Boston Globe: Trans Genocide Isn’t Happening

It was only a week ago that Lilly Wachowski accused author J.K. Rowling of funding “trans genocide.” This is the kind of obnoxious, hyperbolic language that ideologues adopt because they don’t have much of value to say. 

In any case, it turns out that there isn’t much evidence a “trans genocide” is happening, at least not here in the United States. Today the Boston Globe published an article making that point.

In a front page story this summer on the local Pride march, the Omaha World-Herald uncritically quoted a trans rights activist claiming that a proposed state ballot measure that would restrict transgender girls’ and women’s participation in school sports “won’t actually protect” biological women and girls and “will increase violence” against LGBTQ people.

Stigmatizing transgender people, the argument goes, leads to attacks…

But despite a hostile Trump administration and a barrage of anti-trans legislation across the country, the number of violent deaths the group documents has fallen nearly 50 percent from 53 in 2023 to 27 in 2025…

The HRC tallies, too, find a declining number of violent transgender deaths to mourn. The group found a peak in 2021 of 47 deaths falling to 27 last year. HRC described that 40 percent drop as an “ongoing onslaught of violence.”

The Manhattan Institute published a report about this topic back in March. Like the others, it found that violence against trans people was declining, not increasing.

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…

While every death is doubtless a tragedy, we think the evidence is clear: the “epidemic” narrative has no basis in reality. Continuing to point the finger of blame at white supremacy and hatred will do nothing to serve the transgender people whose lives are taken every year for different—and preventable—reasons.

First: the transgender homicide rate is below the general population rate. The only peer-reviewed study to estimate transgender homicide rates, by Alexis Dinno in 2017, found a cumulative general population homicide rate of 25.8 per 100,000 over the five-year study period (2010–2014). Using the Williams Institute population estimate that the HRC itself relies on and assuming no undercount of transgender deaths, the transgender rate over the same period was approximately 3.66 per 100,000, roughly one-seventh the general population rate.

So where does the claim of white supremacy violence against trans people come from? It comes from misleading reports like this one from HRC:

To see how the mismatch between narrative and reality is manufactured, consider the deaths of “four Black transgender women” that the HRC cited in a 2021 report titled “Black LGBTQ People and Compounding Discrimination” as proof that “white supremacy” was driving an “epidemic of violence.” One case, the drive-by shooting of Tyianna Alexander, remains unsolved, with no public evidence of anti-trans bias, a hate crime, or anything tied to white supremacy.

In the other three cases, every identified suspect was a black man. Bianca Bankz was killed by a black man named Moses Allen, who shot Bankz and then killed himself. Dominique Jackson’s killing led to the arrest of a black man named Branden McLaurin; police said there was “no evidence supporting a hate-crime” in this case. Fifty Bandz was killed by boyfriend Michael Joshua Brooks, a black man, in what looks like a straightforward case of intimate partner violence.

By the time the HRC published that report, Brooks and McLaurin had already been arrested, and the basic facts were public. But instead of reporting those facts, HRC took four cases and spun them as evidence of violence fueled by white supremacy.

The author of the Boston Globe piece offered to have an HRC expert correct the City Journal report I just quoted from above and got no response.

I offered the Human Rights Campaign’s key researcher, the transgender woman Charleigh Flohr, or anyone else with the organization an opportunity to rebut the Manhattan Institute finding, but they didn’t reply to me. And I can find no evidence that they have disputed the report in the months since its publication.

There is no epidemic of violence. Trans people are not being targeted by angry white supremacists any more than MAGA-hat wearing racists targeted Jussie Smollett in Chicago.

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