I see this all the time, people saying “transwomen are risking their lives just by existing!” and bemoaning the high murder rate of trans women, things like that.
But when I actually look at the data, it paints a very different story.
There were 22 trans women murdered in the USA in 2015. There aren’t quality numbers about how many trans women there are in the USA total, but estimates put the total at around 700,000. Assuming half of those are trans women, that’s 350,000 (it’s probably more, but that would help my case). That’s a murder rate of about 6.2 per 100,000 people.
Cis women are murdered at a rate of about 1.95 per 100,000 people. So it looks like trans women are in much more danger than their cis counterparts, right?
Well, yes, if all we’re going to compare them to is women. But if we look at male victims of violence (which folks so rarely do, for some reason), we see that men are murdered at a rate of 6.56 per 100,000 people [ibid].
Which is to say, slightly more often than trans women.
Transitioning from being a man to a woman makes you safer.
So where did this idea of trans women as constant victims of violence come from? Is there something I’m missing in the data? Is it just an issue of nobody caring about violence against men, so they only compare trans women to cis women? What’s going on?
All of those 22 seemed to be black or hispanic, a population making around 30% of the US and thus an estimated 100,000 trans women for convenience. This gives a murder rate of 22/100,000.
Furthermore, that article was in late October, suggesting that if murders happen at a steady pace, they were missing approximately 20% of the year’s murders that would put the total at 26/100,000 instead.
And considering that 19 of the murdered women were black, while those estimates give roughly 40,000 black trans women, the murder rate is something like 50/100,000 when accounting for the couple of expected missing murders.
Then there’s the way male victims of homicide tend to be substantially more likely to…have engaged in activities universally agreed to constitute a lifestyle in which getting murdered is not such an unexpected thing. What I’m saying is that, just like we track combatant deaths and civilian deaths in wars separately, trans women are probably more likely to fall in the category which is the murder equivalent of “noncombatant”. When black men are killed, they relatively often are the same kind of people as the killers while trans women are not. (I won’t try to put numbers on it, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows that eg. gangs tend to shoot members of rival gangs more (per capita) than they shoot random outsiders; not saying it isn’t a tragedy, but it’s a different kind of tragedy and “violent men kill non-violent men and women” tickles people’s justice nerves more than “violent men kill other violent men”.) And when one counts that the homicide rate among black people is something like 17/100,000 and a rough estimate would imply a rate of ~25-30/100,000 for black men, black trans women are being killed at almost twice the rate of black men, and even more if one focuses on “non-combatant” murders of people who weren’t involved in doing violence to others (eg. assuming that 1 in 6 murdered black men were “combatants”, it gives trans women a ratio of approximately or over double that of “civilian” men).
Now, what possible factors could be causing one to overestimate the rate? That estimate on the number of trans women is on the low side and the real numbers are probably twice that. This would mean that black trans women would “only” be killed at the same rate as black men. On the other hand we don’t know how many trans women are murdered but labeled as men and not found out about. Thus the real numbers are probably somewhere vaguely between 25-50/100,000, and I’d guess probably a bit closer to the low side than the high.
In fact, this is something the non-shitty SJ people try to draw attention to: it’s not about white trans people; thus saying that “trans people” are having an extremely high risk of being murdered, when it’s specifically TWoC who actually get killed, is at best disingenuous and at worst completely detracting from the actual issues by glossing over that specificity. And this also suggests that black men are also suffering from massive amounts of violence that society should do something about (instead of doing something that lets it look like it’s doing something), as it’s almost as dangerous to be a black man as it is to be a black trans woman (and when we add class to this it gets even more extreme).
It seems a bit disingenuous to keep slicing and dicing the demographics until you come up with an obscure enough one where their rate is higher than average. Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me look a bit askance.
How does the murder rate of TWoC compare to, say, illegal immigrant east Asian sex workers in the US? Or just US based sex workers in general? For a variety of reasons, trans women are more likely to be sex workers than cis women are. What happens if we control for that?
The point of intersectionality is to find out the factors that make people suffer. In this case slicing and dicing the demographics has shown that black people tend to suffer extremely high rates of violence, and I don’t think “black people” is a massively obscure demographic (unlike, say, the way the most vulnerable minority is always the individual; the demographic $murdered_trans_woman_X suffered a murder rate of 100,000/100,000 and that’s terrible), nor “black trans women” either. And I don’t think including class in it is a bad thing either, because “what do we do to the murder rate” is a vague question, but “what do we do to the murder rate of poor black people” is a more specific question that is easier to answer.
And such slicing and dicing also reveals new information; in this case I updated as I was expecting the murder rate of TWoC to be higher than it was compared to the murder rate of black men, and thus it seems that being black AMAB is the actual massive risk factor for violence. Intersectional analysis improves epistemic fidelity!
Also, sex workers suffer massive amounts of violence too and that’s not okay and the things that cause it need to be destroyed.
(via bgaesop-deactivated20160701)
2 weeks ago · tagged #steel feminism #death cw #transmisogyny cw · 128 notes · .permalink
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