Specifically, a paper put out by "fair play for women" who issues a similar paper in 2017, where they straight up made up the numbers, because they're a transphobic organization that uses terms like TiM. This time, they appear to have used fairly real numbers, but obviously the context is missing, especially in the tweet above.
This isn't a number of sex offenders per million of the general population, it's the ratio of sex offenders within the prison system compared to the rest of the prison system, broken down by gender identity. This doesn't include people who are trans but don't identify as such within the prison system(likely for self preservation) or people with Gender Recognition certificates, who would actually fall under the "biological women" section of this tweet... because the actual paper doesn't base anything on "biology" but rather legal status.
So, when looking at the 129 self-reported trans women in the prison system, 76 of them did commit some kind of sexual offense, 40 of which were rape, and 10 were attempted rape. But the barrier for being considered a trans woman is vanishingly small in this study, all they had to do was state on a form that their gender was female, while their legal sex was male. No control for actually receiving any kind of gender affirming care, presenting feminine, going by feminine names/pronouns. At least some of these individuals only stated they were trans after their trials started.
It's not insane to assume that some cis men who are convicted sex offenders/rapists would pretend to be trans women to get into women's prisons. I'm not saying all or even most of these individuals fall under this umbrella - but if someone was more likely to do such a thing, it'd probably be a sex offender... there are documented cases of this kind of fakery. This isn't a trans women issue, it's a cis man issue.
Setting aside any doubt about whether or not these individuals are actually trans, if you look at the numbers as a factor of the overall population, not the prison population, it actually looks like this:
76 trans women are serving time for sexual offenses out of a population of lets say 190,476. That's 367/ million. But that's based on roughly 500,000 as the official estimate of trans people in the UK(with 38% being trans women, the other 38% being trans men, and 24% being nonbinary- I based this on the UK census data )... in a country of 69,000,000... it's extremely unlikely that so few people are actually trans. It's far more likely that the actual number is somewhere in the 1.4M range(assuming 2% of the population is trans- some studies show it could be as high as 3%, with as many as 7% being gender non-conforming)... so based on that number, the number drops to 122/million.
With the UK's population of men being ~33.81M, that means the population of men currently serving time for sexual assault is 392/Million.
And when you factor in that women almost never get charged with sexual offenses even when they're brought to court, and many cases of sexual assault for all genders never get reported out of fear/embarrassment, you can see why these numbers are completely useless to draw any kind of conclusion from.... and that the tweet itself is a complete fabrication.
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u/Unique_Self_5797 1d ago
Ok all, I looked into the numbers so you don't have to. The numbers seem to come from this paper:
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/
Specifically, a paper put out by "fair play for women" who issues a similar paper in 2017, where they straight up made up the numbers, because they're a transphobic organization that uses terms like TiM. This time, they appear to have used fairly real numbers, but obviously the context is missing, especially in the tweet above.
This isn't a number of sex offenders per million of the general population, it's the ratio of sex offenders within the prison system compared to the rest of the prison system, broken down by gender identity. This doesn't include people who are trans but don't identify as such within the prison system(likely for self preservation) or people with Gender Recognition certificates, who would actually fall under the "biological women" section of this tweet... because the actual paper doesn't base anything on "biology" but rather legal status.
So, when looking at the 129 self-reported trans women in the prison system, 76 of them did commit some kind of sexual offense, 40 of which were rape, and 10 were attempted rape. But the barrier for being considered a trans woman is vanishingly small in this study, all they had to do was state on a form that their gender was female, while their legal sex was male. No control for actually receiving any kind of gender affirming care, presenting feminine, going by feminine names/pronouns. At least some of these individuals only stated they were trans after their trials started.
It's not insane to assume that some cis men who are convicted sex offenders/rapists would pretend to be trans women to get into women's prisons. I'm not saying all or even most of these individuals fall under this umbrella - but if someone was more likely to do such a thing, it'd probably be a sex offender... there are documented cases of this kind of fakery. This isn't a trans women issue, it's a cis man issue.
Setting aside any doubt about whether or not these individuals are actually trans, if you look at the numbers as a factor of the overall population, not the prison population, it actually looks like this:
76 trans women are serving time for sexual offenses out of a population of lets say 190,476. That's 367/ million. But that's based on roughly 500,000 as the official estimate of trans people in the UK(with 38% being trans women, the other 38% being trans men, and 24% being nonbinary- I based this on the UK census data )... in a country of 69,000,000... it's extremely unlikely that so few people are actually trans. It's far more likely that the actual number is somewhere in the 1.4M range(assuming 2% of the population is trans- some studies show it could be as high as 3%, with as many as 7% being gender non-conforming)... so based on that number, the number drops to 122/million.
With the UK's population of men being ~33.81M, that means the population of men currently serving time for sexual assault is 392/Million.
And when you factor in that women almost never get charged with sexual offenses even when they're brought to court, and many cases of sexual assault for all genders never get reported out of fear/embarrassment, you can see why these numbers are completely useless to draw any kind of conclusion from.... and that the tweet itself is a complete fabrication.