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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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A romantic partner might commit murder because of the shame of being publically outed as being in a relationship with a trans gender person, and honour killings of trans people by their family members do occur.

Yeah, but the cases sited on various activist sites for TRANS DAY OF REMEMBERING WE ARE BEING GENOCIDED! really do fall into, ironically, 'typical domestic violence for cis women' bucket. A broke up with B, who went on 'if I can't have you nobody else can' retaliation. C was openly living with D who fully knew C was trans, everyone in their families knew of their relationship and had no problem with it, and then... murderation. Where it's not "sex worker who may or may not have been killed by client", it genuinely is one of the few instances where trans women are being treated like cis women.

And that's before we get into "so trans woman A and trans woman B were on-again, off-again lovers and turns out B was nutty as a fruitcake and ended up murdering A".

EDIT: I apologise if that comes across as flippant, but I've gone through some of these lists from the previous years and looked up all the cases of "E and F and G were murdered, E and F and G were trans, now we're not saying E and F and G were murdered for being trans, except we are saying that" and there were examples like "G was pushed into the road and got hit by a car driven by H who had nothing to do with G" and that is treated as "trans death", i.e. this person was trans, this person died, ergo this is another instance of a trans person dying because of transphobia and hate crimes and violence and The Genocide. The one that most made my eyes bulge out was a trans guy who was also an environmental activist, was in a camp with other activists, the camp got raided by the cops and this guy was shot while in a tent. That was treated as "murdered for being trans" where there was no way on earth the cops could have known "ah yes, the person in this tent is trans, we must deliberately target them". You can't even say "the cops deliberately shot this person", it was more "when you start shooting, bystanders get hit" kind of death.

Sometimes the lily gets gilded in these accounts for the sake of "but we must tell a few lies in order to achieve the greater good".

EDIT EDIT: Take, for example, this case:

The first murdered trans victim of 2026 Sthepanny Cassiano da Silva was stabbed by an armed agressor while she showed her civil courage to protect a mother and her daugther in São João Batista on 1 January 2026. The first TDoR case of the year. Rest in Power Sthepanny.

Now, this is definitely a murder. Was it "murdered because trans/for being trans"? No, but it's being used to bump up the statistics. Sites such as this hand out lists of numbers to media outlets who then dutifully run stories on "300 [figure pulled out of the air] trans people were victims of murder last year, shocking rise in transphobic violence, stop hate crimes now, killed just for their gender identity!" when that ain't the reason. If you took only the genuine "yes, the motive for this murder was transphobia", you'd have one or maybe two (those were the most I could find out of the lists). That doesn't play so well when you're trying to sell the mainstream on "there is a transgender genocide happening!"