© Courtesy of Ariel Mary Ann; Facebook; Skye Gould/Insider Riah Milton and Dominique Fells were killed less than 24 hours apart on June 9, 2020. Their deaths sparked a wave of protests in support of Black trans lives. Courtesy of Ariel Mary Ann; Facebook; Skye Gould/Insider- More trans people were killed in 2020 than in any year on record. A majority were Black trans women.
- The American Medical Association said, though the rate of violence is increasing, we are nowhere near the breaking point.
- Insider compiled a database to track every trans person who was killed in 2019, 2020, and 2021 and the trends behind these deaths.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
2020 was
the deadliest year on record for trans people in the US: 44 transgender people were killed, up from 27 in 2019 and 26 in 2018. This year is already on pace to be even deadlier, with 15 killings in the first 109 days.
The real number of deaths is likely much higher, and climbing faster than data can show.
Law enforcement routinely misgenders transgender victims. Being closeted out of fear can keep many trans people from being gendered correctly on their death certificates. Grassroots trans-rights groups are left to carry the mantle, but they lack the bandwidth and funding to thoroughly investigate every death.
"I'm not convinced we're anywhere near a nadir of the kinds of acts and stigma and discrimination that lead to the violence that we've been talking about,"
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, a spokesperson for the American Medical Association, told Insider.
Today we are sharing Insider's Transgender Homicide Project, a database born of hundreds of hours of work to provide the most up-to-date account of trans homicides in the US. The goal of this database, which will be updated quarterly, is to record these deaths, track the trends behind them, and call attention to the killings of trans people in America.
The data shows a steady rise in transphobic attacks in the US in recent years, particularly against Black trans people, in the South, and in Puerto Rico, with guns as the primary weapon.
Insider spoke to relatives of victims, to public-health experts, and to activists, who said the US's failure to officially document and track these deaths creates an uphill battle to end the killings.
Black trans people are being killed at an alarming rate
In May 2020, a series of police killings of Black people, including George Floyd, sparked the
largest civil-rights protests since the 1960s.
Tony McDade, a Black trans man who was shot and killed by the police in Tallahassee, was among the names that became protest chants.
On June 6, amid the protests, two Black trans women were killed within 24 hours:
Dominique Fells and Riah Milton.
The back-to-back deaths spurred
a fresh wave of protests, with demonstrators calling for attention and action to curtail the transphobic, racist violence devastating Black trans communities.
Of the 71 homicides Insider verified from 2019 and 2020, 58 were trans women of color, and 46 were Black trans women.
© Reuters People participate in a Black Trans Lives Matter rally Reuters It is not a new phenomenon - a study of transgender homicide rates in the early 2010s from
Portland State University concluded that Black and Latina transgender women experienced homicide rates that were "almost certainly higher than were those of cisfeminine comparators."
Raquel Willis, a Black transgender journalist and activist, told Insider that several factors contributed to the disproportionate rates of violence against Black trans women. They are more likely than other trans people to experience
housing insecurity, job discrimination, and
systemic racism.
"Women are stigmatized, transgender people are stigmatized, people of color are stigmatized," said Dr. Jack Drescher, a professor at Columbia University and an advisor at the American Psychological Association who was part of the team that made the decision to remove "transgender" as a disorder from the official psychiatry handbook. "So one could say an accumulation of stigma can make them seem like reasonable targets for the kind of people who kill."
Willis told Insider that the economic and societal barriers that Black people face in the US underpinned the violence.
"When you consider how many barriers the Black community faces economically and socially, and has for generations, you're more likely to be in an environment where violence could happen because so many folks are dealing with all types of traumas, named and unnamed, and all types of layers of oppression, economically, socially," Willis said.
The South was by far the US region with the most trans killings
Location played a role in the findings. Nearly half of the homicides in 2020 (20 of 44) took place in the South.
Most Southern states legally permit
trans conversion therapy, a practice that uses emotional and physical abuse in an attempt to force someone back in the closet.
Several states - Oregon, California, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois - and some counties in Maryland and Virginia have passed legislation requiring LGBTQ+ history to be taught in schools.
Lacking a fundamental understanding of gender expression can lead to harmful legislation against vulnerable groups, Drescher said. State legislators around the country have filed over 115 bills restricting the rights of transgender people this year alone, and most were filed in
the South and the Midwest.
Drescher told Insider that a lack of knowledge about what it means to be transgender also makes it easier for people to marginalize trans communities through violence or direct legislative action.
That's also what's driving the "culture wars" in the South, Drescher said. "Social conservatives are going after transgender people for no reason whatsoever, like bathroom bills, sports-team bills, medicating kids."
Willis, who was born and raised in Georgia, said Southern cities also lack the kind of visible history of trans community and resistance inherent to coastal cities, and which give trans people a platform.
"San Francisco has this rich, documented presence, history, visibility of trans people, and in New York to LA to an extent," Willis said. "But even Atlanta, which colloquially is known as a Black gay mecca, doesn't have trans history that is particularly documented."
Puerto Rico had the most trans deaths of any US state or territory
Puerto Rico had the most trans homicides of any US state or territory included in the database in 2020, accounting for six of the 44 people killed last year - the
highest number of transphobic killings to occur on the island in the past decade.
The trend rarely made headlines until the killing of Alexa Negrón Luciano in February 2020. Luciano, a Puerto Rican trans woman, was
attacked and killed by a group of men for using the women's bathroom. Local media outlets and politicians called her "a man in a skirt" and misgendered her when discussing her killing.
Her name became a rallying cry, shining a spotlight on the wave of transphobic killings on the island. The singer Bad Bunny appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" wearing a shirt that said, "They killed Alexa, not a man with a skirt."
© Andrew Lipovsky/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Rapper Bad Bunny performs on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on February 27, 2020. He wore a shirt bringing attention to the death of Alexa Negrón Luciano, a Puerto Rican trans woman who was killed while using a women's bathroom. Andrew Lipovsky/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Serrano says Puerto Rican queer activists are watching the wave of transphobic legislation in the continental US, concerned that it will influence anti-trans politicians on the island.
"Much of that hateful discourse is directly brought over from the United States by white evangelicals. That same discourse from white evangelicals is imitated here," Serrano said. "It isn't anything natural or cultural from the Puerto Rican or Latinx community."
Guns were the primary weapons used against trans people, particularly Black trans women
Of the 71 trans homicides recorded by Insider in 2019 and 2020, 47 - or 66% - were firearm-related. Gun-related homicides of trans people rose 61% between 2019 and 2020, similar to the overall increase in recorded trans homicides.
Black trans women made up the majority of Insider's database and experienced gun-related deaths at higher rates than all Black women. According to
CDC data, nearly 55% of Black female homicide victims were killed using a gun from 1999 to 2019, but about 71% of the Black transgender women in Insider's database were killed using a firearm - a 16-percentage-point difference.
Why trans homicides are so difficult to track
The true number of homicides in trans communities is likely to always be at least somewhat higher.
No official US entity tracks transgender deaths or homicides, locally or nationally. The closest there is to a federal tracker is the
FBI's Uniform Crime Report, which is composed of voluntarily submitted crime statistics from local law-enforcement agencies around the country. While the UCR does track gender-identity-motivated bias crimes, they're
largely presumed to be undercounted because of the voluntary nature of the program.
Instead, the onus is on nongovernmental entities to track them, such as the
Human Rights Campaign and
Remembering Our Dead, a website that documents transgender deaths around the world. Often they rely on families to identify their relatives as trans and confirm their names, but that doesn't happen if the victim's network is unsupportive of their identity.
These reporting obstacles can lead to official sources deadnaming victims, or referring to a transgender person by a name they no longer associate with. In 2018,
ProPublica reviewed 85 cases of killings of transgender people from 65 law-enforcement agencies since 2015 and found that 74 of the victims, or 87%, had been deadnamed or misgendered in police reports.
A separate collection problem arises from the
shifting definition of "transgender" and the growing number of labels for gender identity and expression. That makes it difficult to identify the number of transgender people across the US and calculate homicide rates. Additionally, the
2020 US Census did not include any questions on gender identity.
Misgendering victims deals another blow to grieving families
© Courtesy of Ariel Mary Ann. Riah Milton was killed on June 9, 2020. Courtesy of Ariel Mary Ann. Riah Milton's death in June was a touchstone moment, bringing visibility to trans homicides.
But, as is often the case, early news reports misgendered her and used her deadname. Many also used a photo not of her but of her aunt - which was shared by celebrities including
Kim Kardashian West.
Ariel Mary Ann, Milton's sister, told Insider she had to spend the hours after the killing making calls to newspapers, TV stations, and the Butler County Sheriff's Office in southwestern Ohio to correct police records and local news reports. The next few days were spent tweeting to reach the Kardashians to get Kim to remove the photo, which she ultimately did.
Ariel said she had no time to mourn that evening. She asked for an apology from the police once the corrections were made but never got one.
"This person isn't just a BuzzFeed article or a CNN article or a 'Today' show piece. This person was someone who was loved and cared for by people as a living, breathing person," Ariel said.
Ehrenfeld, the AMA spokesperson, told Insider that the most important step in tackling the epidemic of violence is tracking this data properly by ensuring that local media and police correctly identify victims.
"We need more consistent data collection across all levels of law enforcement, including capturing the demographic information of victims, birth, sex, and gender identity," Ehrenfeld said. "And that is just not happening today."
- Behind the data: There is no central source that Insider used to collect each listed homicide. Insider found the names of the victims from a variety of sources and validated the cases through records requests, news reports, and statements of family and friends.
- Insider will update the database quarterly. The 2021 listings may not reflect the latest number of homicides.
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