Transgender people, and particularly trans women of color, face high rates of violence against them in the United States.
The Office for Victims of Crime says that one in two transgender people are sexually abused or assaulted in their lifetime, citing studies from the International Journal of Transgenderism.
In 2013, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that transgender people are seven times more likely to experience physical violence when interacting with the police than non-transgender people.
In 2015, the NCAVP found that when transgender survivors of intimate partner violence tried to access emergency shelters, 44% of them were denied access. The NCAVP also found that 63% of trans survivors of hate violence knew the person who committed the violence against them beforehand.
The report also found that most of these problems were compounded by other factors, like if the survivor was a person of color, poor, or disabled. It’s impossible to look at anti-trans violence without also seeing the intersections with racist, classist, and ableist violence.
In 2016, we know of 27 trans people who were murdered. So far in 2017, we know of nine trans people who’ve been murdered – all trans women of color. These murders are happening so frequently that when I wrote this script a few weeks ago, that number was eight.
Unfortunately, statistics on the murder rate of trans people are extremely hard to come by because so many trans people are misgendered in death and never even identified as trans.
This can happen because the media doesn’t know how to report on trans individuals, the police don’t know how to deal with hate crimes towards trans people, or most commonly because the family of the dead trans person doesn’t want the public to even know that their child was trans.
For anti-trans families, their child being trans is a source of a shame for them, which means that they’ll hide it at all costs, even when their child is murdered for being trans.
Those NCAVP studies that I mentioned earlier interviewed thousands of queer people who had survived hate crimes, and many of them said that they didn’t report to the police because they were afraid – and out of those who did, many felt that the police were hostile towards them.
In several cases, trans people who reported violence to the police actually wound up being arrested instead of their abuser.
We desperately need more research on this. It would be ridiculous to assert that all the anti-trans violence and anti-trans murders in the US are being correctly reported right now.
Let me give you a few examples. On January 9th, 2015, a trans woman named Papi was shot and killed by a man after she told him that she was transgender. Papi’s friend, Tiffany, another trans woman, told the police that Papi was a trans woman who had been killed because she was trans.
There’s even video footage from the night of the shooting showing Papi presenting as a woman. But the police spokesperson told the press, “That was a man that was shot. It was always a man,” and they said that the victim’s gender identity never played a role in the homicide investigation.
That’s just one example, but it’s impossible to know how many more of these there are. And even when the evidence is clear that it was a hate crime, many states don’t even count gender identity as one of the ways to be targeted for a hate crime.
In August 2016, Rae’Lynn Thomas, a transgender woman, was shot and beaten to death by her mother’s ex-boyfriend as he called her the devil and shouted anti-trans comments. But Ohio doesn’t have a statewide hate crime law for gender identity, and her murder was never officially investigated as a hate crime.
Being transgender in the US is scary, especially if you’re a trans woman of color, if you’re poor, if you’re a sex worker, or if you’re disabled. These communities know that they’re hated and targeted, and they’ve seen their friends and loved ones get killed, beaten, and abused over the years.
Mic has a project called Unerased that tracks the murders of trans women since 2010 and is continually updated. It you want to learn more about the stories of these trans people, you should really check it out.
They found that while the average American’s risk of being murdered is about one in 19,000, that risk jumps to one in 2,600 for young Black trans women.
But without well-documented, nation-wide statistics, people still aren’t taking these cases seriously. Lots of reporting has been happening, like Mic’s Unerased series, the NCAVP’s hate violence tracking, GLAAD’s reporting of murdered trans people, and the Human Rights Campaign’s tracking of murdered trans people.
So far, all the evidence points towards a huge problem of violence against the trans community, and just because there is a lack of federally collected data on this doesn’t mean that the trans community is safe.
Trans people are often terrified to come out because they know the danger it would put them in. They can anticipate the violent reactions of their family members, friends, and romantic or sexual partners.
Lots of trans people are disowned by their parents and kicked out of their homes for coming out.
According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, one in five trans people has experienced homelessness at some point in their life, and 20-40% of homeless youth identify somewhere on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, despite the fact that only about 4% of the total population identifies as LGBTQIA+.
So I think it’s rational for trans people to be afraid of coming out, and obviously for some people, it will be easier than others.
If you’re white, live in a progressive area, have an accepting family, aren’t living in poverty, and aren’t disabled, you’re probably much safer coming out than folks who have to deal with the intersections of racism, classism, and ableism on top of coming out as trans.
I’m sure there are trans people who’ve had very positive experiences of coming out. I, myself, have been pretty lucky, but I know that my experience isn’t at all representative of what all, or even most, trans people face.
The point of all of this isn’t to frighten you if you’re trans – the point is to show cisgender people why trans people might not want to or might not be able to come out. And let’s not forget that coming out isn’t a singular, one-time event.
After someone comes out as trans, they’ll probably come out a thousand more times. If they generally aren’t perceived as the gender they are, they’ll probably have to come out to every new person they meet.
They can have been out for years, but they meet someone and have to politely correct them when they misgender them. When they date, they’ll have to decide between telling people they’re trans right away or waiting until a few dates into the relationship.
And if they date men, they’ll have to deal with the fact that men can react very violently to a trans person coming out. Straight men who find themselves attracted to trans women often feel like their sexuality is being “attacked” or like they’ve been “tricked,” and they feel like they have to defend themselves from that.
Sometimes men try to keep their relationships with trans women secret, and if that relationship is exposed to the public, they snap. Men who date trans women are often mocked by other men, which can make dating a trans woman a source of embarrassment for a man.
Of the trans women who we know have been murdered in the last few years, many of them were killed by an intimate male partner.
Ty Underwood is a trans woman who was murdered by her boyfriend in January 2015. He shot her as she was driving away, and then she crashed into a tree. He publicly denied dating her even though there was evidence of them having a relationship, leading prosecutors to believe he killed Ty when he thought their relationship would be exposed.
Even when trans people date women, though, they’re not completely free from violence. I’ve known a trans person who came out to a girl they were seeing, so the girl slapped them, said she had been tricked, and stormed off.
Lots of trans people who date women have similar experiences of being mocked or attacked in some form because of their identity. It’s just that men tend to be more violent in their reactions. Like, almost all of the trans women murdered last year were either killed by a man or nobody knows who killed them.
These kinds of people, the ones who react violently to finding out that someone they like is trans or doesn’t have the genitals they expected, often hide being the excuse of it just being their “genital preference.”
The thing about that is that genital preferences are not all inherently anti-trans. If you just prefer vaginas over penises, or vice versa, that’s fine.
But when someone’s genital preference is so ingrained in them that they have to attack a trans person they’re dating, either physically or verbally, that’s clearly cissexist.
The constant stigmatizing of trans people, especially women with penises and men with vaginas, leads to these people feeling justified in their violence against trans people. They think to themselves, “Well, genital preferences are okay to have, so my anger at this trans person is completely rational.”
It plays into the awful anti-trans narrative that trans people are constantly trying to “trick” cis people somehow or set a trap for them. In reality, trans people often stress out over when and how they should tell a potential partner about their genitals.
It’s kind of a weird thing to bring up the moment you meet someone, but it can also be unsafe to withhold that information for very long.
There’s a web series called Her Story that I think illustrates this really well. It’s a fictional story, but one of the writers of the series, Jen Richards, is trans, and the show does a good job of showing people what dating can be like for trans people.
It gets the audience to feel the fear that trans women feel when considering if they should tell their partner or potential partner that they’re trans.
So I think in the whole “genital preferences” debate, it’s important to recognize that sometimes those preferences are anti-trans, and sometimes they’re not.
But by constantly and loudly saying that all genital preferences are okay to have, you’re unintentionally supporting these folks who commit violence against trans people using that same logic.
In fact, “trans panic” is actually a defense that people have cited in court to justify their killing of trans people. In 2005, Gwen Araujo was beaten to death by four men who said that Araujo had provoked their violent response by revealing that she had a penis. Two of the men were convicted of second-degree murder, but somehow they were not convicted of hate crime charges.
In 2013, Islan Nettles was murdered by a man who claimed he flew into a rage when he discovered Nettles was transgender. He pled guilty to manslaughter and got only twelve years behind bars. He wasn’t charged with murder or a hate crime.
Violence against trans people in the United States is real, and it’s no wonder that trans people are afraid to come out or to tell other people about their genitals.
Some folks like to argue that because trans people have it better here than in some other countries, that we don’t have any problems. But hatred against trans people is alive and well, and often fueled by excuses like trans panic or genital preferences.
I don’t want to scare any trans people out there into staying in the closet, though. Coming out is your decision and it’s a very personal one, but sometimes you have to balance that decision with your safety.
That doesn’t mean it’s always bad, though. Some trans people live long, happy lives. Our stories don’t always end in tragedy, and as we keep fighting to clear up misconceptions about us and gain better visibility in the mainstream, things are only going to get better – I hope.
Anyway, this video is a part of my Feminism with Riley series that I’m doing in collaboration with Everyday Feminism, a website dedicated to helping you stand up to and break down everyday oppression.
Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
