One of the more colorful crime stories of the Biden administration concerned Sam Brinton, an official working on nuclear-waste issues who was arrested for chronic luggage theft. Brinton, who describes himself as nonbinary, was convicted of nabbing women’s suitcases from airports and then confidently wearing the ladieswear he had found inside. One victim, a Tanzanian fashion designer, realized Brinton had stolen her luggage when she spotted him at a gala beaming in one of her African gowns.
Nationwide, headlines describe a spectrum of transgendered, nonbinary, and other “gender non-conforming” variations of criminal offenders. These range from relatively innocuous criminality—like Brinton’s—to deadly violence. In January, transgender repeat knife offender Jaia Cruz fatally stabbed a postal worker after jockeying over places in the sandwich line at a Manhattan deli. A few weeks later, transgender Nicol Suarez, who was being pursued by ICE for previous crimes, stalked and then raped a 14-year-old boy in a bodega bathroom in East Harlem. In February, 18-year-old transgender Trinity Shockley was arrested as she planned a mass Valentine’s Day school shooting. She failed where Tennessee transgender teen Audrey Hale succeeded; Hale gunned down six kids and adults at The Covenant School.
All of these cases raise a very obvious question: Do transgender Americans commit crime at higher rates or of different types than “cis-gender” Americans?
The answer is: We have no idea.
Whereas crime data exist for all other demographics—race, age, educational attainment, etc.—we are not systematically collecting or analyzing stats for trans offenders. Apparently, it’s too politically uncomfortable to call attention to transgender people as anything but victims. Any effort to delve into research on transgenderism and crime uncovers reports, white papers, law review essays, and media reporting—but all of it is focused exclusively on trans victimization. Such material prioritizes analytics such as the percentage of trans crime victims who were deadnamed in the press and how many were transwomen “of color.”
The focus on trans victimization is so powerful that media reporting and advocacy emphasize any suggestion—often unsubstantiated—that trans victims are the objects of hate crimes. But few reports actually record who the offenders are committing crimes against transgender individuals, and whether they are trans themselves.
A chilling illustration was the gruesome murder last month of transman Sam Nordquist, which Audacia Ray, interim executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, seized upon as symptomatic of “growing permissiveness for anti-trans sentiment” and “cultural indifference to the humanity of LGBTQ people.” However, not only is law enforcement not treating the killing as a hate crime—at least two of Nordquist’s killers appear themselves to be trans.
This tracks with the fact that violent crime tends to be remarkably intra-group. “Black-on-black crime,” for instance, is very real: 57.1 percent of NYC murder victims were black in 2023, as were an astonishingly parallel 57 percent of murder suspects. Similarly, 40 percent of rape victims were Hispanic, as were about 37 percent of suspects.
What percentage of attacks are trans-on-trans? It might be helpful to know, right?
A modest number of studies exists from outside the U.S. on transgender offending and indicate that transgender individuals tend to commit a dispropor-tionate amount of crime, violence, and sexual violence. A Swedish study conducted in 2011 found that “transsexual individuals were at increased risk of being convicted for any crime or violent crime after sex reassignment.” More specifically, transwomen had a significantly increased risk for committing crime and violent crime compared with biological women—but not compared to cis-men. Indeed, transwomen retain “a male pattern regarding criminality.”
Transmen, on the other hand, had higher crime and violent crime rates than women—about the same rates as biological men. In other words, women who “transition” commit crime at rates similar to men—who, in the general population, commit most of the lawbreaking and violence.
An earlier Swedish study, from 1992, also suggests that higher rates of criminality exist within the transgender population. This research found that 9.7 percent of male-to-female and 6.1 percent of female-to-male sex change applicants had been prosecuted for a crime—higher than rates in the general population.
More granularly, existing stats indicate that, among criminals, transwomen are more likely to be sex offenders than are heterosexual men or women. In 2020, data from Britain’s Ministry of Justice found that an astounding 59 percent of transwomen prisoners were sex offenders—compared with 3 percent of women and 17 percent of men.
And with such sparse research to go on, even a 2021 study of Finnish adolescents adds a useful data point; it found that trans adolescents were more likely to be bullies than the victims of bullying.
Not having comprehensive information about a population that we know sometimes steals women’s luggage and sometimes commits mass murder harms public safety. If we don’t study and understand crime patterns, we can’t protect people from those crimes. Instead of evidence, the policies we have been implementing relating to transgender offending are based on ideological narratives that put identity-group interests ahead of public safety.
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Like many areas of academia, criminology has suffered extreme ideological takeover from the progressive left. This has resulted in biased hiring and funding for scholars who both are themselves desired demographic groups and whose work obsesses over identity-group grievances while being anti-police, anti-prosecutor, and anti-incarceration. The result is a sharp drop-off in academic research relating to the true heart of criminology: crime.
“We have a whole generation that hasn’t been studying criminal offending,” lamented John MacDonald, who directs the Master in Criminology program at the University of Pennsylvania. “We don’t know enough about changing offending patterns other than what we’re experiencing. You know, porch pirates, repeat property theft.” As with the examples of trans crime above, “All these things are happening, but we don’t have criminologists the way we used to really focusing on studying offenders.”
This is especially problematic because, by definition, the gender dysphoria at the heart of transgenderism has a psychological component—as does criminality. In particular, criminals express high levels of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), which is “typified by an enduring disregard for, or violation of, the rights of others.” No wonder male inmates have ASPD at alarming 40 percent to 70 percent rates, compared with the general population, where only around 2–4 percent of men have ASPD, and fewer than 1 percent of women.
Significantly, this violent condition coincides at meaningful rates with transgenderism. A 2014 Iranian study found that 23 percent of gender dysphoria patients also had, specifically, antisocial personality disorder. The potential overlap of trans identities with violent mental health issues was evoked by a recent high-profile murder ring run by an unlikely cult of vegan, transgender, rationalist-anarchist computer geniuses called the Zizians. The group’s long-haired leader, Jack “Ziz” LaSota, reportedly led his devotees, who include former NASA and Google scientists, to commit at least six murders. The latest was the January killing of a U.S. border patrol agent in Vermont, during which Zizian member Felix Bauckholt, a young German national and math genius who was living as “Ophelia,” died in the shoot-out.
Even the outlandish Zizian cult does not seem to have broken through to the research community to undertake a more evidence-based examination of transgenderism and violent crime. This is especially concerning because policy continues to be enacted, especially in the one area where it’s impossible to avoid confronting transgender offending: prison. Since incarceration requires sorting by gender, dealing with the issue of gender preferences is unavoidable, as is codifying rules around transgender housing and access to special commissary items like chest binders, hair rollers, and stand-to-urinate devices, and treatments like hormones and surgeries. These—as well as correctional staff pat-down policies—are the central issues in correctional trans policies at every level of government.
And here, the lack of critical data and the extreme political discomfort with appearing insensitive to trans issues has allowed incredibly circular, contradictory, and solipsistic arguments to gain purchase in policymaking. Once again, identity politics have been placed above concerns about physical violence—especially for female inmates.
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New York City’s TGNCNBI Task Force—yes, that is the acronym—is a perfect illustration. The City Council in 2019 enacted a bill requiring the Board of Correction to convene a taskforce to recommend policies on transgender, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary (TGNCNBI) individuals in custody. As bill sponsor Helen Rosenthal explained, “I introduced legislation mandating this task force because New York City should be a leader when it comes to upholding the dignity of TGNCNBI incarcerated people.”
The mandate, in other words, sets up transgender inmates as victims and goes from there. It is worth noting that over a third of NYC’s jail inmates are charged with murder, and hundreds of others have a top charge of sexual violence. This is an intrinsically dangerous population.
When the NYC task force came out with its 2022 report, it not only cast transgender inmates as perennial victims, but featured personal gripes from the task force members themselves about their mistreatment. It opens with complaints that the members “received little emotional support when encountering instances of micro or macroaggressions from government agencies or non-profits.” The tone of the report itself suggests that an open conversation about safety was made impossible by identity-grievance browbeating. Its introduction makes that clear by noting bitterly how “TGNCNBI and/or formerly incarcerated task force members spent significant time providing impromptu and unpaid ‘trans 101’ lessons to many other task force members.”
Unfortunately, it seems that many members would have benefited from “Criminology 101.” In fact, the task force takes criminal-justice realities so unseriously that it offers pronouncements without evidence, like this one from Rosenthal: “Nationwide and here in New York, TGNCNBI people have been overpoliced and over-incarcerated.”
For this task force, any amount of policing or incarceration is too much. The report’s top recommendation is that “the City and State must release people and decarcerate the jails including all the TGNCNBI people.” Doubling down, the task force exhorts: “Staffing must be reimagined from a security job to a prevention and wellness job.” Not acknowledging that working with murderers has to be a security job, advocates elevate transgender “wellness” over elementary safety.
The report’s central aim is to enshrine the rule that gender assignments for living quarters must be guided by inmates’ “internal sense of self.” The New York State Legislature has a similar bill, currently in committee. This law, among other things, would require inmates to “be presumptively placed in a correctional facility with persons of the gender that most closely aligns with such person’s self-attested gender identity.”
But considering that over half of biologically male inmates have personality disorders that induce them to “deceive and manipulate others for personal gain,” relying on self-reporting seems undoubtedly risky. And, indeed, no other criminal-justice classifications rely on offenders’ subjective feelings about their true selves. Other mutable traits like gang affiliation and religious belief are not only more concrete—corrections staff routinely and understandably make their own housing decisions based on these factors for the sake of inmate safety.
Amazingly, even when these feelings of true self shift repeatedly, advocates chalk up these vacillations exclusively to the effects of transgender victimization. And so NYC’s task force suggests that any “inconsistency in identity” is due to fear of becoming a victim of hate. Not only that, but even posing “threats of potential sexual violence”—even actual “incidents of misconduct”—by transgender inmates should be seen as understandable “responses to threats to safety and a non gender-affirming environment.” Committing sexual violence just means you’re a trans victim.
It’s easy for advocates to excuse lying and sexual predation because they barely acknowledge that there could be a personal gain for male inmates to lie to be housed with women—or that female inmates could be at risk. The drafted New York State law, for example, mandates: “The complaints of other incarcerated individuals who do not wish to be housed with a non-cisgender or intersex person due to that person’s…sex characteristics” would be discounted as “discriminatory.” If a female inmate does not want to be housed with an avowed transwoman who appears male in every respect, she’s the victimizer.
Unbelievably, there is no acknowledgement of any special danger to female inmates posed by a roommate who has the physical strength, higher propensity to violence, and penis of a man (even if he is wearing lip gloss). Advocates explicitly argue that biological sex makes no difference at all when you are being assaulted. NYC’s task-force even complains that all cis-gendered inmates “are housed by gender identity regardless of pending allegations of sexual abuse on harassment” and therefore trans inmates should be, too.
But, of course, genitalia matter. In New Jersey, in 2020, Demi Minor, who was serving 30 years for a fatal stabbing, began identifying as a transgender woman and was transferred to female housing. There, he impregnated two female inmates. A woman (under the conventional definition of the word) could not, in fact, have had the same effect.
Yet advocates are given so much latitude to insist that all incarcerated genders are created equal that they are permitted to muddle basic definitions without being challenged.
The NYC report, for instance, explains that trans inmates may request general-population housing exclusively for transgender inmates because “for some, the reason is simply a desire to be fully integrated into the lives that all women lead, and that need outweighs the support gained from housing with one’s peers.” So, are transwomen the same as “all women”—or are their true peers only other transwomen? These internal contradictions go unchecked.
This definitional muddiness is echoed at the federal level, where trans inmates are managed by the Bureau of Prisons’ Women and Special Populations Branch. But here again it’s hard to skirt that all inmates are not created biologically equal. The Branch’s home page highlights: “Women’s pathways to incarceration often differ from those of men.” And they give an embarrassingly cis-gender example: “Women are more likely than men to have been the primary caregivers of their children prior to incarceration.”
The federal facilities themselves are designed around these female realities, including programming and services tailored toward “meeting the sex specific needs of women.” And security is also lowered accordingly. “When compared to men,” the Branch’s website explains, “the risk of violence or serious misconduct in prison for women is significantly lower.” But none of these are true for transwomen inmates.
Federal guidelines have also provided lopsided rules for transwomen and transmen regarding ability to choose the gender of the corrections officer searching them, whether to shower in private, and available commissary items. In most cases, it is biological women who are given less choice.
In addition to simply stomaching these inconsistencies, advocates do not wrangle with the budgetary trade-offs that would come with their demands to hire more trans-specialized staff, offer more transgender-focused programming, or provide more trans-training. Every dollar spent on trans advocacy is one fewer that could go toward fixing the broken door locks in America’s rundown jail systems. This has direct physical safety trade-offs, as New York, like many other jurisdictions, is facing a crisis in correctional-staff attrition that has led to an alarming statewide strike by prison employees. Under these conditions, New York State prisons have seen a near tripling of inmate assaults on other inmates over the past four years, and a near doubling of assaults on staff. Clearly, every bit of funding toward the correctional system is needed to restore greater safety from violence. But, again, physical safety has been given less weight than identity politics.
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Until now. The Trump administration does not share these priorities. Trump entered his second administration with a slew of executive orders that slashed DEI efforts and reestablished public safety above identity-group demands. He sent ICE agents to round up and deport felons regardless of “migrant rights.” He barred biological boys from competing in girls’ sports, because their disparate strength endangers girls’ welfare. And he mandated that jails and prisons recognize just two genders and handle them accordingly.
To comply with President Trump’s executive order, on February 21, a Bureau of Prisons memo detailed strict new guidelines for the treatment of transgender inmates, including ending special procedures for pat-down searches. But then, on February 24, a federal judge issued an injunction to shield a certain number of trans inmates from being switched to housing that aligns with their biological gender.
Such rapid and unresolved flip-flops were to be expected, given the nature of Trump’s blanket decision. While Trump’s policy recognizes the larger safety risks in making gender mutable in prisons, it does not contend with some of the thornier issues that need public probing.
Given the complexities and the vast unknowns about transgender populations and criminality, more nuanced long-term policies—at all levels of government—will be hard to create. Both the public and policymakers should have a greater understanding of how often biological men in women’s housing harm women, staff, or each other. How often do inmates change their reported identities? Which offenders do so, and under what circumstances? How does “gender-affirming” housing and products affect the likelihood of committing violence while incarcerated or violence after release from prison?
These are basic data points that are critical to having this debate in a meaningful and responsible way.
Further, this evidence would help policymakers confront and handle a pivotal question: Does the criminal-justice system care about inner identity? Should it? External appearance matters for cops and prison guards to identify and sort offenders. However, trans advocates insist that correctional staff disregard outward appearance in addressing, housing, and handling trans inmates because it has no bearing on true identity. Adding to this circularity, the “right” for inmates to contravene their natural appearance with in-custody surgeries or commissary items for genital tucking contradicts this notion that appearance doesn’t matter, because they argue that appearance matters above all else.
The sustained muddle in our policies around transgender offending also highlights a larger problem. Progressive narratives against punishment and imprisonment have so controlled the conversation about criminal justice over the past decade that it’s still necessary to argue and advocate against the idea that we don’t need a criminal-justice system at all. Thus, the TGNCNBI task force demands that New York City “invest in alternatives to detention and incarceration,” and, in particular, “models that are proven to address the root causes of incarceration, reduce recidivism, and have a tremendous cost-savings benefit for NYC, in comparison to current costs of incarceration.”
These models and alternatives do not exist. Pretending that they do is just as helpful as pretending that inmates with penises don’t pose a unique risk to female prisoners.
Unless America recenters our debates about criminal offending in reality, and ballasts them with evidence, we will help neither crime victims nor offenders. And we will certainly harm transgender Americans, who are so often both.
Photo: Rainerzufall1234/Wikimedia
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