I am of so many different minds on issues like this. The first thing that is on my mind is your casual dismissal of this sentence, "With 2021 on track to be the deadliest year on record for transgender people in the United States" you really show yourself to be just as petty as the people you are complaining about. I mean if people are still killing Trans people obviously people still care. Hell, you proved you care by taking the time to right this blog. We all know how you feel about Trans people so there really isn't any point in wondering why you dismiss this so easily.
The next point is I hate how offended people get over jokes. It's become obvious Dave has some opinions on Trans people that probably don't walk the PC line, but jokes are probably the least offensive way to get those opinions out in the open to have a conversation about. And they usually come from a place of love or at least acceptance. I don't see any malice in any of this. And I've watched every DC special up to this one. I will probably watch this one too at some point.
My last point though is that DC did this on purpose. This isn't the first time he has joked about trans people. He knew what the response would be. Yet here we are with everyone talking about his special...Almost like he planned it.
I do dismiss the statement. Not because I don't care. I do care. However, I reject the premise that Trans people are always killed for the sole reason that they are Trans people. The statement doesn't provide any background or even claim that "hate crimes against Trans people are more deadly." But in general, it's irrelevant.
I agree with you that DC made the jokes on purpose. But it wasn't just for "shock value." The jokes, most who watched the special appear to agree, are funny. Chapelle wasn't making jokes about dead Trans people. He was joking about the same thin-skinned reactionary response to anything that challenges their own narrative.
Comparing with Mel Brooks...Jews are killed BECAUSE THEY ARE JEWS all the time. And Jewish comedians still joke about Jews, and even really bad topics like Hitler. It's dark humor, and it's shocking at times. But claiming that funny jokes about Jews or Trans people incites hate, especially when the jokes are coming from a place that illuminates the stupidity of the haters, is just nonsense. I treat it appropriately.
Your comment on Steve dismissing the most deadly year for Trans people made me wonder how much that "most deadly" modifier tells us. Before I go further, I want to be clear that EVERY murder is a tragedy and should not have happened, whether it's a Trans or a non-Trans victim.
That said, we do live in a fallen world where murders happen, and it's worth asking whether Trans people are murdered disproportionately compared to the population at large, the LGBT+ population, and the Black community, if race's is going to be highlighted ("the majority of whom are Black transgender people").
If we use HRC's numbers (44 deaths) and a population estimate from UCLA's Williams Center (1.4M Trans adults[1]), we arrive at a murder rate of 0.0031%. In 2020, the FBI reported 21,570 murders in the US[2], and the Census provides a population estimate of 331MM for 2020 United States[3]. Doing the same math as above, we arrive at a US murder rate of 0.0065%, more than double the Trans murder rate. Now, looking at the racial angle, we get 9,913 Black Americans murdered in 2020[4] from a population of 44.78MM[5], resulting in a murder rate of 0.02214%, more than 3 times the murder rate of the population at large, and 7 times the Trans murder rate.
And looking at the HRC reported murders, I count 26 Black Trans murders of the 44 Trans murders reported (59%).
If I were building a model that described what the numbers tell us, by far, the dominant predictor of one's likelihood of being murdered would include race as the dominant variable. Looking at Black murders compared to other racial cohorts, we find that the the overall representation of Black victims in all murders is 55.8%, not far from the 59% of Black victims within the Trans group.
My personal reading of these numbers and the idea that Culture is contributing to encouraging Trans murders is that the "harmful Culture" theory is MUCH weaker than the observation that Black Americans are murdered MUCH more than other demographic groups, and the murders of Black Trans people in 2020 likely reflects the overall trend of Black Americans being murdered more often.
I don't fault the folks for calling out injustices as they see it, but it's important to also recognize the wider context in which the injustices are occurring. Even if activists were successful in "cancelling" content that they believe is contributing to violence against Trans people, it's doubtful that they'll actually make a dent in the overall number of Trans murders (given that Trans folks are murdered LESS often than the typical American), and it's extremely doubtful that they will make a dent in Black Trans murders, given that just being Black is a 7x stronger predictor of being murdered than being Trans.
Anyhoo, I don't know if I have any other thoughts beyond this, but I did want to see what the overall context of murders was before endorsing a causal connection or even a correlation between Netflix's offerings and Trans people being murdered. There are larger currents at work here, and unless activists' efforts to "cancel" Netflix are being dwarfed by much larger efforts to reduce murders against Blacks and Americans at large, any successful cancellations will be largely meaningless as Americans across the board continue to be murdered.
I haven't checked but I believe you. I questioned the significance of the "deadliest year" statement when I first saw it on another site and planned to do just what you did. I'm pretty sure you researched it better than I would have.
That's a fair point and could potentially alter my conclusions. If we could show that the primary cause of the murder was because they were Trans (a hate crime), then something that modified the Culture to diminish the chances that folks are being murdered because they are Trans (and not Black, not because they happen to be caught up in the commission of an unrelated crime, etc.) could bring that 44 number down.
I'm not seeing any primary causes in the HRC link above - do you have any actual data that supports the idea that these folks were murdered for "being Trans" as opposed to something else?
I don't. I actually figured the numbers would be where they are. I took more issue with Steve's casual dismissal than anything. You know he didn't bother to look at those numbers.
I'm not going to speculate on what Steve is seeing or not seeing, but if you wanted to try and arrive at an estimate of what those numbers might be, you might start with the FBI's hate crimes statistics[1], see how many were identified as hate crimes against Trans people, and divide that number by the total number of crimes against Trans people to get a sense of the ratio of Trans hate victims vs. Trans non-hate victims.
It's not going to be a great estimate, but should point us in the right direction of what the actual objective number may be. I don't have any more time to pursue this today, but will be following along if you decide to play sleuth/mathematician.
I am of so many different minds on issues like this. The first thing that is on my mind is your casual dismissal of this sentence, "With 2021 on track to be the deadliest year on record for transgender people in the United States" you really show yourself to be just as petty as the people you are complaining about. I mean if people are still killing Trans people obviously people still care. Hell, you proved you care by taking the time to right this blog. We all know how you feel about Trans people so there really isn't any point in wondering why you dismiss this so easily.
The next point is I hate how offended people get over jokes. It's become obvious Dave has some opinions on Trans people that probably don't walk the PC line, but jokes are probably the least offensive way to get those opinions out in the open to have a conversation about. And they usually come from a place of love or at least acceptance. I don't see any malice in any of this. And I've watched every DC special up to this one. I will probably watch this one too at some point.
My last point though is that DC did this on purpose. This isn't the first time he has joked about trans people. He knew what the response would be. Yet here we are with everyone talking about his special...Almost like he planned it.
I do dismiss the statement. Not because I don't care. I do care. However, I reject the premise that Trans people are always killed for the sole reason that they are Trans people. The statement doesn't provide any background or even claim that "hate crimes against Trans people are more deadly." But in general, it's irrelevant.
I agree with you that DC made the jokes on purpose. But it wasn't just for "shock value." The jokes, most who watched the special appear to agree, are funny. Chapelle wasn't making jokes about dead Trans people. He was joking about the same thin-skinned reactionary response to anything that challenges their own narrative.
Comparing with Mel Brooks...Jews are killed BECAUSE THEY ARE JEWS all the time. And Jewish comedians still joke about Jews, and even really bad topics like Hitler. It's dark humor, and it's shocking at times. But claiming that funny jokes about Jews or Trans people incites hate, especially when the jokes are coming from a place that illuminates the stupidity of the haters, is just nonsense. I treat it appropriately.
Rejecting a premise without any information on the validity of said premise is the definition of not caring.
Your comment on Steve dismissing the most deadly year for Trans people made me wonder how much that "most deadly" modifier tells us. Before I go further, I want to be clear that EVERY murder is a tragedy and should not have happened, whether it's a Trans or a non-Trans victim.
That said, we do live in a fallen world where murders happen, and it's worth asking whether Trans people are murdered disproportionately compared to the population at large, the LGBT+ population, and the Black community, if race's is going to be highlighted ("the majority of whom are Black transgender people").
If we use HRC's numbers (44 deaths) and a population estimate from UCLA's Williams Center (1.4M Trans adults[1]), we arrive at a murder rate of 0.0031%. In 2020, the FBI reported 21,570 murders in the US[2], and the Census provides a population estimate of 331MM for 2020 United States[3]. Doing the same math as above, we arrive at a US murder rate of 0.0065%, more than double the Trans murder rate. Now, looking at the racial angle, we get 9,913 Black Americans murdered in 2020[4] from a population of 44.78MM[5], resulting in a murder rate of 0.02214%, more than 3 times the murder rate of the population at large, and 7 times the Trans murder rate.
And looking at the HRC reported murders, I count 26 Black Trans murders of the 44 Trans murders reported (59%).
If I were building a model that described what the numbers tell us, by far, the dominant predictor of one's likelihood of being murdered would include race as the dominant variable. Looking at Black murders compared to other racial cohorts, we find that the the overall representation of Black victims in all murders is 55.8%, not far from the 59% of Black victims within the Trans group.
My personal reading of these numbers and the idea that Culture is contributing to encouraging Trans murders is that the "harmful Culture" theory is MUCH weaker than the observation that Black Americans are murdered MUCH more than other demographic groups, and the murders of Black Trans people in 2020 likely reflects the overall trend of Black Americans being murdered more often.
I don't fault the folks for calling out injustices as they see it, but it's important to also recognize the wider context in which the injustices are occurring. Even if activists were successful in "cancelling" content that they believe is contributing to violence against Trans people, it's doubtful that they'll actually make a dent in the overall number of Trans murders (given that Trans folks are murdered LESS often than the typical American), and it's extremely doubtful that they will make a dent in Black Trans murders, given that just being Black is a 7x stronger predictor of being murdered than being Trans.
Anyhoo, I don't know if I have any other thoughts beyond this, but I did want to see what the overall context of murders was before endorsing a causal connection or even a correlation between Netflix's offerings and Trans people being murdered. There are larger currents at work here, and unless activists' efforts to "cancel" Netflix are being dwarfed by much larger efforts to reduce murders against Blacks and Americans at large, any successful cancellations will be largely meaningless as Americans across the board continue to be murdered.
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/27/1040904770/fbi-data-murder-increase-2020
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183489/population-of-the-us-by-ethnicity-since-2000/
(And as always, feel free to check my numbers and let me know if I got the math wrong and that's leading me astray in my conclusions.)
I haven't checked but I believe you. I questioned the significance of the "deadliest year" statement when I first saw it on another site and planned to do just what you did. I'm pretty sure you researched it better than I would have.
One thing you didn't include is why people are murdered. How many of those people were the victim of a hate crime? Killed simply for being trans.
That's a fair point and could potentially alter my conclusions. If we could show that the primary cause of the murder was because they were Trans (a hate crime), then something that modified the Culture to diminish the chances that folks are being murdered because they are Trans (and not Black, not because they happen to be caught up in the commission of an unrelated crime, etc.) could bring that 44 number down.
I'm not seeing any primary causes in the HRC link above - do you have any actual data that supports the idea that these folks were murdered for "being Trans" as opposed to something else?
I don't. I actually figured the numbers would be where they are. I took more issue with Steve's casual dismissal than anything. You know he didn't bother to look at those numbers.
I'm not going to speculate on what Steve is seeing or not seeing, but if you wanted to try and arrive at an estimate of what those numbers might be, you might start with the FBI's hate crimes statistics[1], see how many were identified as hate crimes against Trans people, and divide that number by the total number of crimes against Trans people to get a sense of the ratio of Trans hate victims vs. Trans non-hate victims.
It's not going to be a great estimate, but should point us in the right direction of what the actual objective number may be. I don't have any more time to pursue this today, but will be following along if you decide to play sleuth/mathematician.
[1] https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime