TDOR: Trans Death and Trans Life
Currents
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I am bisexual and trans, and I’ve been involved in related activism for years. Among other things, I host biweekly trans meetups for youth. I was asked to host a Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) event for November 20th; a candlelit vigil and a reading of the names of those lost to anti-trans violence.
I was torn. Since transitioning, I’ve felt a target on my back and a weight on my shoulders. I knew, of course, that a large proportion of those killed were sex workers and black women, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t at risk. I had also read somewhere that trans people only lived to about 35 years old before suicide or murder caught up with them. I hadn't planned on living long, anyway, but knowing I was setting myself up for potential murder followed me like a dark cloud.
I didn’t much like the idea of dwelling on the violence I knew could still be coming for me — but when another LGBT organization asked me to host a TDOR event for them, I realised that as an activist, this was something I needed to face, in order to better understand it. So, I buckled down and began to research the stats and stories behind TDOR.
What I discovered surprised me.
I was first drawn to a series of infographics, released each year by Trans Respect Versus Transphobia, with an astounding number at the top — "3314 murders of trans and gender-diverse people were registered worldwide." Whoa. 3314 people just this year?
No, wait. “Between January 1, 2008 and 30 September, 2019,” it said.
Okay, I reasoned, that still sounds like a lot. I wondered how many cis people were killed during this time, so I scrolled on — but there were no numbers to compare the two demographics. It seemed that the clearest way to illustrate the severity of this murder epidemic was to simply show that trans people are being murdered at a significantly higher rate than cis people; I googled, and I googled again, but I could not find the comparison I was looking for. So, I looked up the data myself, and I was astonished to find that the numbers did not back up the mainstream narrative.
The current murder rate in the United States is five murders per 100,000, which is about 0.005%. The Williams Institute’s 2016 study, “How Many Adults Identify as Transgender in the United States?,” reports that 1.4 million US Americans identify as transgender. In 2019, the United States reported the murders of 30 trans people. With 1.4 million trans people, that’s a murder rate of 0.002% — less than half of the murder rate for the general population. It’s possible that more trans people are dying than reported, but the number would have to be over 250% higher to be considered even marginally higher than the overall rate.
I thought my math had to be wrong. There was a trans murder epidemic happening in the US, all the websites said so. Everyone knew this. It was a fact.
Still, these people were being killed for being trans, right? There was no doubt about that; both the original TDOR website and Trans Respect Versus Transphobia had lists of the names of the dead, and each of them were listed as “Killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.” I needed to see for myself what was happening, so I selected random names from the list of the dead and searched them to learn more about how they died.
Very few of the reports on their deaths mentioned transphobic motivations — or any motivation at all. Some cases were vague, with transphobia as a plausible motive, while others seemed to have nothing to do with it whatsoever — yet they are counted by TDOR as victims of anti-trans violence.
For example:
- Jacqueline Cowdrey, a trans woman who was apparently murdered in 2014. There was no evidence as to how she was murdered, nor that she was murdered for being trans, nor even that she was murdered at all.
- Eli or Ellie Washtock, killed in 2019, an amateur sleuth who turned up dead while investigating a mysterious murder.
- Four trans women sex workers killed by cops in Mexico in 2019; they were going to testify against police officers for human trafficking.
- Jordan Cofer, the sibling of 2019 Dayton shooter Conor Betts, killed alongside 8 [apparently] cisgender people in the mass shooting. It is not known if Betts actually meant to kill Cofer – and, apparently, Betts’ Twitter profile listed his own pronouns (something commonly done by allies to the trans community).
- Johana Medina León, a Salvadorian asylum seeker who died in 2019 due to negligence while in ICE custody.
- Flávia Luiza, who in 2018 died on an airplane from Brazil to France due to natural causes.
Clearly, these were examples of people who should not be on the list. Of the confirmed murders included, most have undetermined motives; but often, they are tied to sex work or drug deals, and black women make up the majority of the cases. Of the 30 trans people killed in the US, I can’t fully confirm any to be motivated by anti-trans violence — though it seems likely in situations such as Paris Cameron’s, where she and two gay men were shot at a party. Many are entirely ambiguous, with no suspect and no known motivation. I kept thinking, there are just 30 names. There are 365 days in a year, and no one could take the time to read a few articles and figure out whether these 30 names should be on this list?
It seemed clear to me that transphobic violence wasn’t the most common denominator among those killed. The Trans Respect Versus Transphobia site itself says: “The victims whose occupations are known are mostly sex workers (61%). In the United States, the majority of the trans people reported murdered are trans women of colour and/or Native American trans women (90%).”
This backed up what I saw as I looked through the lists of victims. The homicide rate for black women in the US is much higher than it is for white women, and the poverty rate is twice as high. Sex workers are 60 to 100 times more likely to be murdered than other women.
Only when looking at the specific data on violence against sex workers that the numbers begin to show a disproportionate number of trans women among the victims. The 2019 US memorial list for the International Day to End Violence against Sex Workers shows that around 12% of sex workers murdered were black, trans, and women. Needless to say, the sex workers in question are usually street and survival sex workers, and it’s worth mentioning that the poverty rate for black people in the US is over double that of white people.
It should be noted that certain places have a much higher concentration of trans murders than others. The UK, my place of birth, has fewer than one trans murder per year, while the United States has dozens, and Brazil is in the hundreds, even though the population is significantly lower than the US. Even so, the 2018 murder rate in Brazil was 24.7 per 100,000, about 0.02% of the population — a huge difference in comparison to the US, and one which seems to correlate with the difference in the numbers of trans women murdered in the two countries.
These homicide numbers are more indicative of the higher murder rates among sex workers, black people, and women in general, and this is most prominent in countries like the US. If those numbers are to be believed, it would seem that trans people are not facing an epidemic of murder, and I am certainly not one of those with a target on my back.
There does appear to be a component of trans-related risk within sex work. According to “Gender, Race, and Risk: Intersectional Risk Management in the Sale of Sex Online” in The Journal of Sex Research, "Background risks, such as limited access to health care, structural and legal discrimination, social stigma, lack of social support, and rejection by friends and family result in an increased likelihood of homelessness and unemployment […and] contribute to higher instances of survival and transactional sex, which are associated with increased experience of violence, drug use, and an increased likelihood of contracting HIV.”
But if these issues are the true dangers, then the solution must be to fight against a system in which those at risk can fall through the cracks. Such a system will never be safe for trans people, even if transphobia is minimized. If we can’t protect the most vulnerable among us, then it’s clear who we truly care about.
While researching, I saw a post about TDOR on the Facebook page of an acquaintance, a white trans man living in Central Europe. Of these trans people who died, he said, “They could have been me.” But that wasn’t true. That’s not what’s happening. Neither he nor I are anywhere near the risk the majority of these women are facing.
The culture we have created around TDOR supports the fear felt by people like us. Articles on trans murders in the US, regardless of whether the motivations behind the killings are known, generally launch right into explanations of the trans murder epidemic, often spending more time on that than the case itself The messaging is usually vague, sometimes paying lip service to black trans women in the sex industry. But the impression it leaves is clear: this is happening to trans people because they are trans. No wonder we have such a distorted impression.
It’s not us at all. Not only have we been living in this fear, the same fear which told me I wouldn’t live to see 36, but we have been appropriating a violence which is not happening to us.
Yet make no mistake — this is a good fight. These people's lives are absolutely worth fighting for. I don’t want to disregard the names on the TDOR list, even if I’m giving up on TDOR itself. These murders are unjust, a symptom of a systemic failure to provide support for the country’s most vulnerable. Knowing what I know now, I feel empowered. I realise I’m not a victim, at least not to the degree I thought I was. The weight on my shoulders is lifted; I have room to move and power to act.
And knowing where to bring the fight, I can achieve far more than any candlelit vigil.
Published Nov 16, 2020
Updated Sep 15, 2023