The Statistic No One's Allowed To Study

Why are so many transgender prisoners sex offenders?

MARY HARRINGTON

A Detroit billboard educating passers-by on what they’re allowed to notice

Another day, another new report showing that half of trans prisoners are sex offenders.

The report, obtained via a 2022 public records request to Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections, shows that of the 161 men in Wisconsin jails who self-reported as transender, 81 (50.3%) were sex offenders.

This figure is borne out scross the English-speaking world. In 2017, the UK feminist group Fair Play for Women showed via Freedom of Information requests that roughly half of the trans-identified male prisoners in the United Kingdom were sex offenders.

Was this a blip? Was it a misleading statistic, based on too small a sample? The BBC’s “fact check” team did their best to make this seem plausible. In the intervening years, though, figures dragged from other prison services around the Anglosphere show data that are startlingly consistent with the 2017 British report:

• Numbers from Canada, revealed earlier this year, showing that nearly half (44 percent) of trans-identified Canadian male prisoners are in jail for sexual offences.

• Data from the US Bureau of Prisons, via the US feminist campaign group Keep Prisons Single Sex, show that across the USA, 47% of male trans-identified inmates are sex offenders.

So what’s going on here?

The 50% figure argues forcefully against the trans activist claim that trans women are women in every meaningful way. The 2022 UK Census reported that 262,000 people in Britain identify as trans: around 0.5% of the population. Meanwhile, fewer than 150 women in total are in prison in Britain for sex offences, despite representing half the overall population.

If trans women really were indistinguishable from women, they’d barely show up in Britain’s sex offender statistics. In fact, if this were the case you’d expect most of the trans prison population to be there for theft or TV licence evasion, as is the case with, y’know, women women.

But that’s not what we see. Analysis shows, for example, that out of the total population of sex offenders registered as women in 2019, trans-identified males made up around 38% of the total: definitely a higher figure than you’d expect if this were a representative proportion of trans individuals, let alone of women.

The figure looks more proportional if you accept the blasphemous premise that trans women are men. Overall, sex offenders almost always are men: figures vary, but usually suggest around 90 percent. Now, in Britain, sex offenders make up around 18% of the prison population: 11,873 prisoners as of September 2021. So if around 60 of these identify as women, that’s about 0.5%: in line with overall figures for the UK trans population.

So we might say: ok, let’s concede that trans women are men. This figure isn’t so shocking after all, then? A proportion of trans-identified men will be sex offenders, simply because a proportion of men unfortunately are. Of course it follows from this that we’d have to acknowledge the wrongfulness of incarcerating trans-identified criminal men in women’s prisons, rather than with other men: a policy now in place in numerous jurisdictions to often grotesque effect.

But even this contextualised (and, for trans activists, already heretical) moderate position doesn’t explain the prevalence of sex offenders in the overall trans-identified offender profile. Sex offenders make up 18% of the UK prison population, as already noted, but consistently around 50% of trans-identified prisoners. Even accepting the blasphemous-but-true premise that trans women are men, if trans identity had no bearing on the offender profile you’d expect a larger proportion to be in for theft (29% of the prison population) or drug offences (21%).

But that’s not what we’re seeing. Why is this? Why are so many of the transgender prisoners currently in jail there for sexual offences? Of all the reasons a man might break the law and end up in prison, why does so large a proportion of that subset of law-breaking men that identifies as the opposite sex turn out to be rapists, child-molesters, and the like?

I can think of a number of hypotheses, most of which are even more blasphemous than stating that trans women are men. It could be, for example, that "becoming" the opposite sex is, for some, the ultimate challenge to sexual norms. And if you enjoy challenging sexual norms there might be others (such as consent, or age ranges) you also enjoy challenging.

Or it might be that autogynephilia is not in fact “debunked” but a real paraphilia - in other words, that for at least some trans-identified males, their identity is a sexual fetish. Paraphilias tend to cluster, meaning that if an individual has one fetish, they may have others. And, much as with challenging sexual norms, some fetishes can’t be realised without breaking the law.

Perhaps the explanation is something altogether more innocent. Is this just transphobic oppression of sex workers? A report last year on MoJ data suggests not. Of the 97 trans prisoners in UK jails in 2022, 44 were jailed for rape and a further 14 for sexual offences related to children. Not exactly the multiply-oppressed street martyrs of activist mythology.

Or perhaps the 50% statistic is somehow a quirk of the data. It could be, for example, that the subset of sexual predators who are transgender is just unusually bad at evading detection for some reason. I can’t imagine what might excite suspicion about someone who looks like (say) “Lisa” Hauxwell, but maybe that’s transphobia for you.

Whatever that explanation is, discovering the truth would take proper sociological, criminological and psychological research. If academic freedom were still a thing (if it ever was), criminologists and other social studies academics would be doing this research. But unfortunately the vast majority of this apparatus has long been tacitly focused on rubber-stamping progressive ideology; increasingly, too, such institutions explicitly exclude anyone unwilling to make a formal commitment to this worldview.

And for this worldview, transgender people are a sacred caste. So we’ll probably never know why sex offenders are so well-represented, across the Anglosphere, in the transgender prison population. And we mustn’t ask.

Source: Reactionary Feminist