“‘Epidemic’ of Anti-Transgender Violence Highlighted in New Report,” read a November 2023 ABC News headline. According to the report’s publisher, a Washington, D.C.-based LGBT activist group called Human Rights Campaign (HRC), this “epidemic of violence against transgender and gender nonconforming people” is a “national tragedy and a national embarrassment.”
Just to be sure that we all got the epidemic memo, HRC stuck the E-word in the title of its report—Epidemic Of Violence. USA Today, The Hill, and NBC were among the media outlets that followed ABC in uncritically repeating this epidemic narrative.
Our annual Epidemic Of Violence report addresses the senseless violence claiming the lives of trans and gender non-conforming people who deserved to live their lives fully, openly and authentically without fear.
On #TDOR, we share their stories. https://t.co/6bNqgIwt51
— Human Rights Campaign (@HRC) November 20, 2023
The use of this kind of language isn’t new. HRC and other trans-rights groups have offered similarly apocalyptic claims in the past. And the idea that transgender people regularly run the risk of life-threatening violence due to right-wing transphobia has become received wisdom in many progressive circles. Even the U.S. Vice President and President have explicitly claimed that my country is experiencing an “epidemic” of lethal anti-transgender violence.
This would be horrific news—if it were true. Is it?
The 2023 Epidemic Of Violence report focuses heavily on the most serious kind of violence: homicide. In this regard, the authors identify a grand total of 33 “transgender or gender non-conforming” Americans who were killed over the one-year time period ending on November 20, 2023 (a date that, since 1999, has corresponded to Transgender Day of Remembrance).
To be clear: This isn’t a list of those who were killed because they were transgender. Rather, this represents the entire annual HRC tally of every American homicide victim who is known to have identified as transgender (or “gender nonconforming”) at the time he or she was killed.
As HRC correctly notes, it’s impossible to guarantee that such a list is complete. Perhaps there were trans homicide victims whose gender identity wasn’t known to police, the media, or even to their own family. However, it seems unlikely that HRC significantly underreported the true tally, as the group itself has boasted of an exhaustive process whereby staff “identify [trans] victims through daily monitoring of local news and social media,” supplemented by news provided from “loved ones of the victims [who] reach out to HRC directly.”
If that number—33 deaths in a nation of about 330-million people—strikes you as low by the standards of most “epidemics,” your impression would be correct: HRC’s own data suggest that, far from being victimized by an “epidemic” of murderous violence, transgender Americans are less likely to be killed than members of the population-at-large.
This fact wasn’t noted in any of the above-cited media coverage of the Epidemic Of Violence report. From what I can tell, HRC’s claims were universally taken at face value by mainstream-media reporters.
In 2022—we don’t have full 2023 data yet—the FBI counted 21,156 homicides in the United States; or about 6.3 homicides for every 100,000 Americans. That’s a fairly typical annualized U.S. homicide rate for the last quarter century or so. And so, while the 2022 calendar year doesn’t correspond chronologically to the 2022-23 reporting period covered by the HRC report, it provides a reliable population baseline.
To assess how HRC’s trans homicide victim tally compares to America’s general population on a per-capita basis, we need to divide the HRC-supplied figure by the number of trans-identified people in the United States. According to UCLA’s Williams Institute (self-described as America’s “leading research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy”), there are about 1.6-million Americans who “identify as transgender”—or about 0.5% of the American population.
This yields an annualized homicide rate for trans victims of less than 2.1 per 100,000. That’s about a third of the victim homicide rate for the overall American population (which, as noted above, was 6.3 per 100,000 in 2022).
Of course, a single homicide is one homicide too many, no matter the victim’s identity. And America’s overall murder rate is scandalously high compared to those of other developed nations. But putting that aside, the country’s trans population, far from suffering a homicide “epidemic,” seems to inhabit a bubble of relative safety (by American standards, at any rate).
Some caveats are required here. For one thing, the category definition used by HRC—encompassing not just transgender people, but also those who are merely “gender non-conforming”—would seem to be more broad than that employed by the Williams Institute (which simply counts those who “identify as transgender”). Moreover, the Williams Institute analysis excludes transgender Americans aged 12 or younger.
But insofar as either of these factors is statistically significant, the effect of the introduced error would be to artificially increase the calculated trans homicide victim rate—either by expanding the numerator (in the case of HRC’s more expansive definition of who counts as trans, for purposes of tallying victims), or by shrinking the denominator (in the case of the Williams Institute’s exclusion of children).
In any case, even if one assumed that trans people were being killed in the United States at double the rate suggested by HRC’s data, one still winds up with a much lower homicide victim rate than that corresponding to America’s total population.
Nor does HRC’s alarmist rhetoric hold up when the data is subdivided by race. The authors note that, of the 33 identified homicide victims corresponding to the period in question, only three were white, while twenty-three were black, and seven were “Hispanic/Latine.” They conclude that, “as those living at the intersection of multiple marginalized racial/ethnic and gender identities, transgender women of color—and Black transgender women in particular—are disproportionately affected by the epidemic of violence against transgender people.”
Except—again—there is no epidemic. Williams Institute data from 2016 suggest that, of the total transgender population in the United States, roughly 45% is non-white. That works out to just over 700,000 transgender people of color. Thirty killed over a one-year period yields a homicide victim rate of about 4.2 per 100,000. Again, that’s 30 people too many. But the per-capita figure is well below the average for America as a whole.
If one focuses only on the 23 black victims identified by HRC, the homicide rate is higher: 9.8 per 100,000 (assuming that about 15.5% of America’s transgender population is black, as Williams Institute data suggest). And this figure is, indeed, higher than America’s baseline homicide victim rate of 6.3 per 100,000. But it is also less than half the baseline homicide victim rate for all black Americans—which was measured at over 23 per 100,000 in 2020.
The fact that blacks are killed at a much higher rate than whites in the United States is, of course, its own kind of scandal—but it is a scandal connected to race (and racism), not to any imaginary epidemic against trans people.
The word “hate” appears more than two dozen times in the HRC report, reflecting the authors’ somewhat obvious attempt to link the claimed “epidemic” of homicides to transphobia. But scan the details of the 33 victims listed in the report, and one quickly finds that transphobic “hate” doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with most of these homicides.
The entry for Banko Brown, for instance, lists the victim as “a 24-year-old Black trans man…remembered as being ‘brilliant’ and as someone who made ‘everybody laugh’…On April 27, 2023, he was killed by an armed security guard in San Francisco after an altercation.”
Remembering Banko Brown
The ‘bold’ and ‘funny’ Black trans man was shot outside a San Francisco Walgreens by an armed security guard.
In fact, Banko was killed after repeatedly threatening to stab a guard and charging toward him. The local prosecutor declined to file criminal charges against the guard, having concluded that he acted in self-defense. Brown had initially been confronted for shoplifting, and there’s no indication that gender identity played a role in his death.
Epidemic Of Violence is a slick, professionally produced document. Its authors know how to do arithmetic, and almost certainly performed the same calculations that I described above. If those numbers had yielded evidence of a real epidemic, they’d have showed their homework for all to see. But, inconveniently for HRC, that’s not the case. So instead, the report is long on loaded language and selectively curated human interest vignettes, and short on math.
This is an LGBT activist group that takes in more than $40-million annually from donors and granting entities. Yet gay marriage is (thankfully) now legal all 50 states, and most of the big battles for LGBT rights have been won. Pretending that there’s an “epidemic” against trans people would seem to be one of the few remaining strategies that would allow a well-funded group such as HRC to maintain its media profile and sustain a sense of political urgency in regard to its mission, thereby keeping donors motivated. (Earlier in 2023, HRC grandly declared a “national state of emergency” for America’s LGBT population.) It’s a grubby game, even if HRC is hardly the only nonprofit advocacy organization that plays it.
But there’s another likely explanation at play here—and one that I find more unsettling.
In its report, HRC tries hard to connect the claimed “epidemic” of trans murders to its overall political agenda. Specifically, the authors seek to draw a connection with “anti-trans” policies, such as bills that restrict drag performances to adult attendees and legislation that protects women’s sports from male-bodied trans athletes.
“Such bills ingrain discrimination and hate into law, perpetuate stigma and marginalization of transgender people, and harm the health and well-being of transgender youth,” HRC concludes. This passage appears in a section titled, Needed Legal Protections. This suggests that the only way to keep trans people from being murdered (on an “epidemic” scale, no less) is for politicians to follow the full slate of trans activist demands catalogued by HRC, from the classroom to the gym to the doctor’s office.
Essentially, HRC is weaponizing a set of scattered, tragic, violent, premature deaths in an attempt to shut down debate on contentious subjects. Are we to believe that Banko Brown wouldn’t have been killed while shoplifting if trans-presenting children were rushed into “gender-affirming” surgeries and drug regimes on a more expedited basis, or if more male-bodied athletes were permitted to compete in female sports leagues?
November 2024 will bring yet another HRC report, no doubt stuffed with many of the same claims and slogans. But perhaps this time around, reporters will get out their calculators before acting as relay stations for the group’s morbid propaganda.
