If you were to listen to the radical left - or even the more run-of-the-mill left, assuming there still are any - you'd think that all the troubles of the world were due to white supremacists. The left would have us believe a Klansman is hiding behind every door, when in fact, real white supremacists are pretty thin on the ground. It's a common bugaboo of the left, and as President Reagan famously said, there's so much the left knows that just isn't so. But the left just knows that white supremacy is the primary cause of crime, of violence, of climate change, of overdue library books, eczema, and toenail fungus.
Now we learn that white supremacy is to blame for violence against transgender people, as well. The Human Rights Campaign is making that claim, and as City Journal's Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright have shown us, there's just one problem with the Human Rights Campaign's claim:
Today, on International Transgender Day of Visibility, advocates will likely claim that transgender people are facing an “epidemic” of deadly violence driven by white supremacy, transphobia, and politicization by the far Right. For more than a decade, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has pushed this narrative, publishing annual “Epidemic of Violence” reports documenting transgender homicide victims in the United States. Relying on the HRC’s analysis, activists, presidents, members of Congress, the American Medical Association, celebrities, journalists, and scholars have repeated the HRC’s claims so often that for many they feel like established facts.
The problem is that many of these claims just don’t add up. 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.
A lot of murders, not just among transgender people but people in general, are due to intimate partner violence; more so than random street violence. So this shouldn't come as any surprise, but to hammer it home, Lundgren and Wright did the math, and it's revealing.
We reached this conclusion using the HRC’s own victim lists as the starting point. We independently verified every case from 2015 through 2024 (304 victims) using court records, police statements, local news reports, and other public documentation. We examined what the record could actually confirm about suspects, motives, circumstances, and case outcomes. You can find the full dataset, methodology, and case-level documentation in our T-CLEAR report (Transgender Comprehensive Lethal Evidence Analysis Report).
While every death is doubtless a tragedy, we think the evidence is clear: the “epidemic” narrative has no basis in reality. Continuing to point the finger of blame at white supremacy and hatred will do nothing to serve the transgender people whose lives are taken every year for different—and preventable—reasons.
There's a lot more to the report.
Read More: The Uncomfortable Truth About Trans Violence and Political Radicalization
First of all, Lundgren and Wright discovered that the transgender homicide rate is actually lower than that of the general population. In 2017, the study linked here found a genpop homicide rate of 25.8 per 100,000, whereas the transgender community did better, with only 3.66 per 100,000 - about one seventh of the general population.
If white supremacists are indeed targeting transgender people, then they are doing a lousy job of it.
There's another flaw in the Human Rights Campaign's horse squeeze. In cases of homicide of transgender victims, where the suspect is identified, black suspects make up 65 percent of the perpetrators, compared to 18 percent being white subjects. That's very nearly the reverse of the percentages of those demographics present in the general population.
Here's the thing: Intimate partner violence is a primary driver of homicide among all demographics, but human behavior is very complex. There are subcultures and subcultures within subcultures, all complicating attempts to quantify human behavior. We are, behaviorally, very complex critters. But blaming transgender homicides, or anything else, on white supremacy is a canard. It's a cheap, easy way to reduce a complex behavioral problem to an easily digestible talking point, to scare people, to make a political point that is no more based in reality than the claim that the moon is made of green cheese.
Lundgren and Wright conclude:
But if our goal is to reduce the number of dead transgender people, then our first obligation is to describe the problem honestly. That means admitting that most of these killings were not confirmed hate crimes, that the suspect pool looks the opposite of what public rhetoric about white supremacy would lead people to expect, and that the violence that does occur is usually intra-racial, intimate, and concentrated in a much narrower subgroup than the word “epidemic” suggests.
Now that the facts are public, ignorance is no longer an excuse. The HRC has a choice: keep repeating a false story that serves progressive ideology, or face facts and respond to the problem as it actually exists.
Except, they won't. The Human Rights Campaign won't admit they're wrong. Not on this issue. They have a great talking point, a great fundraising claim, and to be perfectly frank, a way to demonize the one demographic that it is still acceptable to attack simply because they exist.
In reality, it's very likely there aren't enough committed white supremacists in the entire United States to staff a small-town Walmart. But the left insists they are everywhere, forcing us to drop what we are doing at any given moment to debunk them. That's OK - as this report shows, the facts are, as usual, on our side.
