The main reason it took me a while to come around to transfeminism was that statistic about transmasculine people being much more likely to be victims of sexual assault than transfeminine people, a claim that is apparently backed by multiple independent surveys.
To me, this claim always seemed somewhat surprising and at-odds with everything else I knew about transphobia, but that only suggested that there must be something about transmasculinity that I didn't understand, some specific form of oppression going on that I was unaware of. So I spent a long time listening to people we'd today call "transa***ophobia theorists" to try and get a better understanding of this oppression.
Eventually the irl evidence of my eyes and ears became too strong and I had to look for an explanation beyond "we're all equally oppressed", and I found that explanation in transfeminism, but I still wonder about that specific statistic. What is going on with it?
The study I see cited the most is this one by Abern etc al. It's not really a journal article, it's actually a letter (specifically a Concise Research Report), which is a much shorter publication, albeit still peer-reviewed.
The letter in question is entirely about a single survey with 996 participants with the sole aim of determining what proportion of transmasculine and transfeminine people had experienced sexual assault in their lifetimes.
The exact results are a little tricky to ascertain because, although it's a short letter, they are stated twice and with different percentages each time (seemingly due to confusion over whether to count people who skipped the question altogether), which does not reflect particularly well on the quality of the peer review, I guess. But I think the correct interpretation is that 50% of transmasc respondents had ever been victims of sexual assault, vs 37% of transfems. That is the statistic that stuck in my mind for so long.
Something that's a little odd about this survey is that only 21% of respondents were transfem vs 79% transmasc. That is an unusually stark difference. Does that discrepancy reflect a bias in how the respondents were selected?
The authors themselves admit that the overwhelming whiteness of the respondents reflects some bias in the selection. In fact, the majority of respondents also have private health insurance but also very low income and have graduated school but not college, which suggests to me that a very large portion of survey respondents were current college students, which would also go some way to explaining the lack of transfem respondents (since transfems transition older on average).
It's hard to work out exactly how respondents were recruited. For instance, we are told "social media" was used, but not which forms and in which way. The survey was actually done in 2017-2018, a time when most transfems of my acquaintance predominantly used Twitter and sometimes Reddit (that's just anecdotal ofc). If the study was only shared on Tumblr, for instance, could that explain it? We have no way of knowing.
We also don't know what question specifically was asked. Was it "Have you ever been the victim of a sexual assault?" or was it something that gave examples of the kinds of things that might constitute assault? Could the question have been interpreted as implying (without meaning to) forms of assault where the victim is presumed to have specific anatomy, such that people without that anatomy might answer "No" irrespective of what they had experienced? We don't know the question, so we can't know.
Furthermore, if the question merely asked about sexual assault without defining it, might there be an issue with certain demographics being more or less likely to characterise sexual assaults they had experienced as sexual assaults? I know from my own experience that I have been sexually assaulted many times but it took me a long time to understand that that was the correct term for what I had been through. I think many people have a mental image of what a sexual assault looks like, and if their experience doesn't match that image they may not characterise it as assault, even though it is.
All these things were questions that a good survey designer would hopefully think about before doing the survey, but it seems no one did in this case. But ultimately, it doesn't actually matter, because even if this survey is really flawed, it cites an earlier survey that was much more thorough, so we may as well look at that one instead.
That is the 2015 US Transgender Survey, which had 28,000 respondents, a really good sample size. And we're off to a great start because there's a 43/57 transfem/transmasc split this time, which is much better.
I'll just give a quick run-down of the main points as they relate to trans women's experiences in comparison to trans men (it's much harder to generically compare transfem to transmasc here, because the non-binary category is generally not separated into transition direction, so this is the only realistic way of doing the comparison).
Compared to trans men, trans women...
...start transition about 10 years later on average.
...are more than twice as likely to say other people can tell they are trans most of the time.
...who came out to a partner were twice as likely to be broken-up with over it.
...who have kids were more than 4 times as likely for their kids to stop speaking to them because of their transition.
...are more likely to experience family rejection.
...were 3 times as likely to have temporarily "de-transitioned", mainly due to family pressure or harassment.
...who were perceived as trans at school were twice as likely to be physically attacked.
...who were perceived as trans at school were more than twice as likely to have been sexually assaulted.
...who were perceived as trans at school were more likely to have left school due to harassment.
...who were perceived as trans at school were more than twice as likely to have been expelled.
...were more likely to have left college or vocational school because of harassment.
...were more likely to have lost a job due to gender identity or expression.
...were more likely to have been assaulted at work in the past year due to being trans.
...were more than twice as likely to have done sex work.
...who had an interaction with cops who believed them to be sex workers were more likely to be arrested.
...who had interactions with cops were more likely to be misgendered.
...were more likely to have been made homeless in the past year due to being trans.
...were more likely to have been denied housing in the past year due to being trans.
...were more likely to have been attacked by or forced to engage in sexual activity with cops.
...were more likely to be verbally harassed by strangers.
...were more likely to have been physically attacked by strangers in public.
...were more likely to have had bad experiences on public transport in the past year.
...were more likely to have had a bad experience at a domestic violence shelter in the past year.
...were more likely to have had bad experience with a legal professional.
...were more likely to have been sexually assaulted in a public bathroom.
That is all exactly what I would expect, based on the experiences of the trans people I know. It paints a picture of a world where trans women experience a whole lot more oppression, much of it violent, including sexual assault, at school, by police officers, in public bathrooms, the list goes on.
So what is going on when this survey also states that 51% of trans men have been sexually assaulted, vs 37% of trans women? (Yes, that's basically identical to the other survey) How can that possibly make sense in the context of basically everything else in the survey?
We can't blame the survey itself this time, because we know exactly what question they were asked, and it did detail what kinds of things are considered sexual assault. So, then, what's going on?
This survey essentially states that trans women are more likely to experience sexual assault, but are also less likely to have experienced sexual assault. So that must mean that we have to look at pre-transition experiences for the explanation.
Is it true that closeted trans women are less likely to experience sexual assault than closeted trans men? Maybe. It would've been nice if this survey had established the answer to that question for us. But if so, it would explain at least some of this statistic.
It would imply that a trans woman's risk of experiencing sexual assault jumps up from moderate to very high at the moment she starts her transition. Anecdotally, there is definitely a substantial increase in oppression when you start openly asserting your womanhood, although I and virtually every transfem I know was on the receiving end of sexual violence long before that, there is no doubt that it gets markedly worse.
If this is the explanation, it does rather raise the question of why surveys ask for "lifetime sexual assault" rather than "sexual assault in the past year", for example. I would like to be able to put this down to survey-designer bias, and indeed neither of the co-leads on this survey were transfems, so transmisogynistic bias would hardly be surprising. There were also some parts of the writing that stood out oddly to me:
7% of the "AMAB" respondents were categorised not as trans women or non-binary but as "crossdresser". There is no transmasc equivalent of this for obvious reasons, but this asymmetry is not mentioned by the authors at any point (even though that asymmetry is basically the canonical example of transmisogyny).
There is no acknowledgement of the "non-binary woman" identity that so many transfems have - such people are just classified as "trans woman", which is why the non-binary category is 80% transmasc. This is one classic way in which transfems are denied access to non-binariness.
Quite a lot of the statistics were not broken down by gender, even though it would've been interesting to see, and I suspect would've demonstrated a strong gender gap: things like alcohol and tobacco use, salary, unemployment, whether they had supportive classmates at school.
At one point, the authors make a point of mentioning that, even though trans women make up the majority of trans sex workers, transmasc non-binary sex workers should not be forgotten - that's all well and good, but the chart they use to show this demonstrates that transfem non-binary people are actually more likely to be sex workers than transmascs, and they aren't mentioned at all.
In short, I felt like there was a thread transmisogyny throughout the study. But, even if the co-leads weren't, two of the other authors are trans women, so I'm not sure that argument holds up. Maybe it does, idk. In any case, I am not convinced of it, even if I have an uneasy feeling.
But ultimately the issue is this: the sexual assault question is framed in such a way that it ends up weighting pre-transition experiences very heavily compared to post-transition. This is exactly the trick that transmisogynists like to pull so often, to give the impression of a trans woman as someone unworthy of sympathy due to an alleged earlier life of great privilege, even if she is suffering a lot right now.
The only way I can make sense of this statistic in the context of everything else, is that a closeted transfem is less likely to be sexually assaulted than a closeted transmasc, but after transition it switches and the transfem is much more likely to be sexually assaulted. Does that reflect a particular form of oppression faced by transmascs? It seems an odd way to frame the situation, to say the least.
But also, I think there may be something else going on with the relatively low sexual assault rate for closeted transfems. I have experienced forms of assault as a woman that I instantly recognise as assault, but I remember experiencing exactly the same things when I considered myself to be a man and back then I didn't consider it to be assault.
When you think of yourself as a man, and another man gropes you (for example), it can be really difficult to conceptualise that as "sexual assault", even though it is. And even looking back now, I still find it hard to refer to some of those experiences as sexual assault.
There was a man who sexually assaulted me 20 years ago and I said nothing, and then he did the same things to a cis woman who made a complaint and he rightly got punished for it. If someone had surveyed me after that, I still would've said I had never experienced sexual assault. As a closeted transfem, I was in a position where there clearly was a power dynamic but it was one I couldn't understand, and without understanding it I couldn't put the words "sexual assault" to the actions. Part of being a closeted transfem is being unable to conceptualise your gendered oppression as oppression, because on some level you regard yourself as a gendered oppressor and that can be reflected in the language you use to describe your oppression even long after the fact.
So, perhaps it's true that closeted transfems experience less sexual assault. But equally perhaps it's not, and they just find it harder to refer to it that way. I don't know. But I do know that it's absurd to take a survey that shows over and over again that transfems are right at the bottom of the gender hierarchy, and cherry pick the one statistic that appears to show the opposite.
