Report Finds Transgender People Have Lower Homicide Rate Than General Population, With Partners Often Identified as Perpetrators

A new analysis by two researchers argues that transgender people are killed at a lower rate than the broader US population and that, in most identified cases, the violence is not primarily motivated by anti-transgender bias.

The study, published earlier this year by Manhattan Institute researchers Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright, challenges claims from the Human Rights Campaign and other nonprofit groups that transgender people face an “epidemic” of lethal violence linked to 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 concluded.

The researchers reviewed more than 300 homicide cases dating to 2015 in which the victim was transgender.

Among cases with an identified suspect, 65% of alleged perpetrators were Black and 18% were white, according to the report.

The authors said the pattern could not be explained by a single unusual year or by a small number of exceptional cases.

They specifically pointed to 2020, when the HRC described the deaths of “our Black trans siblings” as part of an “epidemic of violence” driven by “systems of white supremacy.” In the cases verified by the Manhattan Institute researchers that year, no white suspect was identified.

DISCOVER MORE: 17-Year-Old Faces Adult Charges in Lewis Place Shooting

The analysis found that confirmed hate crimes accounted for just 3.3% of the cases examined.

Instead, the most frequently identified circumstance was intimate partner violence, the researchers wrote. Other cases involved encounters connected to sex work, arguments, robbery and various forms of personal conflict.

The authors argued that the evidence points more often to violence involving people who knew one another or encountered each other in vulnerable settings than to attacks by strangers motivated by racism or anti-transgender hatred.

The report also compared homicide rates from 2010 through 2014, concluding that the rate for transgender people was about one-seventh of the rate for the US population overall.

During that five-year period, the researchers calculated a homicide rate of 3.66 per 100,000 transgender people, compared with 25.8 per 100,000 people in the general population.

Young Black transgender women, who represented 69% of the victims in the study, had a homicide rate the researchers described as roughly one-quarter that of young Black men who were not transgender.

The researchers also questioned comparisons that measure these victims against Black non-transgender women, saying that doing so can make the rate appear unusually high when framed as a figure for “women.”

The Human Rights Campaign did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.