Paul Tuns:
Transgender activists regularly tout an “epidemic” of murderous violence against self-identified transgender individuals, but statistics are seldom provided to back up their claims. While there are no official statistics for Canada or the United States, the TransRespect project claims nine Canadian transgender murder victims from 2008 through 2021. But even these statistics raise questions. Gender identity researcher Tish Still examined the numbers for the United Kingdom and found that there have been fewer than a dozen murders of transgender victims since 2008, or fewer than one a year, a country with twice the population of Canada.
Still took a close look at Transgender Europe, which has been tasked with providing reliable statistics for trans murder victims with its Trans Murder Monitor. She wrote in Unherd that their claim that the Monitor’s claim that 11 men born male that identified as woman – and all were men posing as women – were killed over the past 13 years is actually inflated. Still found that one was, in fact, a suicide and another was later re-classified as non-suspicious, so there were a mere 9 trans victims of murder since 2008.
Transgender rights groups estimate that there are between 300,000-500,000 trans individuals, out of a total United Kingdom population of 64.5 million.
Still also found that transgender individuals committed 12 homicides between 2008 and 2017, meaning that people who do not identify with their biological sex were slightly more likely to commit murder than to be a victim of one.
The United Kingdom, like many other countries in the West, recognizes the Trans Day of Remembrance in November, but Still complains that “there is still no equivalent to the Trans Day of Remembrance for the much greater number of women killed by male violence.” By comparison, in the United Kingdom, 1800 women were killed over the same period.
Feminist Karen Ingala-Smith’s research suggests that not all so-called trans victims were necessarily targeted because of their identity. Still said the “motives behind these crimes are more complex than straightforward ‘transphobia.’” Four of the nine worked as prostitutes and one of them was killed by her husband and presumptive pimp. Two other murders were drug-related. Still said, “despite the way their deaths are often framed by the media and by activists, the large majority of these trans victims were not killed simply for being trans.”
TransRespect’s 2021 report found that in 2020, there were 375 “trans and gender-diverse people” murdered, that 96 per cent identified as “women or transfeminine,” and that 58 per cent of transgendered victims were known prostitutes.
