Why The Left’s ‘Fight Back’ Rhetoric Is Reckless

The public conversation about crime and transgender identity has taken a dangerous turn. On one side, progressive activists and many Democratic politicians repeat a simple slogan: transgender people are uniquely vulnerable victims who must be encouraged to “fight back” against a hostile society. On the other side, anger at high-profile crimes, including the horrific 2023 Nashville Christian school shooting by a transgender-identifying assailant, tempts some critics to speak as though transgender identity itself were a predictor of violence. Both tendencies, the romanticizing of confrontation and the temptation to essentialize an entire group, are mistakes. What is needed instead is a sober account of what we actually know about crime, victimization, and public safety in this small but intensely politicized population.

Will an identity group’s average rates of victimization and offending, even if accurately measured, tell us who is “dangerous” and who is not? Not necessarily. Human beings are not statistical aggregates. Still, politics has made crime statistics inescapable. Progressive advocates justify aggressive rhetoric by claiming that transgender people face dramatically higher rates of violent victimization than the rest of the population. Conservative critics respond by pointing to studies in which some transgender samples show elevated rates of property, drug, or violent offending compared to matched controls. If each side selects only the numbers that support its preferred narrative, the result is not justice for anyone, but confusion, resentment, and policy paralysis.

The first task is conceptual cleanup. When people hear that “transgender people are much more likely to be victims of violence,” they often imagine that the primary threat comes from hateful strangers seeking out transgender victims because of bias alone. Yet survey research suggests a more complex picture. Large national surveys find that transgender respondents report high rates of intimate partner violence, sexual victimization, and street harassment, but also high rates of homelessness, substance use, and involvement in informal or illegal economies. These are the classic structural risk factors for both victimization and offending. They do not excuse crime, but they do explain why certain groups appear so frequently in police data.

This is the point at which crime statistics are often misused. A study that reports that a given transgender sample has higher odds of arrest for property or drug offenses than a non transgender comparison group does not thereby demonstrate that transgender identity itself is criminogenic. The relevant question is whether the elevated risk remains once we control for age, poverty, childhood trauma, family instability, homelessness, serious mental illness, and substance dependence. Many of the most frequently cited studies lack sufficient data or statistical power to answer that question. Others use convenience samples from clinics or service organizations, which naturally overrepresent those in the greatest distress. When activists on either side convert such findings into sweeping slogans, they outrun the evidence.

Still, it would be a mistake, particularly for conservative readers, to dismiss these questions as merely academic. Police departments, social service agencies, and courts must make concrete decisions about resource allocation, threat assessment, and appropriate responses to repeat offending. Suppose that a local police department observes that a small number of individuals, many of whom identify as transgender, are involved in a disproportionate share of assaults around certain bars or shelters. The department has a basic obligation of equal protection. It cannot decline to enforce the law because offenders happen to belong to a protected class. At the same time, it has to understand why these clusters of violence occur, what role substance use and mental illness play, and whether any aspect of activist rhetoric is escalating already volatile situations.

Here, the “fight back” mantra becomes especially troubling. In an effort to counter narratives of helplessness, some activists and politicians have framed confrontations between transgender individuals and perceived bigots as morally righteous, almost sacramental, acts of resistance. The rhetoric slides easily from the language of civil rights to the language of struggle, and in the age of social media, flashpoints are instantly amplified and celebrated. The problem is not that self-defense is wrong. The problem is that a generalized call to “fight back” is delivered to a population that, by the activists’ own account, suffers unusually high rates of serious mental distress, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. It is not difficult to see how this combination can yield explosive results in rare but devastating cases.

The Nashville shooter was responsible, morally and legally, for her own actions. Nothing about her identity explains away the gravity of the crime. Yet after such incidents, the broader culture’s response is telling. Some progressive commentators rushed to frame the attack primarily as a symptom of societal transphobia, as if the real story were the shooter’s suffering rather than the murdered children and adults. Others, understandably horrified, toyed with the idea that transgender identity itself was the danger. Both reactions miss the mark. A serious law and order conservatism insists on individual responsibility, resists identity-based excuses, and refuses to generalize guilt to those who share a label but not an act.

What, then, should a responsible conservative say about apparent patterns of criminal involvement among some transgender subsets? First, that criminal law must remain neutral with respect to identity. A burglary is a burglary, a homicide is a homicide, whether committed by a transgender person, a conservative Christian, or anyone else. Hate crime enhancements, which treat identical acts differently depending on the government’s view of a perpetrator’s subjective motives, are already dubious on rule of law grounds. Carving out de facto immunities for favored groups is worse. Second, that targeted mental health and substance abuse interventions can be justified on public safety grounds, without endorsing the ideologies that currently dominate gender discourse.

Consider a hypothetical city in which a small group of chronically homeless individuals, many with gender dysphoria, engage in repeated low-level property crimes and occasional violent outbursts. A progressive city council may frame this solely as a housing and discrimination crisis, blaming landlords, churches, and abstract “hate.” A serious conservative response will be more direct. It will insist on firm, consistent enforcement of public order laws, so that ordinary citizens are not compelled to bear the costs of repeated victimization. It will support court-mandated treatment, not as a substitute for accountability, but as a condition of probation or parole. It will work to shut down activist channels that glorify confrontation or encourage unstable individuals to interpret every slight as a cause for righteous aggression.

The central mistake of the contemporary left is to treat victim status as a kind of moral currency. On this view, a group’s higher average rates of victimization entitle it to a discount on ordinary standards of behavior. Radical rhetoric, property destruction, or even occasional violence are reinterpreted as “punching up.” Conservatives sometimes make a mirror image error, treating group averages as evidence that entire classes of people are inherently suspect. A better approach is to return to the core conservative insight that justice is about persons, not abstractions. If a transgender person commits a crime, he or she should be treated just as any other offender would be. If a transgender person is violently victimized, he or she deserves the same protection and care as any other victim. Neither condition, identity or victimization, functions as a get out of jail free card.

There is also a cultural dimension that cannot be ignored. Young people who struggle with identity, depression, or alienation are exquisitely sensitive to the narratives offered by adults. When authority figures, including elected officials, signal that violence committed in the name of a cause will be understood, explained, or even half excused, they send a message that some people can engage in behavior that would be condemned in anyone else. This is a recipe for further tragedy. A healthier culture would tell vulnerable young people that they are responsible agents, capable of both great good and great harm, and that their value does not lie in belonging to a particular category but in their common humanity.

Finally, there is the question of what Christians, Jews, and other traditional believers should do when asked to affirm doctrines about gender that they regard as false or harmful. Some progressives portray refusal as an act of aggression, and a few even suggest that such dissent contributes to violence against transgender people. Here again, we must resist the slide from disagreement to moral blame. In a free society, citizens have the right to argue that medicalizing gender distress, particularly in children, is a grave mistake. They also have the right to insist that law, medicine, and education not be captured by a single ideology. To label such dissent as a form of violence is not only false, it encourages those who already see themselves as embattled to interpret ordinary political argument as an attack that demands literal self-defense.

The path forward is neither to deny the vulnerability of many transgender individuals nor to accept any ideological veto on serious public safety concerns. Instead, we should do three things at once. We should insist that crime be punished, regardless of the identity of the offender. We should provide targeted, evidence-based interventions for those at the highest risk of both victimization and offending, especially where mental illness and addiction are involved. And we should push back against political rhetoric, on all sides, that treats violence as an understandable extension of identity politics. That combination, firm in justice and realistic about human frailty, offers the best hope of protecting both public safety and the genuine dignity of every person involved.

If you enjoy my work, please subscribe: https://x.com/amuse.

Sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping independent journalists overcome formidable challenges in today’s media landscape and bring crucial stories to you.

READ NEXT: Why Trump’s DOJ Created A New Seat — And Why This Patriot Got It