Tish Still, parent of a child who identifies as transgender, was worried about the “epidemic” of trans murder victims:
Facts always matter — but they take on a particular importance when they’re being used to claim that your child could be murdered. So I decided to delve into the research used to inform these claims. For me, it was personal.
The Government doesn’t publish data on the number of transgender people in the UK, though in 2018 it “tentatively” estimated that the figure stood between “approximately 200,000-500,000”. What proportion of that number must have been killed to warrant today’s warnings of trans murder epidemic? 10? 100? 1,000?
To find out, I analysed data collected by the trans-led organisation Transgender Europe, which has received more than a million dollars from the Arcus Foundation, who are based in the US and take a keen interest in transgender issues. As well as donating almost $150,000 to Stonewall, in 2015 the Arcus Foundation handed $312,000 to Transgender Europe specifically to supply reliable global data on transgender murders. The website it created provides an interactive map and links to documents naming the transgender victims.
Looking at Transgender Europe’s list of cases, it became clear — to my relief — that the total murders reported for the United Kingdom since 2008 amounted to 11. This translates as a murder rate of around 0.165%.
Now, that is still significantly higher than the murder rate for the UK as a whole: the ONS reports that the homicide rate in the UK for the year ending March 2020 was 11.7 per million people, rising to 17 per million among men. But look a bit closer at the list of trans murder victims, and that figure of 11 becomes increasingly suspect.
For instance, two of the listed victims, Vikki Thompson and Jacqueline Cowdry, appear to have been erroneously included. Thompson died by suicide while incarcerated in HMP Leeds, while Cowdry’s death was ultimately ruled as non-suspicious. This reduces the total to nine unlawful deaths, all of whom were born male. (By contrast, the number of homicides committed by transgender people between 2008 and 2017 was 12.) For context, the number of women killed by men during the same period was 1800. So much for our alleged “cis-privilege”.
Searching for more information led me to the work of Karen Ingala-Smith, who founded the Counting Dead Women project in 2012 after she realised that there was no central record of the extent of femicide here in the UK; thanks to her, a list of murdered women is read out in the House of Commons each year to imprint the rate of femicide on the minds our political class. Ingala-Smith’s tireless work focusses on female victims of, predominantly, male violence, though she made an exception to highlight the discrepancy between the mass hysteria about transgender victims of homicide compared to the treatment of woman-killing as mere background noise. (There is still no equivalent to the Trans Day of Remembrance for the much greater number of women killed by male violence.)
Crucially, her research sheds a vital spotlight on the nine remaining victims identified by the Trans Murder Monitoring report. Reading it, two things become clear. The first is that it is not entirely certain that all the victims themselves identified with the label “transgender”. The second is that the motives behind these crimes are more complex than straightforward “transphobia”.
