Violence declines — but not for trans people
Joy Bastet, 47, of San Francisco officially came out during the summer of 2020, while she was living in Laguna Beach. Even before she began living openly as trans, though, she said her nonconformity was obvious enough to invite harassment and threats.
She said she’s suffered sexual abuse at the hands of partners over the course of her life, including some who are trans themselves, but felt going to the police wouldn’t help. After intimidating encounters with people she called skinheads and alt-righters, she knew she had to leave Orange County.
“I became concerned with the idea that if I didn’t somehow figure out a way to live peacefully, eventually someone bigger than me was going to come around,” she said.
Hers is hardly a unique experience. A study out this month found that trans and nonbinary adults face staggering rates of violence in California, even as the broader population has reported a dip — underscoring how life in even the most welcoming states is still often fraught for trans people.
The fourth annual California Violence Experiences Survey, conducted by UC San Diego’s Center on Gender Equity and Health in partnership with Tulane University, was conducted from March to May. It found that 1 in 20 adults surveyed reported experiencing physical violence in the past year. About 1 in 10 of the study’s more than 3,500 respondents experienced sexual harassment or assault in the last year.
Trans and nonbinary people — which the 2023 study tracked for the first time — reported higher rates of victimization than cisgender people across those categories: Transgender adults reported a sevenfold higher rate of physical violence compared to cisgender respondents, and both trans and nonbinary respondents experienced five times the rate of sexual harassment and assault.
More than half of cisgender women also reported experiencing intimate partner violence at some point in their lifetime, the study found, while that number was 76% for nonbinary people and 83% for transgender people.
The report lands as trans people and their inclusion in public life have become topics of heated partisan discourse. More than 500 state bills regulating everything from trans children’s inclusion in sports to the provision of gender-affirming health care have been introduced this year across the country, as pundits and presidential candidates decry “transgenderism.” And amid rancorous debates over how schools treat trans students, libraries throughout Northern California have been targeted with bomb threats.
“I wish I could say I was surprised,” study author Anita Raj said of the disparities in violence. “It’s very upsetting, and all the more so in light of the kind of legislative actions that are occurring against these very same communities.”
Notably, the CalVEX study found that reported rates of violence for adults overall had decreased slightly over the last year, down 3% from the prior survey in 2022. That conflicts with the most recent state Department of Justice
report, which found an uptick in reported violent crime of 6.1% since 2021. But whereas the CalVEX data includes threats of violence and nonphysical forms of abuse, like slurs or harassment via unwanted sexual texts or emails, the state data defines violent crime narrowly as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
“None of those would capture the threat of a crime per se,” said Magnus Lofstrom, policy director of criminal justice at the Public Policy Institute of California. “You can imagine (with) homicides, (state officials) have pretty complete reporting. But then you have other types of crimes where it’s not going to be quite as complete,” like rapes and sexual assaults, which he said are “widely believed” to be underreported.
Population data on transgender people has historically been sparse, but it’s an area of increasing scholarly interest as sampling methods adapt to the changing language used by LGBTQ+ people. To that end, the CalVEX study is “interesting” in how it polls nonbinary respondents, said Ilan Meyer, a public policy scholar at UCLA’s Williams Institute.
Traditionally, surveys that account for trans and nonbinary people have used the “two-step model,” Meyer explained: one question asking respondents about their assigned sex at birth, and one question asking about their gender identity, which may include options for genders beyond “man” and “woman.” Researchers then look for respondents whose answers to the two questions seem to conflict, and count them as “transgender” in their survey populations.
The CalVEX study, by contrast, includes specific identity options like nonbinary and genderfluid, plus an option for respondents to self-describe their gender identity, and then asks whether they have “lived experience as a trans person.”
This more novel format risks diluting the data with cisgender respondents who don’t understand terms like genderfluid and incorrectly identify themselves, said Meyer, a longtime researcher of LGBTQ+ population data. But that format is also better able to account for the shifting ways trans people describe themselves and their identities: “It’s trying to respect whatever identity you have.”
And the CalVEX findings track with broader estimates of the trans population in the U.S., which range between 0.5% and 2% of adults, Meyer noted — so he stressed he “totally believe (s) the survey results.”
Bastet’s life since she first landed in the Bay Area last year hasn’t always been peaceful. A former avionics technician, she settled in San Francisco this summer without a job lined up and has been job-hunting since. Even living in the city, she said, she gets publicly heckled on occasion — though where hatred in Orange County felt “much more systemic,” here “it’s just incidental most of the time.”
Still, she said, the relief of transitioning has been worth the danger: “Who else would I be besides myself ?”