After deadly flooding in Texas, Republicans used an emergency legislative session called to tackle the state’s most pressing issue: where trans people pee.
They’re trying to use attacking trans people just minding our business to cover up GOP having sex with kids while letting dozens of other kids get murdered by psychos or murdered by mismanaged disasters. Tx is perfectly representative of entire GOP - unaccountable, useless, and godless scum
Gender-nonconforming cis people will be targets of harassment due to these bans a long time before many trans people will. There are many more such cis people than trans, and people who are trans (by contrast) can often be very gender-conforming and blend in relatively easy. Which raises the key point: bathroom bans are as ludicrous as they are cruel. Any mechanism at enforcement is just going to cause huge problems. I guess everyone will need to carry their birth certificate with them when they’re out in public in Texas now?
Laws like this are doomed. “You Can Aways Tell!” Right, silly of me to overlook that. I’d like to introduce you to an interesting bit of statistics called Bayes Theorem.
There is a famous theorem that connects conditional probabilities of two events. It's named Bayes' theorem, and the formula is as follows:
P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B)
You can ask a question: "What is the probability of A given B if I know the likelihood of B given A?". This theorem sometimes provides surprising and unintuitive results. The most commonly described examples are drug testing and illness detection, which has a lot in common with the relative odds of finding some unique state in the population. Let's stick to the second one.
In a group of 1000 people, perhaps 10 of them are transgender persons. Everybody is transvestigated using some magical technique, which somehow shows the actual result in 95% of cases, an absurdly high accuracy, but there’s a point to this. Next, let’s find the probability of a person being actually transgender if their magical investigation result is positive.
Without thinking, you may predict, by intuition, that the result should be around 90%, right? Let's make some calculations and estimate the correct answer.
1. We will use a notation: C – cisgender, T – identified as transgender, + – test positive, - – test negative.
2. Rewrite information from the text above in a way of probabilities: P(C) = 0.99, P(T) = 0.01, P(+|T) = 0.95, P(-|T) = 0.05, P(+|C) = 0.05, P(-|C) = 0.95.
3. Work out the total probability of a test to be positive: P(+) = P(+|T) * P(T) + P(+|C) * P(C) = 0.95 * 0.01 + 0.05 * 0.99 = 0.059.
4. Use the Bayes' theorem to find the conditional probability P(T|+) = P(+|T) * P(T) / P(+) = 0.95 * 0.01 / 0.059 = 0.161.
Hmm... About 16%, not 90%! it isn't that high, is it? It turns out that this kind of paradox appears if there is a significant imbalance between the number of people in two distinct groups. Trans people are relatively rare, altering the probabilities in a very non-intuitive way.
Even if the “Transvestigators” have a 95% accuracy in identifying individuals as trans or cis, trans folks are uncommon, and they will be wrong 5 out of 6 guesses.
Enforcing laws aimed at transgender folks is going to be hard, with lots of false arrests. Your attempts at restriction will sweep up more folks who are not transgender than are, by a substantial margin. There will be litigation. There are so very many underemployed lawyers in the United States, and they will be delighted to go for 30% of a sure thing.
What else would you expect from Texas- the Texas republicans will everything and anything to hurt all Texans from kids to adults - the only thing they care about is power - if Texans want a better government they need to rise up protest in big numbers and VOTE THEM OUT
They’re trying to use attacking trans people just minding our business to cover up GOP having sex with kids while letting dozens of other kids get murdered by psychos or murdered by mismanaged disasters. Tx is perfectly representative of entire GOP - unaccountable, useless, and godless scum
What can we do to address this horrible action?
Gender-nonconforming cis people will be targets of harassment due to these bans a long time before many trans people will. There are many more such cis people than trans, and people who are trans (by contrast) can often be very gender-conforming and blend in relatively easy. Which raises the key point: bathroom bans are as ludicrous as they are cruel. Any mechanism at enforcement is just going to cause huge problems. I guess everyone will need to carry their birth certificate with them when they’re out in public in Texas now?
Laws like this are doomed. “You Can Aways Tell!” Right, silly of me to overlook that. I’d like to introduce you to an interesting bit of statistics called Bayes Theorem.
There is a famous theorem that connects conditional probabilities of two events. It's named Bayes' theorem, and the formula is as follows:
P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B)
You can ask a question: "What is the probability of A given B if I know the likelihood of B given A?". This theorem sometimes provides surprising and unintuitive results. The most commonly described examples are drug testing and illness detection, which has a lot in common with the relative odds of finding some unique state in the population. Let's stick to the second one.
In a group of 1000 people, perhaps 10 of them are transgender persons. Everybody is transvestigated using some magical technique, which somehow shows the actual result in 95% of cases, an absurdly high accuracy, but there’s a point to this. Next, let’s find the probability of a person being actually transgender if their magical investigation result is positive.
Without thinking, you may predict, by intuition, that the result should be around 90%, right? Let's make some calculations and estimate the correct answer.
1. We will use a notation: C – cisgender, T – identified as transgender, + – test positive, - – test negative.
2. Rewrite information from the text above in a way of probabilities: P(C) = 0.99, P(T) = 0.01, P(+|T) = 0.95, P(-|T) = 0.05, P(+|C) = 0.05, P(-|C) = 0.95.
3. Work out the total probability of a test to be positive: P(+) = P(+|T) * P(T) + P(+|C) * P(C) = 0.95 * 0.01 + 0.05 * 0.99 = 0.059.
4. Use the Bayes' theorem to find the conditional probability P(T|+) = P(+|T) * P(T) / P(+) = 0.95 * 0.01 / 0.059 = 0.161.
Hmm... About 16%, not 90%! it isn't that high, is it? It turns out that this kind of paradox appears if there is a significant imbalance between the number of people in two distinct groups. Trans people are relatively rare, altering the probabilities in a very non-intuitive way.
Even if the “Transvestigators” have a 95% accuracy in identifying individuals as trans or cis, trans folks are uncommon, and they will be wrong 5 out of 6 guesses.
Enforcing laws aimed at transgender folks is going to be hard, with lots of false arrests. Your attempts at restriction will sweep up more folks who are not transgender than are, by a substantial margin. There will be litigation. There are so very many underemployed lawyers in the United States, and they will be delighted to go for 30% of a sure thing.
The very shock of using a session for flood relief for this crap…
What else would you expect from Texas- the Texas republicans will everything and anything to hurt all Texans from kids to adults - the only thing they care about is power - if Texans want a better government they need to rise up protest in big numbers and VOTE THEM OUT
"Never let a crisis go to waste..."
*𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘷𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘵*