Transgendered people in the US face one-in-eight to one-in-twelve murder rates depending on race and geographic location;
I’ve seen this claim before but I’ve never seen it attached to a reliable source. Do you have a citation for it? The HCR estimates that there are about 15-30 murders of transgendered people each year. If we underestimate the percentage of the American population that is trans using the HCR’s data and use the lower bound estimate that 1 in every 3000 people are transgendered (here I’m using the cited Conway study that says lower bound of 1 in 2500 and underestimating a bit more both to make the math easier and to make sure we’re very definitely not overcounting, note that Conway’s upper bound is in 1 in 500) then we get with a US population of around three hundred million, a total of about 100,000 trans people in the US. Now if we assume that all those trans murders are evenly distributed (which seems to be really unlikely), we get assuming that they have around 60 years of time to get murdered, with a 30⁄100,000 chance each year, we get a chance of 1-(1-(30/100,000))^60 chance of getting murdered in their lifetimes (60 comes from assuming that they know they are transgendered around age 12 and then have 60 years of time to get murdered). That’s around a 2.8% chance. That’s really high, but nowhere near 1 in 12 which is more than twice that (8.3%) . In this context, this occurs with 1⁄12 being the claimed lower bound, and with us assuming a generously large number of murders yearly and a generously small transgender population, and are still off by a factor of 2.
Note if one uses for example a population estimate based on the middle of Conway’s range (1 in a 1000 being transgendered) then one gets a result of around .006%, which is about 50% percent more likely than the entire US pop but is even farther from the claimed numbers.
Edit: Ok. Th HRC also on the same webpage but with minimal arithmetic claim that 1 in every 1000 murders might be a transgendered person. If we use this estimate and assume that there are then around 140 transgendered murders yearly, and use the reasonable estimate of 1 in every 1000 people being transgendered so a total pop of around 300,000 then one gets (1-(1-140/300,000)^60) which is around a 3% chance.
Edit: If you use the most generous estimate for the murder total (140), and the smallest population estimate for the transgendered population then you can get 8% which is a little under 1⁄12. Here I’m using my underestimate of Conway’s estimate. If one uses Conway’s actual lower bound one gets around 7%. I don’t think I need to discuss in detail why this estimate is unlikely to be accurate. It seems clear from these estimates that the murder rate of transgendered individuals is much higher than that of the general population (especially when considered as a relative rate), but it is not likely to be anywhere near 1/12th.
You know, I can’t find a good source for it now, and it appears to be an apocryphal claim. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve picked up an oft-quoted but exaggerated statistic about this issue. I’m a bit of a newb, but I’ll try to strikethrough that claim. ETA: The Help guide doesn’t list that particular markup. Someone throw me a bone?
A look at Carsten Balzer’s 2009 study claims that a recent attempt to monitor the rate of reported murders worldwide (their criteria were basically “can be accessed by a newspaper website or some other online source during a google search, after filtering for duplicates”) gave a rate of about one reported murder every three days. Source is here:
As far as I’m aware, strikethrough is not available through markdown as it is implemented on this site; to get the strikethrough effect you have to retract your entire post.
I think the current norm on LessWrong is putting “edit to add: I no longer believe this claim to be true” in parentheses after the claim. I think your idea of strikethrough is really good, though.
I’ve seen this claim before but I’ve never seen it attached to a reliable source. Do you have a citation for it? The HCR estimates that there are about 15-30 murders of transgendered people each year. If we underestimate the percentage of the American population that is trans using the HCR’s data and use the lower bound estimate that 1 in every 3000 people are transgendered (here I’m using the cited Conway study that says lower bound of 1 in 2500 and underestimating a bit more both to make the math easier and to make sure we’re very definitely not overcounting, note that Conway’s upper bound is in 1 in 500) then we get with a US population of around three hundred million, a total of about 100,000 trans people in the US. Now if we assume that all those trans murders are evenly distributed (which seems to be really unlikely), we get assuming that they have around 60 years of time to get murdered, with a 30⁄100,000 chance each year, we get a chance of 1-(1-(30/100,000))^60 chance of getting murdered in their lifetimes (60 comes from assuming that they know they are transgendered around age 12 and then have 60 years of time to get murdered). That’s around a 2.8% chance. That’s really high, but nowhere near 1 in 12 which is more than twice that (8.3%) . In this context, this occurs with 1⁄12 being the claimed lower bound, and with us assuming a generously large number of murders yearly and a generously small transgender population, and are still off by a factor of 2.
Note if one uses for example a population estimate based on the middle of Conway’s range (1 in a 1000 being transgendered) then one gets a result of around .006%, which is about 50% percent more likely than the entire US pop but is even farther from the claimed numbers.
Edit: Ok. Th HRC also on the same webpage but with minimal arithmetic claim that 1 in every 1000 murders might be a transgendered person. If we use this estimate and assume that there are then around 140 transgendered murders yearly, and use the reasonable estimate of 1 in every 1000 people being transgendered so a total pop of around 300,000 then one gets (1-(1-140/300,000)^60) which is around a 3% chance.
Edit: If you use the most generous estimate for the murder total (140), and the smallest population estimate for the transgendered population then you can get 8% which is a little under 1⁄12. Here I’m using my underestimate of Conway’s estimate. If one uses Conway’s actual lower bound one gets around 7%. I don’t think I need to discuss in detail why this estimate is unlikely to be accurate. It seems clear from these estimates that the murder rate of transgendered individuals is much higher than that of the general population (especially when considered as a relative rate), but it is not likely to be anywhere near 1/12th.
You know, I can’t find a good source for it now, and it appears to be an apocryphal claim. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve picked up an oft-quoted but exaggerated statistic about this issue. I’m a bit of a newb, but I’ll try to strikethrough that claim. ETA: The Help guide doesn’t list that particular markup. Someone throw me a bone?
A look at Carsten Balzer’s 2009 study claims that a recent attempt to monitor the rate of reported murders worldwide (their criteria were basically “can be accessed by a newspaper website or some other online source during a google search, after filtering for duplicates”) gave a rate of about one reported murder every three days. Source is here:
http://www.liminalis.de/2009_03/TMM/tmm-englisch/Liminalis-2009-TMM-report2008-2009-en.pdf
As far as I’m aware, strikethrough is not available through markdown as it is implemented on this site; to get the strikethrough effect you have to retract your entire post.
Thank you for the clarification.
I think the current norm on LessWrong is putting “edit to add: I no longer believe this claim to be true” in parentheses after the claim. I think your idea of strikethrough is really good, though.
Nope, no strikethrough. Weird.