Transgender individuals in the United States are killed at lower rates than the general population, according to a study published earlier this year by the Manhattan Institute's Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright. The findings challenge assertions by advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign that an "epidemic" of anti-transgender violence driven by bias and hate is sweeping the nation. Instead, the researchers found that when transgender people are murdered, the primary motive is typically intimate partner violence rather than prejudice.
The researchers examined more than 300 homicide cases since 2015 in which the victim was transgender. Between 2010 and 2014, the murder rate for transgender people was roughly one-seventh that of the overall population — 3.66 per 100,000 compared to 25.8 per 100,000 for all Americans. Among cases where suspects were identified, Black suspects made up 65% of perpetrators while white suspects accounted for 18%. In 2020, the year the Human Rights Campaign blamed "white supremacy" for deaths of Black transgender people, not a single white suspect was confirmed in the cases the Manhattan Institute verified. Confirmed hate crimes appeared in just 3.3% of the cases studied. Young Black transgender women, who represent 69% of all victims, face a homicide rate about one-quarter that of young Black non-transgender men.
"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," Lundgren and Wright found. The report states that the most common circumstances surrounding these deaths were intimate partner violence, sex-work encounters, disputes, robbery, and other interpersonal conflicts. According to the researchers, "the dominant pattern is not hateful white men hunting down black transgender victims because of racism and transphobia" but rather "violence between people who know each other, sleep with each other, live around each other, or encounter each other in high-risk contexts."
The findings matter because they directly contradict the narrative promoted by major LGBTQ advocacy organizations that transgender people face uniquely high rates of violence motivated by transphobia. The researchers note that transgender male victims are often misleadingly compared to non-transgender women, which makes their homicide rate appear unusually elevated for "women" when in fact it's substantially lower than for non-transgender men in similar demographic groups. The study suggests that the actual risk factors driving transgender homicides are the same ones affecting the broader population: intimate relationships gone violent, involvement in high-risk occupations like sex work, and interpersonal disputes in dangerous environments. The pattern points to structural vulnerabilities — poverty, unstable housing, survival crime — rather than an organized campaign of bias-driven killings. Understanding the true nature of these deaths matters for crafting effective prevention strategies that address the real risks transgender people face rather than chasing a misleading narrative.