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2016 was the deadliest recorded year for murders of transgender people in the United States. But just as it has been the case for the past few years, 2017 is likely to surpass that.
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Just in the first 75 days of this year, seven trans people — six Black — have been murdered. Last year, of the 25 reported deaths, at least 18 were Black.
The first trans murder this year occurred on Jan. 4 in Canton, Mississippi, and like many before her, Mesha was misgendered — the coroner identified her as Omario Caldwell.
Two days later, Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow was stabbed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
By the end of February, five more transgender women were reported killed across the country.
“It’s only two months into the year and there have been seven murders, so we’re certainly on pace to blow right by the record set last year,” Massachusetts Democrat Joe Kennedy III told The Washington Post this week after he, along with other members of Congress, asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch a federal hate crime investigation into the epidemic.
“We will fight back against a scourge of hate-based, hate-inspired violence that plagues the transgender community every single day, particularly women of color,” Kennedy told a crowd earlier this month, naming the seven victims on the Capitol Plaza, as he announced his chairmanship of a transgender equality task force for Congress’s Equality Caucus.
But for an issue that has been glossed over by authorities for years, the path to beginning a formal inquiry will likely be saddled with a number of challenges.
In the few years that the FBI has tracked hate crimes, they have recorded only a fraction of them — and no killings.
And in all the cases of trans murders in 2017, police have ruled out investigating them as hate crimes. That’s on trend with the past: as a joint report by the Human Rights Campaign and the Trans People of Color Coalition made clear, of the 53 reported transgender murders between 2013 to 2015, not a single one was prosecuted or reported as a hate crime.
The justice system itself also represents a huge barrier to curbing anti-transgender violence. Even if they are not engaged in survival behaviors that are criminalized, transgender people who report to police that they have been victimized by physical or sexual assault face the risk of being harassed or intimidated by law enforcement.
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In fact, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that transgender people of color were six times more likely to experience physical violence from the police than the rest of the population.
Kennedy and his Democrat colleagues’ letter to Sessions highlighted just that.
“Transgender women are often targeted by law enforcement for a variety of reasons, and as a result are deterred from seeking help when they are targets of violence or harassment,” they wrote in their open letter to Sessions. “Transgender Americans deserve to have these attacks investigated as hate crimes.”
But the likelihood of Sessions beginning an investigation is low, given that as U.S. senator, he opposed the law that now allows his Justice Department to monitor transgender hate crimes — let alone investigate them.
“I would hope that the Justice Department would take seriously a letter from multiple members of Congress on issues of this gravity,” said David Stacy, the Human Rights Campaign’s director of government affairs, as reported by the Washington Post. “I can’t speak to whether Jeff Session will take it seriously. I hope he will.”
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