Group: Trans people face an ‘epidemic of violence’
At least 33 transgender or gender nonconforming people were killed in the past year in the U.S., the vast majority of them people of color, according to an annual tally compiled by the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group.
The Human Rights Campaign’s annual report was released Monday to coincide with Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual observance memorializing transgender and gender nonconforming people whose lives have been lost to anti-transgender violence.
“The epidemic of violence against transgender and gender nonconforming people is a national tragedy and a national embarrassment,” organization president Kelley Robinson said in a news release. “Each of the lives taken is the result of a society that demeans and devalues anyone who dares challenge the gender binary.”
The average age of those killed in the past year was 28, and most died by gun violence, according to the annual Epidemic of Violence report released by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the HRC’s educational arm.
“The 33 people we lost in the last year were overwhelmingly young and people of color, with Black trans women disproportionately impacted,” Robinson said.
More than 26,000 people died by homicide nationwide in 2021, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 2.8 million people in the U.S. identify as transgender or nonbinary, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
Black trans women at highest risk
The organization’s 2023 figure was slightly higher than last year’s total of 32. Robinson said the numbers probably don’t reflect the actual total, given that such deaths sometimes go unreported or misreported, or are initially misclassified because of misgendering.
That point was echoed by Kris Tassone, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, whose own tally was even higher: 53 transgender lives lost to violence based on police reports, obituaries, submissions from friends and family, and collaboration with other activists.
Since 2013, the Human Rights Campaign has recorded 335 such deaths, 85% of them people of color. Of the 33 killings that occurred from Nov. 21, 2022, to Nov. 20, 2023, 90% were people of color. Black transgender women comprised more than 6 in 10 victims.
Nearly 4 in 5 (79%) victims in the Human Rights Campaign report were younger than 35, and the killer was unknown in a third of the cases. More than half (51.5%) were initially misgendered by police or in news reports, the report said.
Robinson, of the HRC, noted the increasing rhetoric, threats of violence and legislation targeting the transgender community in recent years, including laws banning gender-affirming health care, bomb threats directed at libraries and hospitals that support trans and nonbinary people, and last year’s mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ establishment in Colorado.
Is legislation part of the problem?
Earlier this year, the Human Rights Campaign declared a “national state of emergency” for LGBTQ+ Americans for the first time in its more than 40-year history, citing what it said were more than 550 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced into statehouses across the country. More than 80 were signed into law.
Meanwhile, hate crimes based on gender identity rose by nearly a third from 2021 to 2022, the FBI reported.
Tori Cooper of the Human Rights Campaign’s Transgender Justice Initiative said it’s a crisis rooted in, among other things, racism, toxic masculinity and transphobia.
“These victims had families, friends, hopes, dreams,” Cooper said. “None of them deserved to have their lives stolen by horrific violence.”