Would this kind of lecture be transphobic?

[Anonymous]

This is a hypothetical situation. A college professor does a lesson with the class titled "AMAB violence against AFABs".

The lesson stars with statistics written on the smart board slides which the professor reads aloud such as "1 in 3 AFABs have been a victim of AMAB sexual violence" and "every day around the world, 133 AFABs are killed by an AMAB intimate partner".

The professor then plays the next series of slides. Each slide contains an actual case or sometimes multiple cases of rape, murder, sexual harassment or other violent crimes. Each slide contains a photo and age of the perpetrator, the crime they committed, what they were charged with (if applicable) and the country, city/state or province where they committed the crime, as well as the ages of the victims. Some slides contained photos of the victims.

In all the example cases, the perpetrators were AMAB and age 21+. Most were cis men, some were trans women and some were non-binary. All the victims in the example cases were AFAB and all ages. Most were cis women/girls, some were trans men/boys, some were non-binary and a few were too young to state their gender identity. The professor does not misgender any of the perpetrators or victims in the slides. The professor always uses the preferred pronouns or otherwise the pronouns that match their gender identities. In the end of the lesson, the professor states to the class that AMAB violence against AFABs is a widespread problem that needs to be addressed.

[Anonymous]

Why would this be transphobic? Are you a troll?

[Anonymous]

Were the numbers of trans women perpetrators disproportional to the numbers of trans women in the population? Disproportional to the proportion of trans women who are perpetrators of this kind of violence? IOW, if one in one ten thousand perpetrators of violence against women are trans women, was this showing two in twenty?

If so, I'd question why the lecturer was leaning into the so-called "gender critical" talking points which I find to be transphobic.

It feels like a whole lot of belaboring of the position of trans women as perpetrators (and why is there no mention of violence AGAINST transwomen, which is widespread?)

[Anonymous]

No sounds very academic

[Anonymous]

Doesn’t matter if actual facts are presented - if it’s anything that could remotely be interpreted as shining a negative light on trans people, true or not, it’s transphobic. At least in this current climate.

[Anonymous]

It sounds like you're trying to call trans women men without actually coming out and saying it.

It's also weird that you would have a hypothetical lecture like this. Are you a professor of gender studies?

[Anonymous]

As a woman I don’t like it when, for example, any AMAB violence against AFABs is represented as “female against female” violence, regardless of the gender identity of the perpetrator. For example, there have been some pretty egregious crimes committed by trans women in female prisons against AFAB prisoners. These are especially egregious because IMO those particular perpetrators should not have been in a women’s prison to begin with.

However, trans women AMABs committing violence on AFABs are a pretty small number of people and a small percentage of AMABs committing violence on AFABs overall. So it would be hard for the presentation to not seem like the trans women AMABs were cherry-picked to make a point unless the presentation had thousands of examples, which would be an absurdly long presentation. So it would be hard for such a presentation not to appear transphobic, or at least having to be bent and twisted to try to make a point that would be better made another way.

[Anonymous]

Huh? I don't know, but this would be a super weird way to discuss violence considering the very small number of trans people in the world.

[Anonymous]

What’safab amab?

[Anonymous]

Assigned Female at Birth / Assigned Male at Birth. Technical terms to be precise when having sex/gender related conversations, to avoid making assumptions one way or another.

The lecture described in the OP smells a lot like the #NotOurCrimes propaganda that down-the-rabbit-hole people like JK Rowling promote. The aim is to argue that violence is a male trait that AMAB m2f trans people have, while ignoring violence by AFAB people and non-violence by AMAB trans people.

There is room for academic research into violence broken down by sex and gender demographics, and to investigate violence reduction strategies that benefit from customization by sex and gender, but context matters, and ideologically driven searches for evidence to support a pre-decided conclusion is junk science.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a woman I don’t like it when, for example, any AMAB violence against AFABs is represented as “female against female” violence, regardless of the gender identity of the perpetrator. For example, there have been some pretty egregious crimes committed by trans women in female prisons against AFAB prisoners. These are especially egregious because IMO those particular perpetrators should not have been in a women’s prison to begin with.

However, trans women AMABs committing violence on AFABs are a pretty small number of people and a small percentage of AMABs committing violence on AFABs overall. So it would be hard for the presentation to not seem like the trans women AMABs were cherry-picked to make a point unless the presentation had thousands of examples, which would be an absurdly long presentation. So it would be hard for such a presentation not to appear transphobic, or at least having to be bent and twisted to try to make a point that would be better made another way.

Thank you for putting your finger on what made me uncomfortable about this idea.

To OP: I think if you want to approach gendered violence in a way that both respects gender identity but also does not exclude crimes committed by or against trans people, it would make more sense to group the presentation more granularly — cisman to ciswoman violence, cisman to cisman, cis woman to ciswoman, cisman to trans man, trans man to nb, etc. and discussing how common that violence was in comparison to the groups’ representation in the greater population and also highlighting studies about underreporting — for example I would assume men (trans and cis) are probably less likely to report violence they experience for example due to both culture notions of masculinity and the unlikelihood they’ll be believed by law enforcement but I don’t actually have any data to back that up and think it would be helpful to this kind of conversation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It sounds like you're trying to call trans women men without actually coming out and saying it.

It's also weird that you would have a hypothetical lecture like this. Are you a professor of gender studies?

DP

That may be true, but it's also the technically correct way to discuss and investigate similarities between AMAB f2m transgender people and AMAB cisgender people.
It could come from bad faith, but it is the best way to have a civil conversation between people of did opinions, about a delicate topic, using precise, neutral terminology.

It would be bad faith to push a claim that f2m transgender people are scientifically indistinguishable from cisgender female people and have nothing in common with cisgender male people.

Someone can be non-transphobic while still believing that sex and gender are more complicated, and need different social rules, than "everyone is male or female, and their assignment is an individual choice, and everything should continue to operate under the same rules as before sex and gender had any distinction, when any ambiguity or inconsistency was pretended to not exist."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It sounds like you're trying to call trans women men without actually coming out and saying it.

It's also weird that you would have a hypothetical lecture like this. Are you a professor of gender studies?

DP

That may be true, but it's also the technically correct way to discuss and investigate similarities between AMAB f2m transgender people and AMAB cisgender people.
It could come from bad faith, but it is the best way to have a civil conversation between people of did opinions, about a delicate topic, using precise, neutral terminology.

It would be bad faith to push a claim that f2m transgender people are scientifically indistinguishable from cisgender female people and have nothing in common with cisgender male people.

Someone can be non-transphobic while still believing that sex and gender are more complicated, and need different social rules, than "everyone is male or female, and their assignment is an individual choice, and everything should continue to operate under the same rules as before sex and gender had any distinction, when any ambiguity or inconsistency was pretended to not exist."

I would be more interested in a presentation discussing the fact that almost all mass shooters are men. No binary trans women have been mass shooters. AMAB nonbinary and AFAB nonbinary and AFAB binary men has been mass shooters. No AMAB binary trans woman has been one. That's an interesting thing that needs to be researched.

[Anonymous]

It's misogyny. It's splitting unnecessary hairs.

Listen: trans women are women. A subset of women. When you're talking about them being victims of domestic violence, or violence done by men, they're women.

Listen: trans women are men. A subset of men. When you're talking about the violence acts they commit against other women, trans or not.

Both of these statements are true. Obfuscating this with jargon like "Amab" is dangerous because it adds a level of remove to the simple fact that's been true since the beginning of time: the majority of physical crimes against women are committed by men.

Why? A good question with many answers, and one for which no one has established any solution.

It's also true that a great deal of the time, trans men are men when they commit violence, and women when they are victims.

Does this logic explain every violent incident? Of course not. Nothing about violence, or gender id absolute. All we can do is look at patterns and statistics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It sounds like you're trying to call trans women men without actually coming out and saying it.

It's also weird that you would have a hypothetical lecture like this. Are you a professor of gender studies?

DP

That may be true, but it's also the technically correct way to discuss and investigate similarities between AMAB f2m transgender people and AMAB cisgender people.
It could come from bad faith, but it is the best way to have a civil conversation between people of did opinions, about a delicate topic, using precise, neutral terminology.

It would be bad faith to push a claim that f2m transgender people are scientifically indistinguishable from cisgender female people and have nothing in common with cisgender male people.

Someone can be non-transphobic while still believing that sex and gender are more complicated, and need different social rules, than "everyone is male or female, and their assignment is an individual choice, and everything should continue to operate under the same rules as before sex and gender had any distinction, when any ambiguity or inconsistency was pretended to not exist."

I would be more interested in a presentation discussing the fact that almost all mass shooters are men. No binary trans women have been mass shooters. AMAB nonbinary and AFAB nonbinary and AFAB binary men has been mass shooters. No AMAB binary trans woman has been one. That's an interesting thing that needs to be researched.

T is one hell of a drug. That's a scientific fact.