Trans women are five times more likely than men to commit offences
Lucy Johnston said:
“there are studies, I'm citing mine, that show that trans women are 5 times more likely than men to commit offences.”
A specific numerical claim attributed to a study sounds like hard data, and the framing that trans women retain male patterns of offending is a widely circulated argument in public debate about single-sex spaces.
The study being referenced here is Dhejne et al., a Swedish cohort study from 2011, and its own authors have said publicly and repeatedly that it does not support this reading. The comparison that produced an elevated figure was between trans women and cisgender women, not between trans women and men, and when the researchers looked only at people who transitioned after 1989, the difference disappeared entirely. Presenting a five-times figure without that context does not just simplify the study: it inverts its conclusions. The practical consequence is that trans women get treated as presumptively dangerous in policy debates and excluded from spaces the law already gives them the right to use, on the basis of a statistic that the people who produced it say means something entirely different.
What I said at the time:
“I think we've got to be really careful about what we're saying here. We're saying things like men are more dangerous than women... We need to protect society from bad people. And bad people could be black people, gay people, trans people, straight people, white people, cisgender people.”
Trans women who are treated as presumptively dangerous in policy and public life, and excluded from spaces they are legally entitled to use.