Are trans women actually as scary as cis men?
Are trans women actually as scary as cis men?
survey results
I don’t care that much about transwomen being in women’s spaces; it seems like in most spaces this is fine most of the time, and everybody’s making way too big a fuss about it.
I said this online, and people on twitter were like “aella, transwomen are dangerous”.
I realized I can look at my data! In my Big Kink Survey (n=640k), I collect gender identity questions. I also ask this question:
Have you ever had a sexual experience with someone else who did not want the experience?
And you knew that they didn't want it? This *doesn't* include consensual nonconsent, such as roleplaying an abduction.
My goal was to ask a question without any scary words (such as rape or sexual assault), but still asked people, in the most neutral, gentle way possible, if they’d ever did something sexual to someone who they knew didn’t want them to do it.
This isn’t perfect, of course! It might fuzz in encounters like “wife consensually has unpleasant duty sex with husband, who knows she doesn’t want to be having the sex”. But I think for now it’s a pretty decent proxy for ‘being rapey’.
I’m writing this blog post before I look at the answer! I want to commit to publishing it regardless of what it is.
(Read more about the survey demographics here, an accessible description of the survey here, and a much more in depth dive into its construction here)
So the question is - who reports committing the most sexual assault? Take into account the question wording, and make your guess. Predict the results before you scroll down.
Some quick caveats before the answer - this sample is not ‘people who follow aella’ - it came from a survey that went viral, and has a majority demographic of ‘young, liberal, online women.’
Also, there’s still hypotheses besides the straightforward one - maybe trans people are much more or less likely to answer yes to all questions, and thus show up either under or overreported for things? Maybe trans people have way more sexual experiences in general, and this causes them to be exposed to more consent culture? Or maybe greater volume results in just greater opportunity to end up offending? Could go either way.
(You might also suspect trolls in reporting, but I have a whole bunch of ways to catch these; my survey set is huge, so there’s lots of methods of determining weird responses. I’d go into it here, but I’d rather not give anybody ideas for how to game my traps)
I think these aren’t very strong hypotheses, but there’s still other ways the world could be. This should go without saying - I don’t really bother to say this in my other posts cause I consider it so obvious - but I’m emphasizing it here cause it’s a touchy topic, and also because I’m waiting for my data to load and it’s taking a long time.
Answer:
This is only ages 18-24, because age was a confounder (trans people taking my survey tended to be younger, and older people have more years to spend sexually assaulting)
It looks like in this survey, trans women report offending roughly as much as cis men do. But nonbinary people (who were assigned male at birth) report offending the most.
(This isn’t the first time I’ve found that enby amabs (short for nonbinary, assigned-male-at-birth) answer questions very differently than trans women! I’m not sure what’s going on here).
My total sample (for the 18-24 cohort) was 207,864 ciswomen, 84,119 cismen, 7,831 transwomen, 15,997 transmen, 9,059 enby (amab), and 45,998 enby (afab).
I wonder though - does taking hormones impact people’s rates of doing sexual assault?
Let’s check
Seems to be mostly an increase. This makes sense - the length of time someone is on estrogen probably correlates with age, and the older you are, the more opportunity you’ve had to do sexual assault.
Still though, splitting out the bins makes them a lil smaller, and the last bin, the smallest (612) seems kinda weird. It’s probably partially noise (e.g., 66 people reported doing any assault), which is starting to get into slightly less confident territory. But it also might suggest a different trait - by a certain age (I assume this is really about age, not hormones), it suggests if someone hasn’t sexually offended, they probably won’t - but if you have sexually offended, you probably will do so again, with an increase in severity.
….Actually, to test this theory, let me check this for cis men and age, which should be a much higher sample.
Huh! Seems like if men are gonna sexually assault, they’ve mostly done it by their early 30’s.
So my guess is the last bar in the ‘transwoman’ graph is likely a fluke, but I’m not sure. Probably worth looking into.
Who are trans women assaulting, though? Cis men presumably are mostly assaulting cis women, because they tend to mostly be straight and cis women tend to be mostly weaker.
On the other hand, trans women rated themselves as more sexually attracted to people with penises, and people who looked more masculine, compared to cis men. On a spectrum from people with vaginas (3) to penises (-3), cis men’s average preference rating was 1.8. By comparison, trans women’s average preference was -0.1.
So probably when trans women do assault people, I’d guess a higher number of them are bio males compared to when cis men assault. This might lower the rate of offenses against women, but I would be surprised if it was significant.
Conclusions
I’m a bit surprised by this. My prediction, before looking at the results, would be that enby amabs would report sexual assaulting the highest - and I was right on that. But I thought transwomen would have lower rates of assault than cis men (though still higher than cis women). I was wrong - the results seem to suggest that they perform just as much, if not slightly greater, rates of sexual assault.
I am, in general, pro allowing trans women in women’s spaces, mostly because I don’t think there’s actually that much of a risk. I also think this is true for allowing cis men into women’s spaces. In general, I think the women who are overly concerned with gender tend to be more neurotic and paranoid, and over-vigilant to danger given the actual base rates of assault occurring in community places outside the home. It’s pretty rare!
That being said, this data did update me towards a bit more sympathy towards the bio-woman’s space preservation. It seems like some evidence that cis women who are distrustful toward trans women on the basis of their biological sex might be at least a little, if not entirely, correct.
A bonus for the paid subscribers - if I filter my sample to the ages of 30+, we get this weird chart: