Thread by @sappholives83

(Fair warning: this is a long one, even for me.)

For anyone who doesn’t know, I’m a law enforcement officer with experience investigating both homicides and sex crimes.

When I was a rookie in 2007, there was a clear understanding that crossdressing men in women’s spaces were often there for sexual reasons, and that if we were called to deal with one, he was to be trespassed from the premises if the owner/manager requested it (meaning criminal charges would be filed if he returned), and any women who were in the bathroom with him would be questioned to make sure they hadn’t been harassed or assaulted. After that, assuming no one had been assaulted and wanted to press charges, he would be released with a verbal warning to stay out of women’s bathrooms.

When I started working sex crimes in 2015, it was still understood that crossdressers did it for sexual reasons, and common knowledge that transvestitic fetishism is often found in men who display other predatory sexual behaviors. (I would also estimate that roughly 50% of the hard drives containing child sexual abuse material that I had to go through in my time there also contained images or video of the hard drive’s (male) owner dressed in women’s or adult-sized toddler/infant clothing of some kind.)

By the time I made Homicide in 2017, you could hear the first rumblings of the impending eruption of narcissism and delusion, if you were paying close attention. I wasn’t, but you know what they say about hindsight being 20/20.

Between 2016 and 2018, I went to multiple law enforcement seminars and training events related to sexually motivated homicide, and from 2018-2020, I took classes in abnormal psych through a program my department has established with a local university.

At the seminars and training events, if speakers or instructors discussed killers like BTK or Col. Russell Williams (both of whom were crossdressers), they would discuss the rest of the subject’s psychology and case file in depth, but skirt around the issue of their TF with a deliberately casual, deliberately brief comment not designed to invite further questions.

When I tried to ask questions about the relationship between a killer’s TF and their crimes anyway (not out of TERFery; at the time, I knew basically nothing about the tactics or goals of the trans rights movement; I was interested only out of professional curiosity) I was either ignored or given the beginning of an answer that sometimes started out strong, but by the end of the reply had inevitably gone off the rails. No answer I was ever given had any real relationship to my actual questions.

There was a very obvious reluctance to go beyond recounting the bones of this part of these particular cases, and very little discussion of the part TF played in the motive or the psychology of the killers, a reluctance that was especially obvious when discussing crimes with a clear sexual aspect. Certainly no instructor ever tried to draw a link between a suspect’s TF and elements of the crime.

It was frustrating, but I chalked it up to personal feelings on the part of the speakers and instructors, who had clearly been uncomfortable discussing the subject - something I didn’t then understand, and which puzzled me. The link between TF and sexually inappropriate and/or predatory behavior has never been a secret in law enforcement circles, and it seemed odd for them to be so reluctant to discuss what was basically common knowledge.

In my first abnormal sexual psych class, it was worse. Any time the subject came up, the professor would say something like “this is what we used to think, but recent studies have proven that TW are no threat to other women and that TF/AGP doesn’t exist/affects natal women also.” (He went back and forth on that one).

(2/2)

The first time I heard “other women” used in that context was incredibly jarring, but I assumed the professor was just a radical…until I looked at my (mostly significantly younger) classmates and saw nothing but acceptance. That was a learning moment for me.

Towards the end of the semester, I realized that he was never going to discuss transvestitic fetishism at all, much less the link between TF and predatory and/or inappropriate sexual behavior, so I asked about it directly. I got a scolding for “transphobia” and an answer so circuitous that it had no actual meaning when you finished translating it into normal English.

When I attempted to clarify what he wanted to say, I got a curled lip and a “no wonder you went into law enforcement; academia seems a bit much for you.”

He clearly intended the comment to have a withering effect, but even the nicest of the 3 drill sergeants who pushed our platoon through Basic Training would have laughed at him (and then made him do push ups until his arms stopped working) for coming up with a weak insult like that, so I just told him politely that he was probably right, since I cared more about facts than I did about what other people think, and left.

I signed up to repeat the class the next semester with a different professor, and ran into the same thing: a facade of “this is what we used to think and it was wrong” laid down to hide a clear reluctance to discuss facts that the psychological and law enforcement communities have known for decades.

This professor wasn’t a jackass, but his answers to my questions on the subject were just as circuitous and contorted as the other’s had been. That was when I really understood that this wasn’t being ignored because of a few radical professors, but that the school itself was almost certainly telling these men what they could and could not teach.

This was a classroom full of students who would need this knowledge in the future: would-be psychologists and psychiatrists, would-be federal agents, students like myself and two others who were already in law enforcement, people who wanted to work in probation and parole - the list goes on. For almost everyone there, the sexually predatory nature of most MTF transitioners was crucial, vital information that needs to play a key role in the way we do some aspects of our jobs — and we were being deliberately misinformed.

I went back and complained to my lieutenant, and he promised to handle the issue, but two weeks later, DEI initiatives were put into place, with “LGBTQIA+ sensitivity training” mandated for everyone in the department. I’d been openly dating another woman for years, but that didn’t get me out of it, more’s the pity.

Instead, our lieutenant sat the entire Homicide unit down and flat out ordered us not to bring up predatory or murderous “trans women” or crossdressers under any circumstances. We were told that Special Victims was getting the same warning, and that anyone in either unit who disobeyed the order by so much as mentioning one of those men would spend the next year riding a desk, and then be transferred out of Homicide or Special Victims altogether and for good. Since all of us had spent years working to get where we were, we gave him a chorus of “no sir yes sir”s, and when the training came along, we were as quiet as so many mice.

I won’t torment you with all of the details of DEI training, but it was bad. Honestly, it felt cult-like. The DEI trainers they’d hired called us up one at a time and asked us questions about our feelings on race, gender, and sexuality. If we said something they disliked, they would pounce on it and tear it to shreds for whatever imagined prejudice they could contort the words to convey. It reminded me of the “struggle sessions” of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Genderism is a dangerous ideology that interferes with the ability to conduct a proper criminal investigation.