You might have heard the leftist talking point about there being a "genocide" against transgender people in America.
The radical left has even pointed at transgender violence data to argue that such an epidemic exists.
But, much to their surprise, those numbers are now falling. Dramatically. And all on President Donald Trump's watch.
David Mastio laid out the numbers Tuesday in a Boston Globe column that takes direct aim at the prevailing narrative about violence against transgender Americans.
The most striking figures come from transgender advocacy organizations themselves.
Advocates for Trans Equality claimed in its 2025 report on such killings that “right-wing extremists are endangering our democracy and our very right to exist. Trans people — especially Black trans women — continue to bear the brunt of discriminatory policies, political scapegoating, and violence. These forces are interconnected and deadly.”
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.
Advocacy groups insist the data is incomplete and shouldn’t be used to draw any conclusions about the prevalence of anti-trans violence. That’s due, they say, to the bigotry of families and authorities who misname and misgender the victims, making it hard to discern from public records how many transgender people are dying.
The longer-term HRC numbers are also notable. The organization says the highest annual total it has recorded was 57 violent deaths in 2021. By its latest count, that number had fallen to 27.
HRC nevertheless described the situation in its 2025 report as an "ongoing onslaught of violence" and argued that transgender people continue to face disproportionate risks, particularly Black transgender women. The organization also cautions that its figures are minimum counts because some victims may be misidentified or their deaths may not be reported in ways that allow researchers to identify them as transgender.
Let's be clear here: 27 people in a nation of over 330 million people is a rounding error. It's a statistical anomaly. It can almost be explained by pure chance, especially as the legacy media tries to ingrain the transgender fad into youth consciousness.
The data are especially stark because advocacy organizations have spent years using hyperbolic language to describe the alleged threat.
Mastio also points to the argument frequently made by activists that laws restricting transgender participation in women's sports or medical interventions involving minors contribute to an atmosphere that produces violence.
These numbers provide a potent counter-factual that this argument is nothing but baseless hysteria.
If political restrictions themselves were driving a steadily worsening epidemic of deadly violence, one would expect that relationship to become visible somewhere in the numbers. Instead, the major advocacy groups' own fatal-violence counts have moved substantially downward from their recent peaks.
There is another issue here that RedState's Jennifer Oliver O'Connell addressed over the weekend: the broader mental-health picture among people experiencing gender dysphoria and undergoing medical transition.
O'Connell highlighted a Finnish study of more than 2,000 adolescents referred to the country's centralized gender identity clinics.
According to the study as summarized in her report, serious psychiatric problems remained common among gender-referred young people, including after medical gender reassignment.
Because Finland’s health registers are mandatory and patients cannot opt out, the dataset captured the complete fate of every gender-referred adolescent in the country over that period.
“Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals,” the study’s authors concluded.
“Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.”
Well, that's quite a blow to a movement that claims if you don't trans kids against their parents' will then they literally will die.
Every glib, arrogant, virtue-signalling celebrity who’s broadcast the lie that kids will kill themselves if not allowed to transition deserves to have this read aloud to them non-stop through a megaphone for a year. https://t.co/xThQy3eti5
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 20, 2026
It turns out that talking point has been completely exposed as well, as J.K. Rowling pointed out on X.
"Every glib, arrogant, virtue-signalling celebrity who’s broadcast the lie that kids will kill themselves if not allowed to transition deserves to have this read aloud to them non-stop through a megaphone for a year," she remarked about the study.
If advocacy organizations are going to invoke statistics as evidence of an escalating crisis, then declining statistics matter too. You don't get to cite the numbers when they're rising and wave them away when they're falling.
The latest data are particularly interesting because the decline has continued amid precisely the political environment activists warned would make the situation dramatically worse.
Trump returned to the White House, Republican states continued passing restrictions involving transgender medical treatment and athletics, and the administration itself pursued major changes in federal transgender policy.
Yet the violent-death counts published by the advocacy organizations themselves went down.
And there is some genuinely good news buried beneath all the politics. Fewer transgender Americans being violently killed is something people across the political spectrum should be able to welcome.
But hardest hit may be the political narratives of hard left activist organizations, who insist that transgender Americans being "persecuted" is evidence of a right-wing, bigoted, intolerant society that victimizes everyone who is "different."
Maybe it was simply that parents don't like schools secretly telling their children that they might have been born the wrong gender or that God made a "mistake" when they were born and so now they need "gender-reaffirming" surgery.
Their talking point becomes even more egregious when you consider that transgender individuals disproportionately commit violence against their fellow Americans, as RedState's Mike Miller pointed out in a VIP article:
Let's cut to the bottom line of a recently released study from Rutgers University, the Network Contagion Research Institute, and the Manhattan Institute that found a direct correlation between trans beliefs and violence — and then we'll backhoe and fill.
The study, titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?”, surveyed 1,208 U.S. adults. The authors explicitly characterize it as correlational, meaning it establishes no cause-and-effect relationship. [...]
According to the study, gender ideology associated with left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) ideology is far more associated with the Left's willingness to commit — and attempt to justify — political violence.
Reaffirming mental illness and agreeing with human beings that they were "born in the wrong body" is a far more egregious and dangerous message than simply insisting that there are two genders (as there are two sexes in nature) or that biological males should not be unfairly competing against girls in sports.
But it is critical for the activist left to pose as victims, even as they bully Americans to adopt their made-up narratives and ram their doctrinaire agendas down our throats.
We should therefore celebrate not just the end of one, but potentially the end of two, major talking points about the left's transgender agenda.
