic mental health information in the NTDS data significantly limited our ability to identify the pathways to suicidal behavior among the respondents”

They don’t know why the rate is so high — so you can’t say 41% of transgender people attempt suicide because of ‘lack of acceptance’ or ‘bathroom bills or ‘Donald Trump’. Because the study didn’t ask those questions. That would be the case even if the study didn’t have major methodological problems anyway:

Third, since the NTDS utilized convenience sampling, it is unclear how representative the respondents are of the overall U.S. transgender/gender non-conforming adult population. Further, the survey’s focus on discrimination may have resulted in wider participation by persons who had suffered negative life experiences due to antitransgender bias.1 As the relationship between minority stress and mental health would suggest (Meyer, 2003), this may have contributed to a higher prevalence of negative outcomes, including lifetime suicide attempts, in the sample. These limitations should be kept in mind in interpreting the findings of our analyses.

What’s a convenience sample? How is that a methodological flaw? Simply put: the results of a survey of a convenience sample are only relevant to that particular sample. How?

Say I asked ten friends about whether they liked purple hats. As it turns out, all those friends like purple hats. I cannot then go and say ‘one-hundred per cent of people like purple hats’. I only asked my friends — maybe we all belong to the Purple Hat Club. Convenience sampling introduces too much bias for results to be meaningful outside of the sample itself.

In fact let’s have this paper in Developmental Review explain it better than I can, because you can’t use a convenience sample like that:

“Regarding its disadvantages, results that derive from convenience sampling have known generalizability only to the sample studied. Thus, any research question addressed by this strategy is limited to the sample itself. The same limitation holds true for estimates of differences between sociodemographic subgroups. As another disadvantage, convenience samples typically include small numbers of underrepresented sociodemographic subgroups (e.g., ethnic minorities) resulting in insufficient power to detect subgroup differences within a sociodemographic factor or factors. Moreover, although small in number, these underrepresented sociodemographic subgroups introduce modest amounts of variation into the sample, enough variation to produce statistical noise in the analyses but not enough variation to harness or control statistically. Indeed, the widespread use of convenience sampling may be partly responsible for the host of small and inconsistent effects that pervade developmental science, why sizes of effects often vary depending on the variables considered, and why research shows links between particular setting conditions and outcomes for some, but not other, groups”

That 41% stat is bogus. As is everything else in the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey. I’ve officially debunked it. Well done me. Unfortunately, that will not stop the effects of citing its statistics for a decade even though it used a convenience sample and you can’t generalize those statistics to the broader transgender population.

Sigh.

The most disturbing thing about all of this? You can find the description of the study’s methodology on page three. It literally takes some basic curiosity and five minutes, to find out that 41% statistic is statistical noise and not representative of the transgender community. To find that out, I Googled the statistic, and the report was the first result. I then read the PDF.

That is all the effort it took to point out that this statistic is a load of crap. It didn’t stop the media citing it, or activists citing it to policymakers though.

Instead, those groups use it frequently, despite the fact it’s a statistical artifact. It’s been cited to policymakers — and its horseshit. The suicide statistic is a false number used to deceive and scare people.

Yet another scare stat — like the fake murder epidemic.

Fake News And Murder Statistics

We’re often told that there’s a transgender murder epidemic: that trans women are the most likely demographic to be murdered, and therefore the most oppressed, and so on.

I decided to verify this, and GLAAD (which is, remember, an acronym now devoid of meaning. How’s that for symbolism?) gave me the answers. How many homicides of American transgender people were there in 2016? I am sure you are waiting with bated breath for some kind of titanic, earth shattering number that will have you click ‘exit tab’, and bitch about my bullshit article on Twitter. Okay, here it is:

27.

That’s not a typo. It really is 27. The number of total murders in the US in 2016? 17,250, and disproportionately trending black and male. 27 is 0.15% of murders in the US. In terms of figures, the Williams Foundation did a survey and estimated the number of trans people at 0.6% of the US population. The US population is estimated at 325 million at time of writing, which results in a figure of 1.95 million trans people across America.

We’ll take 1.95 million Americans. If we figure how many trans people are victims of murder a year as a percentage, that figure is 0.0013%. Per capita,that’s a ratio of 1.3 trans people murdered per 100,000. The murder rate of women in the US is triple that, and of men, quadruple. Even with an extremely conservative estimate of 0.1% of the US population (or 325,000 trans people), we have a murder rate of 8.3 per 100,000. The murder rate of Chicago is twice that conservative figure at 16.02 people murdered per 100,000. In terms of gross numbers — that’s 11,535 murders of male Americans, and 3,292 murders of female Americans in 2017. 27 is small potatoes. That is not a murder epidemic — in fact it’s a murder rate per capita lower than Canada. It certainly doesn’t mean that there’s an ‘epidemic of transphobic violence’. That’s not something to campaign about — you’ve got it better than literally everyone else. Even if we use the Human Rights Campaign estimate of 750,000 trans people, which is half the 0.6% number, we get a murder rate of 2.7 per 100,000. That’s not a high murder rate. That’s lower than every other demographic in the US.

We are told, that supposedly, 1,700 trans people have been murdered worldwide over the last seven years in this article on Buzzfeed. Your eyes immediately drift to the ‘1,700’ figure, and don’t see the 7 years, do they? That’s why I bolded it. It’s fairly obvious statistical sleight of hand. If we take the 0.6% estimate of trans people in the US and apply it globally to a population of 7 billion people, we get 42 million people. 1,700 divided by seven years gives us a grand total of 242 murders a year. That amounts to 0.003 murders per capita of trans people, worldwide, every year. That’s definitely not an epidemic. In fact, that’s a global murder rate lower than every other category on earth. The murder rate per capita of unicycle-riding clowns is probably higher. To #StopTransMurders would be to eliminate homicide for an entire group of people, which no nation has been able to accomplish. Ever.

Maybe you think 42 million trans people on this earth is too big a number. So, we’ll make the figure 5 million people. A murder rate of 242 per year of a group of 5 million people is still a per capita rate of 4.84 — roughly similar to the US overall murder rate of 4.7. And that’s with a hugely conservative number that I literally pulled out of thin air. All these figures say the same thing — there is no trans murder epidemic — and philanthropic groups and their funded organizations supporting trans rights and sympathetic media have to perform statistical sleight of hand to even make such a proposal look even the slightest bit true. For comparison, the highest murder rate in the world belongs to Honduras, which had 90.4 homicides per 100,000 in 2017. That’s a violent epidemic. To add — the majority of those 27 killed? Black prostitutes. No middle-aged white trans women were killed at all (though some did commit murders) yet they are the ones bleating about #StopTransMurders and working in activist organizations. And the sex-work and transgender lobby does not seem to care about those vulnerable prostitutes, beyond using their names and deaths as a political prop.

If you’re wondering about the gay and lesbian side of things, rather than the transgender epidemic that doesn’t exist, yet is talked about so heavily, the FBI reports in its latest Hate Crimes report state that 16.7% of hate crimes were motivated by sexual orientation. 1.7% were motivated by gender-identity bias. Of the 1,255 victims targeted by sexual orientation, 62.7% were anti-gay male, 21.6% were LGBT (mixed group), and 11.7% targeted towards lesbians. There were 131 victims of ‘gender identity-bias’, 20 of whom were simply ‘gender-non-conforming’. In terms of hate crimes (which is criminal offenses carried out motivated by bias, not necessarily violent) gay men are disproportionately over-represented among the LGBT. That’s an actual disproportionate epidemic of violence — rather than the trans murder epidemic that doesn’t exist.

When was the last time you saw that on BuzzFeed?

But this is not the only ‘transgender murder epidemic’ article on Buzzfeed. The author of that article on Buzzfeed I just linked you, Dominic Holden, wrote a feature entitled Why Are Black Transgender Women Getting Killed In Detroit that uses the same sleight of hand, saying that the murder rate has ‘doubled’ yet doesn’t give you a number. I looked into the source it cited, and the murder rate doubled from 12 murders to 24 murders. That figure comes from the National Coalition Of Anti-Violence Programs, counting between Transgender Days of Remembrance. That’s an even lower figure than the GLAAD data! And it is not just Buzzfeed doing this. A quick Google search leads to more repeating of the ‘trans murder rate is so high it’s an epidemic’ meme . In fact, I googled ‘trans murder epidemic’ and got 535,000 results from Wikipedia, to the Human Rights Campaign, to ‘America’s transgender murder epidemic: why is nothing being done?’ from a UK website called ‘Blasting News’. It even appears as the beginning of the National LGBTQ Task Force’s 2016 annual report, highlighting its #StopTransMurders campaign. But the facts and figures say there isn’t an epidemic. Rather the opposite — trans people have the world’s best murder statistics, as a group. The ‘epidemic’ is easily debunked using LGBTQI+ groups’ own statistics. The trans murder rate is a false meme worthy of inclusion in a late 90’s chain email promising you the truth about Bill Clinton and Whitewater. It’s literal fake news.

The statistics aren’t the only fake news on this matter. Journalist Andy Ngo recently wrote about the queer community faking hate crimes in Portland, including a trans woman who said they had been attacked by thugs with bats, and started a GoFundMe to support themselves, but later turned out to have fallen over while intoxicated:

“Last month, Sophia Gabrielle Stanford was at the center of a fundraising campaign. The GoFundMe page described the trans activist as a victim of a “brutal and aggressively blatant hate crime” in which assailants had beaten her unconscious with a bat in southeast Portland. The campaign and shocking story went viral. However, the police reports raise questions about what happened that night. In the early hours of Sunday, Feb. 10, emergency services received a call about a woman, identified as Stanford, found on a sidewalk with scrapes on her face and knuckles, claiming that she may have been assaulted. The responding officer, Edgar Mitchell, noted that Stanford smelled of alcohol. “I asked [Officer Zachary Roe] what happened,” the report states. “Roe said the individual admitted to being intoxicated, and Roe believed the person fell and hit her head.” Stanford either could not or would not state her name to the police. The responding officer was unable to discover Stanford’s name and claims that she made a threat: “If you don’t treat me right, my people will get you,” she said, according to the report. The report also states that Stanford lost a pistol and bag she was carrying at the time of the alleged attack. A local resident found both items and flagged down another officer, Cuong Nguyen. When Nguyen attempted to return the gun to Stanford at nearby Emanuel Hospital, where she had been transported, she was already discharged. The GoFundMe page stated that Stanford had suffered a “serious concussion” and would need intensive physical therapy, CT scans and counseling”

Using fake statistics only fuels things like this — GoFundMe scams and wasting police time. I don’t have time for graft. Do you?

Oh, I forgot, and fueling a fire that doesn’t need to be fueled — all this sort of thing does is promote an unnecessary moral panic.

Bad Stats Help Nobody

The thing I always ask myself when I see these sorts of things, is well, why? Why overstate, misinterpret, or flat out lie? Why not have a survey with a rigorous, objective method of data collection?

The trans movement has a data problem. It has a data problem with its medicine, and it has a data problem with its prison statistics, its ‘murder epidemic’, and even its suicide statistics. Where it doesn’t have data, it appropriates the statistics of gays and lesbians, as we see with homelessness statistics — where 40% of homeless youth being ‘LGBT’ slowly turns into ‘40% of homeless youth are trans’, despite the fact that 39% of that 40% aren’t transgender at all. Talk about gay and lesbian erasure — they don’t even get to have their own statistics any more, even when they’re not very good ones!

There are a variety of hypotheses that come to mind for me when I attempt to answer ‘why?’. One is that an actual study that wasn’t a complete mess would show statistics that the transgender movement wouldn’t like to hear, or have the public see. They could undermine their narrative and send their movement reeling. Actually, come to think about it, this is the only hypothesis I have. It certainly explains the flat out dishonesty of the transgender movement. It is not as if the transgender movement is lacking in money. Surely the over $300,000 spent on the NCTE survey could have been put to better use than an online survey and a glossy brochure.

Because if we look at the statistics we do have, the transgender movement and it’s claims are clearly undermined — and that’s a problem. Unless they’re hideously oppressed, demands to completely undermine the concept of ‘sex’ in the legal system might be sensibly ignored by policymakers. Instead, because they’re so oppressed, because the ‘statistics’ say so, the transgender movement gets a seat at the identity politics table.

It needs to stop. Now. These claims aren’t backed by hard data. They’re barely backed by any data at all. Before we make changes that could permanently sterilize children and erase gays and lesbians from their own movement, we should really have a better idea of why the transgender movement wants those things.