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Notes -
This one is going to be long, so I'll probably break it up into two halves for easier reading.
We hear a lot about “Transgender Day/Week of Remembrance” and hate-crimes/murders affecting transgender people. Figures get reported uncritically in the media and, more importantly, on social media. But how accurate are they?
I’m going to go through a 2024 report from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, where they call it an “epidemic of violence”. Then I’ll list the names they give of transgender people who were killed in 2023/2024 and what I’ve found online reported on the deaths.
That will let us see, at least, if people really are being murdered wholesale simply for being trans, or if it’s simply for the same reasons people have been murdered throughout history.
Make up your own minds. I’m not doing this for any agenda pro- or anti-anything, except for having accuracy (as much as we can get it) as to who is getting killed and for what reasons (if there are reasons to be established). (I like this new phrase, “gender expansive”. Must remember that is the correct term to use in future).
Several of these cases are to do with “victim was sex worker/may have been engaged in sex work/may have had criminal ties”. Several are “current/former romantic partner”.
So this is everyone who was deliberately murdered solely for being transgender, no other reason? Well, no:
So basically – if you were trans/gender non-conforming/cis gender non-conforming and you died by violence, you get counted in the list of “anti-trans hate”. Yes, even if you got whacked in gang-related crime or were shot by a random shooter who was in a quarrel with a completely different person or got knocked down in a hit-and-run:
I’m putting the descriptions in quotation marks because I’m taking them as-is from the website, sometimes the people involved used different names or gender identities.
There we are: 36 deaths, but how many of them would you count as genuine anti-trans hate crime violence epidemic? I'm not trying to deny transphobia and hate crimes exist, just point out that the next time you see "X trans deaths! our society is homophobic and transphobic, this proves it!", that may not be the exact motive for murder instead of the traditional ones of greed, lust, revenge, etc. that happen to straight white cis people too.
In at least this case (and probably several others), the perpetrator was also trans, which in a sane world would rule out "anti-trans animus" as a motive:
Ah, that's the update I didn't get. Yeah, a lot of these cases can't be "the victim was killed for being trans" because one, at least, the aggressor was upset because he didn't want the relationship to end and already knew the person was trans. Several of them are former partner, so again it's "knew the person was trans".
What boggles my mind is the hit-and-runs. Someone gets knocked down in a routine kind of traffic accident such as happens hundreds of times, but this is judged societal forces of violence that disproportionately affect minorities or something? I do not get any rationale behind including these, apart from "the demand for hate crimes outstrips supply" so they need to pump up the numbers.
"Two people murdered for no reason but being trans" over two years is a lot less impressive than "thirty-six people killed!"
Crime does disproportionately impact minorities, though, including trans people. If you're poor or mentally ill, you're far more likely to be a victim of a crime than if you're not.
The issue is that the HRC apparently thinks press releases about how bad abstract "systemic" transphobia is is a more effective way to address the disparate impact of crime than increase policing and enforcement policies in the most victimized communities.
As @sarker points out above it appears that crime does not, in fact, disproportionately impact trans people.
From @sarker's comment:
So, trans people are fifty times less likely to be murdered than a random American? That doesn't pass the smell test.
As @FtttG points out below, trans people are substantially more likely to report being the victim of a crime, though that comes with obvious caveats. But some basic sanity checks: trans people are also disproportionately non-white, particularly black and Hispanic. They are disproportionately poor and young. These are all groups that face high rates of crime victimization, and you'd expect that, even if trans identity itself doesn't affect victimization, they'd be more likely to be victims of crime. Beyond that, my bet is that trans people spend time with other trans people; trans people commit more crimes; and so even accounting for race and income, you'd still see elevated rates of victimization.
None of this means buying into the HRC's framing that there's a systemic trans genocide going on, except insofar as our public policy choices let criminals run rampant in those communities.
Then you must accept either a much higher number of trans homicide victims (surely HRC has squeezed all the blood from that stone) or much lower number of trans people in the country. Thing is, I went through the trouble of scrolling a little further down Google, and HRC itself estimates 1.6M trans people 13+ in the US. So we're looking at a homicide rate of 1.2 homicides per 100k (apologies, I fucked up the math in the original post, corrected) if we simply take the HRC's numbers at face value. About 1.6M is the lowest estimate I could find on the front page.
To match the genpop homicide victimization rate, you'd need there to be only about 260k trans people in the US. And this isn't even counting the "gender expansive".
HRC is being pulled in two different directions: one, to maximize an estimate of the number of reported trans people; two, to maximize the number of trans murders. The former is a much easier task than the latter, because the same amount of work can get you any estimated number you want. The latter is much harder, because (AFAIK) most places don't report the gender identity of victims; so instead, they have some intern trawl through news reports and flag the ones that explicitly list the gender identity of the victim.
So, although I think the HRC estimates of the number of trans people countrywide are significantly inflated, the bigger factor is that the HRC is not capturing most of the number of trans victims.
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