There Is No ‘Trans Genocide’

I t is around 35 times more dangerous to be black than to be transgender in America — and at least an order of magnitude more dangerous to be a young and working-class white guy, a Southerner, or a Yank of Hispanic origin.

This seems relevant given that a national event titled “Transgender Day of Remembrance” took place just a few days ago. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took the occasion to mount the podium for a formal press briefing attended by many national media outlets — during which she declared that the United States “grieves” for the all of 26 transgender Americans killed in 2023. These victims, Jean-Pierre went on to emphasize, were no mere Dead White Males but “disproportionately black women and women of color.”

Jean-Pierre’s statistics came from the Human Rights Campaign, an influential pro-LGBT lobbying group that organizes Trans Remembrance Day (as part of the broader Transgender Awareness Week) on an annual basis and frequently publishes reports on anti-transgender brutality with titles like “An Epidemic of Violence.” The visibility of such content has apparently had an effect: A Google search for the phrase “trans genocide” turns up an online-encyclopedia article that prints out to five closely spaced pages and defines that term as “the elevated level of systemic violence and discrimination that exists against trans people” in the West.

The only catch is that no such systemic violence exists. According to Jean-Pierre herself — and, presumably, to an LGBT-rights group with every interest in magnifying the phenomenon — the total number of trans-identified Americans known to have been killed in 2023 is 26. If we round that up to 30 (to account for December) and assume that just 1 percent of the U.S. population is trans (given that, as one very limited survey shows, around 3 percent of young Americans are), we obtain an annual transgender-murder rate of 30 in 3.32 million, or just 0.9 people per 100,000 people. Even if we, alternatively, assume an American trans population of just 1.6 million — to gel with one high-quality but conservative recent estimate — the resulting murder rate would be merely 1.9 per 100,000 people.

To put that in context, the murder rate for blacks in the U.S. is currently 30–33 per 100,000 people. The African-American community is an outlier but not necessarily a remarkable one: In a representative recent year, 4.5 percent of black-male deaths were the results of homicide, versus 2.3 percent for American Indians, 2.2 percent for Hispanics, 2 percent for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders . . . and 4.9 percent for all whites under full majority. To say the obvious, all of these groups are currently living far more dangerously than “trans women.”

Further, almost none of the small number of murders of trans people recorded in 2023 were due to “transphobia” from the MAGA-hat set. According to an excellent breakdown posted to social media by writer Pi Campbell, the “victims” highlighted by the Human Rights Campaign included such citizens as Banko Brown (the San Francisco thief/robber shot during a confrontation with a security guard), Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán (an armed environmental activist killed during a shootout with Atlanta police during the violent Stop Cop City protests), and DéVonnie J’Rae Johnson (a trans woman who attacked a security officer with a fire extinguisher).

Others on the list were Maria Jose Rivera — killed in a tragic and widely publicized murder-suicide involving her boyfriend — Camdyn Rider (murder-suicide with husband), Thomas “Tom-Tom” Robertson (victim of a shooting targeting someone else), and a black trans fashion plate called “YOKO” (hit by an SUV while piloting a small scooter). So far as I can tell, not one proven or even seriously alleged hate crime appears anywhere on the Human Rights Campaign’s list.

Also, few of the murders of these (mostly) trans-identified males seem to have occurred anywhere near MAGA country. Per my analysis of the list, which I ran by a research associate and a friend in law enforcement, only four of the 26 victims, and three or four of their killers, were white. Sixteen victims were black and five were Hispanic, while seven murderers were identified as black, at least two were Hispanic, and seven were unknown (most of the remaining killers were police or security guards of various races).

I will note that this point has been made previously by the skilled gonzo journalist Andy Ngo, who earned a few weeks of internet infamy in 2019 for digging into a series of anti-trans attacks and summing up his resulting data set as: “Who is behind the murders? Mostly Black men.” That year, I made some of the same points detailed above for the magazine Quillette: pointing out that the annual number of trans fatalities was around 29, and that this broke down to a grand total of one killing for every 67,690 transgender Americans.

The “trans genocide” hysteria, wholly untethered from reality, does not stand alone. Over the past decade or so, American discourse has fallen prey to what often seems like a constant stream of stupid and baseless panics. At one point during the Black Lives Matter mania, one of the nation’s top attorneys — Ben Crump — penned a best-selling book that unironically argues that white cops and vigilantes are committing “genocide” against black people. When the highly respected Skeptic Research Center conducted large-n polling on the issue of police violence just two years later, it found that one of the most common answers given by both black and Caucasian leftists to the question of how many unarmed blacks they thought were shot annually by cops was “about 10,000.” The real number, per last year’s data from the not-much-right-of-Lenin Washington Post, was “twelve.”

On some level, the real question here is “Why?” Why do powerful figures and respected institutions — the president of the United States and his spox, from behind the White House podium! — continue to propound insanely and verifiably wrong conspiracy theories about how dangerous the country is? I think that the answer is because, to paraphrase Larry Elder, there is a Narrative to save.

For both “ethical” and strategic reasons — Crump made his millions by suing police officers involved in racialized cases — many members of the American elite have publicly committed themselves to the belief that racism and other forms of bias explain all disparities in group outcomes. Publicly advancing this narrative requires having at least some examples of extreme racism, sexism, and so forth on hand to display. The problem is that, in modern upper-middle-class American life, these things rarely exist. The demand for horrors far exceeds their supply, and it may sometimes become . . . strategically necessary to invent some.

This reality, I believe, accounts for a pattern with which we have all become increasingly familiar. First, a horrific claim of bias is made (Jussie Smollett, Covington Catholic High School, Duke University lacrosse, Michael Brown, Jacob Blake, Canadian mass graves, Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate). Next, major social changes are made based on the claim and its implications. Third and finally, the unsupported claim collapses.

When we see social movements like the Trans Day of Remembrance, it is important that we all — well — remember this cycle.