ONE trans person has been murdered in the UK in the last year. ONE. And it wasn't even because they were trans!
This seems to be true, yet kind of misleading at the same time.
When considering this issue, you need to keep a few things in mind. I recommend reading this short article: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-how-many-trans-people-murdered-uk
The article deals with a slightly earlier period than the OP, and mentions that to the best of our knowledge only one trans person was murdered in the UK between late 2017 and late 2018.
But when we talk about the trans murder rate and compare it to the general population’s homicide statistics, it’s based on comparing two barely compatible figures. On the one hand, we know exactly how many people there are in the UK; but on the other hand, the trans murder rate is based on estimates how many transgender people there are in the country, in total, including those not officially listed as having undergone the gender transition and sex reassignment process.
This total number is very fuzzy, where
The latest government publication on the topic (acknowledging there is no robust data) “tentatively” estimates that there are between 200,000 and 500,000 trans people in the UK.
So, very imprecise.
Not to mention that only 4910 of those people “have been given legal recognition of their change of sex in the form of a Gender Recognition Certificate.”
If we go by the 200-500 thousand figure, trans people have 2-5 times less of a chance of being murdered than the general population. But this is based on a very tiny sample size of only 9 trans people murdered in 9 years. All it takes is literally a few killings more or less and the percentage would change drastically.
Another issue you have to consider is that many, many trans people are not out and open about their identities (for understandable reasons), and even fewer of them have ‘fully’ transitioned or are recognized by the authorities as trans. Thus the chance for them being registered simply as having been murdered as a member of their birth sex seems, well, really high.
Indeed,
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) confirmed to FactCheck that “it is not possible to identify transgender victims in current homicide statistics” and “the sex of a homicide victim is determined by the police force that records the crime”.
In other words, there is not yet an official, standardised method for recording the deaths of trans people across the UK.
Finally, while the article I linked tentatively concludes that according to the results of extremely flawed data gathering, trans people do seem less likely to be *murdered*, it notes how it nevertheless seems likely that they suffer from greater amounts of other violent crimes being committed against them than the general (cisgender) population does.
