Every Three Days, a Transgender Person is Murdered in the World

by Michael Jones · 2009-07-21 13:20:00 UTC
Topics:

Trans violence

Sad, but probably not shocking.  The European organization "Transgender Europe" has a new report out this week documenting worldwide violence against trans people, and the findings show an alarming increase in violence toward transgender people. Evidence presented by Transgender Europe tells the gruesome story: between January 2008 and June 2009, more than 200 trans people were murdered in the world.

Broken down, that means that every three days, a trans person is killed somewhere around the globe.  And according to UN Dispatch, there's not one region of the world that's immune from transgender violence.  Perhaps surprisingly, most of the violence has occurred in the Western Hemisphere:

The cases have been reported from all six World regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The majority of cases have been reported from Latin America and North America. On these continents the majority of cases have been reported from Brazil (59) and the U.S.A. (16) for 2008 and from Brazil (23), Venezuela (20), and Guatemala (10) for the first six months of 2009. Moreover, the preliminary results show a total of 11 murdered trans people reported for Colombia followed by 5 for Honduras and 4 for Mexico and Venezuela for 2008, and 6 for Mexico and 3 for Argentina, and the Dominican Republic for the first six months of 2009.

In the United States, of course, we're familiar with the face of violence toward trans folks.  One has to look no further than Latiesha Green, or Angie Zapata, or Ebony Whitaker to see that for U.S. folks, this is happening in our own backyards.

Of course, what's even more frightening about the Transgender Europe report is that the 200+ murders they've documented over the past year and a half are likely a lowball figure.  It's hard to collect accurate evidence on violence committed toward LGBT folks around the globe, since large amounts of violence go unreported.

The study itself is part of an ongoing campaign organized by Transgender Europe and the medical/health journal Liminalis, called The Trans Murder Monitoring Project.  The goal of the project is to document trans violence throughout the globe, putting both names and faces to the epidemic.

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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