What’s True and What’s False in Numbers of Trans Victims of Violence

A writer for the National Review who wrote about Transgender Day of Remembrance made the false claim that trans people are actually safer than other groups of people.

by Evan Urquhart

How many trans people died violently in America in 2023? That’s actually a trick question: Nobody knows, and nobody even claims to know. This may come as a surprise if you’re used to taking the Human Rights Campaign’s annual list of names as a comprehensive list of trans deaths, and it’s apparently also a surprise to Willfred Reilly, an author, right-wing commentator, and political science professor at Kentucky State University. In an article for the National Review, Reilly used HRC’s list to claim that transgender Americans are safer from violence than other people, in service to an argument that concern about violence against the trans community amount to a conspiracy theory. Reilly took the 26 names compiled by Human Rights Campaign for Transgender Day of Remembrance 2023 and estimated the rate of murder for the trans community in the U. S. The problem is, the HRC’s list is not, and doesn’t claim to be, a full count of every trans person to die violently.

screenshot from the National Review

Not only is HRC list of names not comprehensive, it has also never claimed to be comprehensive. No one knows how many trans people each year die to violence, though there is strong circumstantial evidence that trans people are significantly more vulnerable than most Americans.

Transgender Day of Remembrance, observed on November 20, was created by trans activists in 1999, who used the day as a way to mark the passing of those in the community who were often overlooked and forgotten, particularly transfemme sex workers of color. Human Rights Campaign began officially collecting stories of trans people lost to violence in 2013, assembling a list based on news reports, social media reports, and personal reports from those who knew the deceased person. This method puts a human face on violence against trans people, but it’s neither a statistical sampling nor a comprehensive record. Deaths of trans people that are not reported in the press or on social media have no way of being included, unless friends or family know to reach out to HRC directly. No one knows what percentage of all deaths HRC’s official list captures.

This reality is sometimes fudged a bit when reporters write about the list, such as in 2017 when news stories claimed it had been the “deadliest year” for transgender Americans. HRC presents the list with an air of officiality, which helps contribute to the impression that they have collected the names of every trans person who has died to violence, not just an unknown percentage of them. However, HRC’s language always says “at least” this number of trans people died to violence, and places that discuss their methodology are more specific about its limitations. In their report on the 33 deaths that occurred between TDOR 2022 and TDOR 2023, for example, they say the list is “very likely” an undercount and, “data collection is often incomplete or unreliable when it comes to violent and fatal crimes against the trans community.”

screenshot from the 2023 TDOR report by HRC

Reilly’s method of arbitrarily rounding the 26 names on the list to 30 “to account for December,” calculating possible murder rates for 2023 based on different estimates of how many trans people there are, and then comparing the numbers he got to official murder rates for other groups based on official CDC data is, simply, garbage. Reilly is comparing apples to oranges: The CDC’s numbers are based on official death certificates, HRC’s numbers are based on news reports and word of mouth. There are no CDC numbers for causes of death in the trans community, nor is there any official estimate of the size of the transgender population.

Reilly’ story is divorced from anything resembling true empirical methods, and because it’s the National Review it’s also heavily invested in pushing racist narratives about crime and violence. To that end he writes disparagingly about many of the victims, and makes much of the fact that most of the perpetrators were non-white.

screenshot from the National Review

Catering to conservative grievance-mongering on race is familiar territory for Reilly, best known for the book Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, which was published by a conservative publisher in 2019. In it he claimed most hate crimes are hoaxes, a dubious conclusion that is currently unsupported by mainstream researchers (Reilly is also Black himself).

Reilly concludes, based on this completely garbage method, that it actually much safer to be trans than it is to be a member of many other groups, including white men. That seems unlikely, doesn’t it? But, if there are no official numbers with which to calculate a murder rate for the trans community, why do most people think it’s more dangerous to be transgender than cisgender?

The belief that trans people are disproportionately victims of violence rests on strong circumstantial evidence. The largest survey of transgender people conducted thus far, the 2015 US Transgender Survey by the Center for Transgender Equality found that large numbers of trans people report having been victims of violence, including assault, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. For example, 9 percent of trans people surveyed reported having been physically assaulted in the past year, while the reported rate for the US population in the same year was 2 percent. Trans people are also far more likely to experience homelessness. The USTS reported 12 percent of respondents said they had been homeless in the past year. A 2020 study by the Williams Institute found 8 percent of trans people had experienced homelessness that year, compared with 1 percent of cisgender straight people (and 3 percent of non-trans sexual minorities). Data from the National Alliance to End Homelessness further suggests that, of homeless people, trans people are much more likely to be unsheltered, which like homelessness itself is highly correlated with experiences of violence.

In other words, many data points suggest that the transgender population has a number of characteristics that are known to be highly associated with violent death, even if the exact numbers are unknown and perhaps impossible to know precisely, as how a person identified isn’t always clear after their murder. What we do know is that poverty, homelessness, incarceration, drug and alcohol addiction, and survival sex work are all associated with a higher risk of violence, and we have good reason to think all of these are elevated among trans people, particularly trans women of color. Although the HRC list is the most well-known, it’s not definitive, with an alternative data set by the National Center for Trans Equality claiming to have verified 53 violent deaths between November 2022 and November 2023, while also stating that their numbers were likely an undercount.

Events like Transgender Day of Remembrance exist not only to remember the dead but to bring visibility to the conditions of precarity that surround so many trans people’s existence. Focusing too hard on the number of names collected by a particular group in a particular year can obscure the connection between precarity, marginalization, and violence.