Transgender:
“Designating a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond to that person’s sex at birth, or which does not otherwise conform to conventional notions of sex and gender”
Today is the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, established to honour those whose lives have been lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.
According to Transrespect Vs Transphoba Worldwide (TvT) – a project monitoring the number of trans and gender diverse people killed globally – 350 people were killed between October 1st 2019 and September 30th 2020. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) said they had “… never seen such a high number at this point in the year.”
But even these figures don’t tell the whole story. Data is not systematically collected in most countries and this – coupled with misgendering by families, authorities, and the media – means that unreported cases can only be guessed at. But what we do know is that:
- Transgender people in England and Wales are twice as likely to be victims of hate crime as cisgender people. Black transgender women are the most affected.
- A fifth (22%) of the transgender people murdered were killed inside their own house. Other instances where transgender people were burned alive, suffocated, shot and stabbed have been recorded.
- There were 105,090 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2019/20 which is an increase of eight per cent from the previous year.
This year is the first time the UK Statistics Authority has published data on the gender identity of victims of crime in its annual survey.
