The trans genocide that wasn’t

You shouldn’t make a habit out of watching the daily White House press briefings unless you want to get much dumber, but every now and then they are good for some cheap entertainment. On Monday, for example, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre decided to dedicate precious podium time to “Transgender Day of Remembrance.”

GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ activist organization, says that Transgender Day of Remembrance is meant to commemorate “transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.” TDOR (they really like their acronyms, huh?) was started in 1999 by a transgender activist in memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman whose murder remains unsolved. I found it a bit interesting that the catalyst for TDOR was an unsolved murder case. There is no evidence that the crime against Hester was “anti-trans.” Is it possible? Sure, but we don’t really know. The fundamental mismatch between the inspiration for TDOR — an unsolved murder of a trans woman with no identifiable motive — and its purported purpose — to commemorate transgender people killed because they are transgender — immediately raises a red flag.

There are plenty of other issues that we’ll get into in a moment. But first, here’s what Karine Jean-Pierre had to say about TDOR from the briefing room podium: 

Today, on Transgender Day of Remembrance, we grieve the twenty-six transgender Americans who were killed this year. Year after year, we see that these victims are disproportionately black women and women of color. No one should face violence, live in fear, or be discriminated against simply for being themselves.

Secretary of state Antony Blinken similarly claimed in a statement Monday that transgender people “experience disproportionately high levels of homicide and assault.”

So immediately the Biden administration goes along with the assumption that all twenty-six of these transgender people were killed because of their identity, which matches what is said about TDOR by transgender advocacy organizations. According to the LGBTQ+ advocacy world, these twenty-six deaths are evidence of an “epidemic” of  “anti-trans violence” or even a “genocide.” 

“The epidemic of violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people is a national tragedy and a national embarrassment,” Kelly Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, told NBC News. “Each of the lives taken is the result of a society that demeans and devalues anyone who dares challenge the gender binary.”

Let’s start with the obvious: twenty-six deaths is hardly a statistical anomaly. As my friend Terry Schilling previously told Politico, “They bring up the statistic of violence against transgender people — and you look at the numbers, and it’s, like, forty people.” A study from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute estimates there are approximately 1.6 million transgender adults in the United States. If all twenty-six of the transgender killings thus far this year were homicides, that would put the transgender homicide rate in America at about 1.6 per every 100,000. The 2022 homicide rate for the wider American populace was 6.3 homicides per 100,000.

So, some basic math has already debunked the idea that bigoted Americans are hunting down trans people and killing them. But let’s take it a step further. How many of these individuals were actually murdered for being transgender? I looked through all of the cases and found that fifteen of them did not have a publicly stated motive or were yet unsolved: in several of those incidents the police directly said that they did not have evidence the victims were targeted because of their identity, and further, the charges in a few clearly suggest robberies gone wrong. Outside of those fifteen, there were six domestic violence incidents and two auto accidents. Additionally, two of the transgender people killed, Devonnie J’Rae Johnson and Banko Brown, were shot by security guards following violent altercations. Johnson allegedly attacked a security guard with a fire extinguisher and a screwdriver, while Brown allegedly threatened to stab a security guard. Finally, a non-binary individual named Tortuguita was killed by police after allegedly shooting at police officers during a protest at Atlanta’s “cop city.”

If you’re keeping track, that means there is not a single case this year that has been confirmed to be a targeted killing of a transgender person because they are transgender. Additionally, three of the cases memorialized at the White House podium by Karine Jean-Pierre involve individuals who were threatening others.

By the way, Wikipedia cites just eleven cases of transgender people being killed for being transgender since 2020 globally. Just four of these took place in the continental US. Four people in four years. Comparatively, a transgender mass shooter took six lives earlier this year at a Christian elementary school. 

What does this breakdown tell us? Transgender Day of Remembrance is ultimately emblematic of the larger carelessness with which the political left approaches spectacular claims. Twenty-six killings in 2023, not one provably anti-trans and many completely unrelated to gender identity, yet we’re facing an “epidemic” and a “genocide.” Gender dysphoric children may well kill themselves if they don’t get access to “gender-affirming care,” even though there is no evidence such medical interventions alleviate mental health struggles. There were more people killed by lightning in 2022 than unarmed black men killed by police, but our country has a “police brutality” problem.

Consistently, the left manipulates data and/or presents it dishonestly to emotionally blackmail people into accepting their unsupported claims about American society — and, subsequently, their solutions to these made-up problems. It’s an insidious and nasty way to achieve policy wins and TDOR should be a reminder to all of us of the complete shamelessness of these activists as they seek power.