On Violent Victimization of TGNC People
Yes, trans people are more likely to be killed. Stop fooling around.
Yesterday was the Transgender Day of Remembrance, the yearly commemoration of the transgender victims of homicide. The Human Rights Campaign recorded 46 transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people who were killed over the year,1 which is the highest number they’ve recorded since they began tracking in 2013. Outside of a few limited locales such as Philadelphia, there is no real effort to track crime against TGNC people, leaving the Human Rights Campaign’s report the most comprehensive record of violence against them that we have.
Some have determined by means of rudimentary back-of-the-envelope mathematics that TGNC people are not actually at higher risk of being killed than the general population. Personally, I’ve seen this maneuver demonstrated with varying numbers about a half dozen times in the past two days, all to the effect that there’s no need to be worried about violence against TGNC people.
The general outline of the argument is as follows. Transgender people comprise about 0.6% of the adult population of the USA.2 There are roughly 258 million adults in the USA.3 0.6% of 258 million is about 1.5 million. If there were 46 homicides out of a population of 1.5 million, that means there were about 3 homicides per 100,000 transgender adults. Compare this to the general United States statistic of 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people.4 Therefore, transgender people are less likely to be killed than the general population.
This is a very weak argument.
Data collection of the total number of homicides is much more robust than data collection of homicides among TGNC people. This is due to both logistical reasons and bias. Data collection on a subgroup is rarely as high quality as data collection on the larger group, and TGNC people are frequently deadnamed and misgendered in local news reports and police,5 6 making data collection even more difficult. The methodology also runs towards undercounting: We want a name, a news report, a death certificate, something solid to tie every homicide to. To see why this leads to undercounting, consider how official deaths attributed to COVID-19 on death certificates are significantly lower than excess deaths.7 Excess deaths allow us to get a more accurate feel for the real cost that COVID-19 has inflicted because it doesn’t rely as much on us having a highly accurate bureaucratic system of collecting data.
We don’t have anything like excess deaths that we can use to make a more accurate count of the number of homicides against TGNC people. However, we do have information on correlates of and risk factors for violence. One well-known correlate of homicide is poverty,8 9 10 and transgender people are disproportionately impoverished. TGNC people have reported being in poverty twice as often as the general population, and in severe poverty three times as often.11 Additionally, it is well-known that those involved in sex work face much higher rates of homicide than the general population,12 and about one in eight TGNC people report having engaged in sex work,13 several orders of magnitude higher than the general population.14 Additionally, it is known that TGNC people face physical violence at far higher rates than the general population: 9%, or 9,000 per 100,000, experienced physical assault in the past year because they were transgender.15 Compare this to the rate of recorded aggravated assault among the general population: 250 per 100,000.16
Given this information, it seems bewildering to think that transgender people do not face a high risk for homicide. If I presented to you a population which self-reports extremely high rates of poverty, survival sex work, and violent victimization, you would reasonably conclude that they probably get killed a lot, too. A single advocacy organization doing their best to collect names and faces from news and police departments that frequently obscure the fact that the victim is TGNC should not weigh heavily on this conclusion, either for or against.
At the end of the day, however, the reality that transgender people are at a significantly heightened risk for violent victimization is something that can be understood by listening to the experiences of almost any transgender person. Even the most liberal cities in the United States, one of the most progressive countries in the world on transgender issues, are widely regarded by the transgender people who live there as only safer than conservative areas, not safe. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist (or an essay with 16 citations) to be aware of the danger that transgender people are exposed to just by existing in public.
“U.S. Adult Population Grew Faster Than Nation’s Total Population From 2010 to 2020” by the United States Census Bureau.
“News outlets misidentified nearly two out of three victims of anti-trans violence in 2020” by Media Matters for America.
“COVID-19 Mortality Overview” by the Centers for Disease Control.
Pridemore, William A. “A methodological addition to the cross-national empirical literature on social strucutre and homicide: A first test of the poverty-homicide thesis.” Criminology, Volume 46, Issue 1, February 2008, pp. 133-154. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2008.00106.x
Rogers, Megan L. and Pridemore, William A. “The effect of poverty and social protection on national homicide rates: Direct and moderating effects.” Social Science Research, Volume 42, Issue 3, May 2013, pp. 584-595. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.12.005
Males, Mike. “Age, Poverty, Homicide, and Gun Homicide: Is Young Age or Poverty Level the Key Issue?” SAGE Open, Mar. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015573359
James, Sandy, et al. "The report of the 2015 US transgender survey." (2016). pp. 140-145. Retrieved from https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf
John J. Potterat, Devon D. Brewer, Stephen Q. Muth, Richard B. Rothenberg, Donald E. Woodhouse, John B. Muth, Heather K. Stites, and Stuart Brody. “Mortality in a Long-term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women,” American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 159, Issue 8, 15 April 2004, Pages 778–785, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwh110
James, Sandy, et al. "The report of the 2015 US transgender survey." (2016). pp. 158-160.
Potterat, John J., et al. "Estimating the prevalence and career longevity of prostitute women." Journal of Sex Research 27.2 (1990): 233-243. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499009551554
James, Sandy, et al. "The report of the 2015 US transgender survey." (2016). pp. 198-199.
"Crime in the US 2018 Table 16.” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reporting.