No, trans people are not being hunted
One of the more pernicious ways that the press and the left (but I repeat myself) promote their worldview by making everything seem worse than it actually is. They paint everything within a narrative of oppressed classes being systematically persecuted and hunted by the oppressor class, facts be damned. One version of this narrative that pops up with annual regularity is the story that trans people are being killed at "epidemic" rates. The only trouble is, it just isn't so.
OBVIOUS DISCLAIMER: Every death is tragic and every murderer should be punished.
This narrative caught my attention for the first time about four years ago, and I dug into it using the most recent data available from 2015. I found conclusively that, contrary to the narrative, being trans is one of the safest demographics to be when it comes to homicide. Here are images of my notes from that time (sources appear at the end of the article):
Apparently, no journalist is interested in digging into the numbers, because this story comes back year-after-year framed as a "crisis." And although the numbers remain steady, trans homicides are reported as though they are on the rise.
Enter the year 2020. What with the pandemic, lockdowns, mask mandates, riots, and a shitshow of an election, you might be forgiven for not noticing that homicides were up last year, too. By a lot. According to The Guardian, the number of US homicides in 2020 is estimated to be between 4000 and 5000 more than the previous year. Naturally, since we only have estimates at this point, we can't know whether this rise happened across the board or if certain demographics were more heavily impacted. However, thanks to USA Today, we do have a number for trans homicides; 44 in 2020. In raw numbers, that's an obvious jump, but how does this compare to the broader trend?
The CDC reported for 2019 an overall homicide rate of 5.8 per 100,000. Using the Guardian estimates and freshly-minted US Census data, the homicide rate for 2020 looks to be somewhere between 6.98 and 7.3 per 100,000.
Nobody, as far as I can tell, reports the rate of trans homicides, so I had to figure that out on my own. Luckily, Gallup ran a survey in 2020 that found 0.6% of Americans identify as transgender. This matches the 2016 findings by the Williams Institute. That means the transgender population in 2020 was roughly 1.99 million.
I took transgender homicide data from the Human Rights Campaign, which reports 25 in 2019, because they consistently report figures higher than most other organizations tracking the same data. The language on their website suggests they are pushing the numbers as high as they plausibly can, and would like the reader to think it is probably higher.
With this information, I calculated the transgender homicide rate for 2019 at 1.27 per 100,000 and for 2020 at 2.21 per 100,000.
If we compare the increases, the least the overall homicide rate increased was by 1.18 per 100,000, while the transgender homicide rate increased by only 0.94 per 100,000, slightly less, but about even. Therefore, it is entirely reasonable to attribute the rise in transgender homicides in 2020 to the trend of increased homicide overall, not to any increase in already low bias.
It's also worth noting that the Human Rights Campaign makes it a point that 91% of trans homicide victims are black women, that is, biological males. This observation demands to be met with the stark contrast of the homicide rate for black men, which is appallingly over 30 per 100,000! That the rate of trans homicide is below the overall rate, which in turn is well below the rate for black men, when the vast majority of trans homicide victims are biologically black males, only further emphasizes the degree to which trans people are NOT specifically targeted for victimization.
None of this gets to the specifics of any particular crime. For that, I would plug the columnist and Twitter personality, Chad Felix Green, who does yeoman's work getting to the bottom of purported hate-crimes against LGBT individuals. He finds, time and again, that incidents reported as "hate crimes" are much more often garden-variety assaults and altercations that just happen to involve a LGBT person. In Chad's own words: "The only true anti-LGBT motivated hate crime in modern times was the Pulse nightclub terrorist attack which LGBT advocacy orgs *refuse* to include in their statistics."
Let me say it again, every life is valuable regardless of race, gender, sex, orientation, etc. etc. etc. No murderer should go unpunished. Period. But the narrative which says trans people are uniquely targeted for murder because of their identity is demonstrably false!
Nicely done and sourced as always. This is why I enjoy reading yours and Andrew's work so much. Even if trans isn't the big victim narrative these days it's essential for information like this to get out there so these narratives can be shot down quickly and decisively when they crop up. I just hope this information is getting to the people it needs to reach.
ReplyDeleteI found the "further reading" while preparing this article and was very pleased to see it. I came across nothing like it the first time I looked into this claim. Still, three articles against the hundreds, maybe thousands, that breathlessly parrot the "epidemic"? Not likely reaching many.
ReplyDeleteRight, I forgot the sheer volume of crap the left/media/Big Tech complex got. I've really got to give you, Andrew, Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, and others for taking on the thankless task of getting these numbers and ideas out there, though. I frequently wonder if I'm ever going to see any kind of progress, so to speak, rolling back the left's crap in my lifetime and the likely answer to that makes me want to drink until leftism makes sense. Can you tell this stuff is getting to me?
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