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coochiequeens · 1 month ago

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It's also morphed from what was the rate of suicide attempts to just suicide. It’s not ‘41% of transgender-identifying people attempt suicide’, it’s ‘will commit suicide’. The reality of ‘41%’ is neither, it is ‘41% of people who took the National Transgender Discrimination Survey in 2008 answered in the affirmative to a yes/no question about attempting suicide’ which succinctly describes a number that is effectively meaningless statistical noise from a 14-year old study, something that is much less interesting."

By Sue Donym Dec 22, 2024

A few years ago, in the early Neolithic, when I wasn’t banned from Medium, I wrote a post called ‘The Transgender Movement and Bad Stats: A Debunking Compilation’. I had collected a vast amount of statistics and written about them in some very lengthy articles, and thought it was a good idea to collect them together into a single post.

That article is now five years out of date. Medium also banned me for being a hater, so that article is currently only available online as an archived website. I also have some delicious new statistics to compile. An updated reference guide is in order, although some sections will remain relatively the same.

If sections of this article seem familiar to you, that’s probably because they are. I will openly confess to the fact that some of this article is taken from other articles and compiled into what you are currently reading. That’s more or less the point - to write something where the numbers are presented in a digestible format. I make no apologies for this - there are only so many ways to write ‘A says XY is B%’.

You don’t have to read all of this. The sections list below contains the names of each topic - you should be able to search each heading and read it.

I’m not overly fond of writing introductions, so without further ado, let’s dive in.

Sections:

Suicide Statistics - Is 41% A Real Figure?

Prison Statistics - Are trans women more likely to be sex offenders?

Murder Stats - The Fake Epidemic

Homelessness and The Problem with Aggregation

A Quick Funding Update

Conclusion

Suicide Statistics - Is 41% a real figure?

Participate in this debate long enough, and you’ll see the repeated claims that trans people attempt or commit suicide at extremely high rates. That number you’ll often see is ‘41%’. 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 (NTDS), 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.”

If that was too long for you to read - the question was asked as a ‘yes/no’ question. This has a well-known effect of overinflating the number of people who answer in the affirmative to the question ‘Have you ever attempted suicide?’. The NTDS asked the question in this manner and thus massively overinflated the estimated suicide rate in their sample. The ‘41'%’ number is statistical noise. Not only that, but the authors conclude that there’s no explanations available

“ 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 […] 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 even more 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.

A convenience sample means the results are basically a cross between being indicative of a potential issue and waste of time. Essentially, the survey shows the rate of suicide attempts by those who took the survey, which means the results are only applicable to the survey-takers, rather than any broader group of people. This is a problem with all the National Center for Transgender Equality surveys even today - and they’re still treated as an authority on this subject. Total madness.

It’s like if I did a survey of all my friends on whether or not we prefer deep-dish. If I have one Irish person in my sample, and that person just loves deep-dish, I cannot then use the results of my survey to tell Newsweek that 100% of all Irish people love deep-dish. Only my friend does. Similarly, the original authors of the NTDS can say that their survey-takers had a 41% rate of attempted suicide, but they can’t apply the result to the broader demographic of whatever is considered' ‘transgender’ these days.

But unlike me, who did not run off to Newsweek to inform them that 100% of all Irish people love deep-dish, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), did in fact, tell anyone who would listen that ‘41% of trans people attempt suicide’. Activists, non-profits, politicians and mendacious pediatricians followed suit in telling anyone who would listen about ‘41%’, and it became completely divorced from its original context. ‘41%’ quickly took on a life of it’s own, and became an urban myth, a meme, no different from other statistical noise given life, like claims that ‘50% of lesbians beat their partners’, ‘Humans only use 10% of the brain’, ‘50% of cops are wife beaters’, the opium letter in the New England Journal of Medicine that ‘proved’ opiates ‘weren’t addictive’, and the concept of ‘excited delirium’.

All of those had morphed into adages, things widely accepted as true because ‘it was in a study’, or from being uncritically repeated in popular science outlets. They’re things that often have a grain of truth to them or affirm traditional beliefs, so they’re judged as ‘true enough.’ But they’re all falsehoods, just as much as ‘41%’ is, and all those falsehoods share a similar pattern, going from a random statistic in a poorly conducted survey or even just a case study and from there, gradually morphing into widely-accepted knowledge, even though no one really knows where it came from, nor has bothered to investigate it, because it matches with an agenda or traditionally held beliefs. Eventually, someone with a sense of inquiry to them looks into the statistic and finds that it’s false, but by that point it’s often done untold damage and will take decades to purge from the popular consciousness.

The suicide attempt statistic that started life as meaningless noise from a poorly conducted 2008 study with huge methodological flaws has now graduated from random apocrypha to religious dogma. That statistic, which objectively looks horrendous deprived of its original context, was used to justify a whole range of absurd propositions.

Give me absurd propositions X, Y, and Z, or it’s hateful and I’ll kill myself, trans people have a 41% suicide rate because of discrimination!’

Above is a fairly representative example of what the use of ‘41%’ turned into - completely misinformed people screaming histrionically about committing suicide because someone told a man to use the men’s room. Not only is that emotional abuse, it can only last for so long before people get sick of the absurdity. The suicide baiting rhetoric was always going to backfire, and it has done so in spectacular fashion.

Now 41% is used as a slang word for transgender suicide. The adage got repeated so often it turned into a meme, and then that meme became a threat, the demographically tailored 2024 version of ‘kys’1.

Now that it’s essentially well, a nasty threat - yes, telling someone to kill themselves for whatever reason is generally unpleasant behavior, sorry - the power of the statistic is reversed. It’s now used like this:

‘why would I let you into women’s prisons when you are going to kill yourself anyway, degenerate?’ 41% already you fucking troon pedophile, no one cares about the opinions of people who will be dead soon

Personally, I don’t know what to make of the evolution of ‘41%’. It’s gone from being a widely held false belief used to justify all sorts of terrible things to a demand that the trans-identifying person you disagree with should go kill themselves. It’s somehow even less constructive than it was before, which is certainly an achievement, albeit a dubious one.

Yes, transgenderism is a dangerous, illiberal cult full of misogyny, racism, and homophobia, but I don’t think it’s right to sacrifice my values when criticizing them - I can do that effectively without telling people to go and kill themselves. Would you tell someone in a similar situation - like a Scientologist, who is also part of a destructive and nasty cult to go and kill themselves?

See rest of article

#The Transgender Movement and Bad Stats: A Debunking Compilation #That 41% suicide statistic comes from a report done in 2014 based on data from 2008 #Using suicide threats to emotionally blackmail others

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