Championing transgender rights may not have done Democrats any favors in the election, but the Biden administration still pulled out the stops for Transgender Day of Remembrance.
“Today, on Transgender Day of Remembrance, we mourn the transgender Americans whose lives were taken this year in horrific acts of violence,” said President Biden in a Wednesday statement. “There should be no place for hate in America — and yet too many transgender Americans, including young people, are cruelly targeted and face harassment simply for being themselves. It’s wrong.”
Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine, the first Senate-confirmed transgender official in U.S. history, said that the administration “stands firmly with all transgender people.”
“On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, we mourn the people who lost their lives to transphobia and anti-transgender violence this year and remember what those people meant to their loved ones and their communities,” Dr. Levine said in a statement.
Other federal offices marking the date included the Department of Labor; the State Department; the Centers for Disease Control’s Division of HIV Prevention, and the Veterans Health Administration Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Donna Peterkin, director of the VHA DEI office, asked employees to “take a moment of silence to reflect on the struggles and honor the resilience of transgender, non-binary, and gender-diverse individuals and to think of Veterans who were not able to serve openly or who were removed from the military,” according to a leaked memo posted by Libs of TikTok.
The statements show the administration has no plan to distance itself from transgender rights despite post-election indications that voters are moving rightward on gender identity issues.
An Associated Press VoteCast survey found that more than half of voters who cast ballots in the Nov. 5 election agreed that government and societal support for transgender rights has gone too far.
Launched in 1999, Transgender Day of Remembrance honors those “whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence,” according to the LGBTQ group GLAAD, a situation that the Human Rights Campaign described as an “epidemic.”
In its annual report released Tuesday, the HRC said that 36 “transgender and gender-expansive” Americans have been killed since Nov. 20, 2023.
That’s up from 33 people in the previous 12-month period, and 34 in 2022, but HRC said its criteria was expanded this year to include “people who are cisgender and gender non-conforming in their gender expression/presentation.”
“The decision to expand our inclusion criteria was made in acknowledgement that these victims lost their lives to the same transphobic forces, and thus should be memorialized and included in discussions of the epidemic of anti-trans violence,” said the HRC.
Today, on Transgender Day of Remembrance, we honor and remember those who have lost their lives to anti-transgender violence. #TDOR
— ADM Rachel Levine (@HHS_ASH) November 20, 2024
Read more: https://t.co/5prMjHU9yY pic.twitter.com/jK0MxvAHqy
Critics have long argued that Transgender Day of Remembrance is overblown.
They cite data showing that transgender people are actually less likely to be the victims of homicide than Americans at large; that some of the victims were involved in illegal activity, and that about a third were killed by “intimate partners,” relatives or friends, in cases where a suspect has been identified.
One of those who died in 2024, 45-year-old Yella (Robert) Clark, was killed in prison while serving time for murder. Police said another victim, 14-year-old Pauly Likens, was murdered after meeting an adult male for sex via the Grindr app, a dating app for LGBTQ users.
In another case, police charged Jaylen Hill with killing his cousin, Righteous Torrence Hill, 35, during an argument over borrowing Righteous’ car. The victim’s mother told GLAAD that “it was not because he was transgender.”
Since 2013, the HRC found that 83% of those killed were male-to-female transgender people, and 61% were Black male-to-female transgender people, but it’s also possible that adopting an opposite-sex identity may be useful in avoiding becoming a victim.
Kentucky State University associate professor Wilfred Reilly found that the 2017 homicide death rate for transgender people was about 1.48 per 100,000, less than a third of the overall murder rate of about 5 per 100,000 and a fraction of the rate for men in general (6.68) or black people (18.8).
Mr. Reilly said Wednesday that “nothing has changed” since he ran those numbers.
“HRC stats show 30-40 trans murders annually,” he said in an email. “If we assume that even just 0.5% of people are trans, that’s a rate far lower than that for Blacks, poor whites, people living in the South, or literally just males overall.”
A 2017 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that the “overall homicide rate of transgender individuals was likely to be less than that of cisgender individuals,” based on crime data from 2010-14.
At the same time, the study found that the homicide rates for young Black and Hispanic male-to-female transgender people was “almost certainly higher than were those of cisfeminine comparators,” meaning biological women and girls.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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