REVEALED: Intimate partner violence—not transphobia—primary cause of trans murder: report

Transgender Americans are killed at a lower rate than the general population, and when such killings do occur, bias is typically not the main driver, according to a new report. The Manhattan Institute released an analysis earlier this year that undercuts claims from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) that the transgender community faces an "epidemic" of lethal violence rooted in "transphobia" and even "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," researchers Vincent Lundgren and Vincent Wright found.

The report examined over 300 homicides involving transgender victims going back to 2015. Among cases with an identified suspect, 65 percent of those suspects were black, and 18 percent were white.

"This finding is not the result of one bad year or a handful of outlier cases," the researchers said. In 2020, the HRC blamed the deaths of "our Black trans siblings" on "an epidemic of violence" driven by "systems of white supremacy.” However, the Manhattan Institute did not find a single white suspect in the trans homicides that year.

Only 3.3 percent of the cases reviewed in the report turned out to be confirmed hate crimes. "The leading identified circumstance of the murders was instead intimate partner violence," the researchers wrote. "Other common circumstances included sex-work encounters, disputes, robbery, and other forms of interpersonal conflict."

"In other words, the dominant pattern is not hateful white men hunting down black transgender victims because of racism and transphobia. It is violence between people who know each other, sleep with each other, live around each other, or encounter each other in high-risk contexts,” the report added.