The politics of risk
So Owen Jones, speaking at the Pink News awards, spoke of homophobia and transphobia. And indeed. All minorities are at some point judged by their very worst members. It is a useful rule of thumb that a group of people that is mainstream will be perceived based on its average member, whilst a group that is not mainstream will be stereotyped by their outliers. Hence, Muslims being associated with Muslim extremists whilst Christians are with a regular church-going couple. Hence, also, trans people being associated with a small fringe of sex offenders and other criminals who happen to be transgender.
The new Gender Recognition Reform in Scotland, which aims to make allow transgender people to have their status legally recognised without a medical diagnosis brought the question of risk to the fore, with Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, repeatedly asked whether this bill was ‘affecting the safety of women and girls’.
Risk is always a big subject in discussions of the rights of trans people, in particular of trans women. As women, many of them feel they should use the single-sex spaces — bathrooms, changing rooms and the single-sex services — such as women’s refuges — of the female sex. The so-called gender-critical feminists, who do not recognise any gender beside the natal sex, argue that this should not be allowed, due to the risk that the trans women may pose.
Problematically, data on trans offending is scarce. Transgender people are not very numerous, meaning the numbers of transgender criminals are very few—there were just 197 trans prisoners in the UK in 2021 (see page 2,7). More problematically still, the total UK transgender population is known only very approximately (it is estimated to be several hundred thousand people), so we cannot find the precise percentage of the UK trans population those 197 people form. And so, the risk is quite hard to evaluate based on data for offending by trans women. One can reasonably conclude that the risk to a given individual from a trans person is not high — if only because the UK’s transgender population is not high — compared to the risk from cisgender men.
A secondary narrative is that cis men will pretend to be trans women in order to ‘gain access’ to women in lavatories and changing rooms in order to commit a crime — the argument made to Sturgeon by Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women. She claimed that the legislation:
“would potentially open the door for violent males who identify as men to abuse the process of acquiring a gender certificate and the rights that are associated with it. This presents potential risks to the safety of women in all their diversity.”
First of all, it is difficult to see how having everyone using the lavatory corresponding to their natal sex would to solve this problem: if bearded trans men would now have to use the women’s loo, this would give those hypothetical ‘violent males’ the same possibilities for impersonation. (The gender criticals claim they can always tell who is cis and who is trans, but the frequency with which natal women are mistaken by them for men in lavatories suggests that is not the case.) Secondly, there is little evidence from either the UK or the 18 countries that have allowed self-ID — an ability to declare one’s own gender without certification from a doctor — of this impersonation happening. Anecdotal evidence of both kinds of offences (by trans women and by cis men whilst impersonating trans women) in the ‘women’s spaces’ does exist, making the risk non-zero, but no hard data is available.
The gender criticals reply that no matter how low the risk, if it is non-zero, then all ‘men’ (this is how they call trans women) should be excluded from women’s lavatories and changing rooms. ‘Sorry. Our safety trumps men’s feelings’. Then that word ‘safeguarding’ comes out. Supposedly, you can treat law-abiding transgender people like criminals and exclude them because of the need to ‘safeguard’.
It’s not an easy argument to counter, because if you do speak up for trans people, you are immediately accused of putting ‘women and girls’ at risk (they always add the girls, for extra emphasis, knowing full well that children are an emotive subject: in the same way homophobes used to talk up the dangers to children from gay men in the changing room back in the 80s), with subsequent accusations of misogyny and ‘not listening to women’.
Then you think, this sounds familiar. Very familiar. Where have I heard this argument before? Of course. In the aftermath of 9–11 and Iraq, and for many years afterwards, when feelings against Muslims ran high, many fringe figures were calling for a ban on Muslim immigration. In fact, Trump even introduced it in the US for a few countries. The argument? That we do not know the ‘good Muslims’ from bad. That extremists will pretend to be secular Muslims to radicalise and commit acts of violence. That even one death from Muslim terrorism in the West was too many and why were you so unkind to the victims of terrorism. That restricting rights was worth it for ‘safeguarding’. All this despite more cows killing people in the US than terrorists.
Sturgeon’s own defence is to say that ‘most men who want to abuse women do not need to change their gender’. She was slated for this: the counter-argument was that this will now start happening in Scotland because transition is being made so easy. (Once again, hypothetical tall tales are being used to attack a minority). But here’s what Sturgeon really meant: instead of restricting attention it to a particular, very limited, set of situations where the available data suggests the risks are low, should we not focus on lowering the total risk to women?
Indeed, what about all the other places women are at risk, from cis men? The town centre on the night out. The taxi on the way home. The home itself — where a lot of the violence against women occurs. The workplace. Why no talk of limiting rights for the sake of safeguarding there? Men, cis men, routinely attack women in all of those — so why are we not seeking to ban male taxi drivers, male supervisors, male priests? Why doesn’t ‘safety trump men’s feelings’ in those scenarios? The actual number of attacks on women in those settings far, far outnumbers those in ‘single-sex spaces’, and yet we accept this level of risk.
Discrimination can work like that. In the situations that the discriminated are highly likely to find themselves in (such as a trans woman in a women’s changing room), the safety aspect is stressed. Constant demands for total elimination of risk are made. The person making the demands, however, is perfectly happy to accept non-zero, sometimes significant, levels of risk elsewhere. They don’t seem to mind the fact that the same people they are claiming to protect have to endure terrible levels of risk in other situations. The ‘acceptable trade-off’ between on one hand risk to women and on the other restriction of rights of men and trans-women is set at a different, much lower, risk level in situations vital to trans women to exist. That is a sure sign people suggesting this do not care about decreasing risk — they only care about discriminating.
They rely on the public perception of risk being highly imperfect. Simply put, we care far more about risk in certain scenarios than in others. The most obvious example is the way we insist on very high levels of safety for airline travel but far less stringent levels on the road: statistically it is far safer to fly than to travel by car, and yet in public perception it is the air crashes that loom large. Likewise, ‘a man in a bathroom’ is an emotive scenario that calls for increasingly draconian measures to rule out, whilst the more ‘mundane’ attacks on women in other scenarios are much less so.
Even if we were to agree that ‘trans women are just men’ and ‘all men pose the same risk’, the discrimination aspect does not go away. Imagine we disproportionately cared about risk in scenarios likely to involve Jewish men. Imagine assault in a space Jewish men were likely to use attracted headlines and intense social media debate, with calls for more segregation between the sexes in those, but identical assault in other spaces did not. We would be quite rightly calling it out as antisemitic. By the same token, continuously highlighting the few assaults in spaces trans women were likely to use, demanding action in only those scenarios (whilst giving lip service to the others but not talking about them much), is transphobic.
If our aim were to make women safer across the board, we surely would not be focusing on a few scenarios in which they could be in danger ‘in the women’s spaces’. We would be seeking to make them safe across the board, over every scenario. That means making the law a stronger deterrent and dealing with a misogynistic culture among cis men, not least in the police as recent events have shown. It means pushing for a reversal to Tory funding cuts of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) enabling it to prosecute more crimes against women, a vital campaign that is currently totally obscured in the media by the anti-trans hysteria.
As Sturgeon also points out that is the most frustrating part of the whole debate: that we are constantly arguing over a niche issue whilst far more important women’s rights issues, affecting far more women, receive very little attention.