Transgender Murder Rate Lower Than General Population, Study Finds
Researchers challenge claims of epidemic violence driven by hate, citing intimate partner violence as a primary motive.
Transgender individuals are murdered at a lower rate than the general U.S. population, and when such incidents occur, the primary motive is typically not bias, according to a study by Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright of the Manhattan Institute. Their findings, published earlier this year, question assertions by organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) that an "epidemic" of deadly violence against the transgender community is driven by "transphobia" or "white supremacy."
"Transgender people are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, most transgender people are murdered by members of their own race, and intimate partner violence — not hate — is the leading identified motive for most such murders," Lundgren and Wright stated.
The researchers analyzed over 300 murder cases involving transgender victims dating back to 2015. In cases where suspects were identified, Black individuals constituted 65% of perpetrators, while white individuals accounted for 18%.
The study noted that in 2020, a year in which HRC described an "epidemic of violence" against Black transgender individuals fueled by "systems of white supremacy," the Manhattan Institute researchers verified no cases with a identified white suspect.
Confirmed hate crimes represented only 3.3% of the cases examined in the study. The researchers concluded that "the dominant pattern is not hateful white men hunting down black transgender victims because of racism and transphobia. It is violence between people who know each other, sleep with each other, live around each other, or encounter each other in high-risk contexts."
Between 2010 and 2014, the homicide rate for transgender individuals was approximately one-seventh that of the general population. During that period, 3.66 per 100,000 transgender people were murdered, compared to 25.8 per 100,000 in the general population.
The homicide rate for young Black transgender women, who comprised 69% of all victims in the study, was found to be about one-quarter that of young Black non-transgender men. The researchers pointed out that these male victims are often incorrectly compared with Black non-transgender women, which inflates their homicide rate when categorized as "women."
The Human Rights Campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.