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Transgender Europe (TGEU) have a research project, Transrespect versus Trannsphobia Worldwide. They recently issued a press release, TMM Update Trans Day of Remembrance 2019:

The TDoR 2019 update has revealed a total of 331 cases of reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019. The majority of the murders occurred in Brazil (130), Mexico (63), and the United States (30), adding up to a total of 3314 reported cases in 74 countries worldwide between 1st of January 2008 and 30th of September 2019.

They include a list of names.

These claims have been widely reported, including:

That seems like a particularly large number for what I understand is an incredibly minority group.

Have there been 331 killings of trans and gender-diverse people over a 12 month period?

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    I made a significant edit to more clearly show that the source of the claim was already amongst your links, and they provided supporting evidence. What sort of evidence would it take to convince you it was true or false?
    – Oddthinking
    Nov 21, 2019 at 1:07
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    There are several million transgender or non-binary individuals in the US alone. Yes, they are very much a "minority group", but they're more common than you seem to believe.
    – F1Krazy
    Nov 21, 2019 at 9:41
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    “Several million” would be around 1%. There are about 30,000 or so murders each year in the USA, so you’d expect a few hundred murdered. The 30 may be “murdered because of their gender”, on top of 300 who just had bad luck. If 30 is the US total, then transgender people are either very, very lucky or very, very careful.
    – gnasher729
    Nov 25, 2019 at 20:56
  • @gnasher729 Murder does not occur proportionally among people groups. For example, it's well known that American Blacks are far over-represented in the murder rates.
    – user11643
    Nov 22, 2020 at 18:28
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    @fredsbend If only 30 transgender people are murdered in the USA every year, then they are enormously underrepresented.
    – gnasher729
    Nov 24, 2020 at 11:36

1 Answer 1

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Yes, and probably more. These numbers come from netizens finding online news articles about murdered trans people, and creating a database: the Trans Murder Monitoring project. Indeed, each case is documented with a link to the source. They highlight the caveats thusly:

  1. The collected data show only those cases which have been reported. There is no data and no estimates available for unreported cases.

  2. The data presented here does not include all reported cases worldwide, but only those which can be found on the Internet, along with those murders that reported to us by local activists or our partner organizations.

  3. Due to the dozens of languages used in the Internet, the variety of terms used to denote trans and gender-diverse people, and the myriad numbers of web pages to search through, it is simply not possible to find all reports shown on the Internet.

  4. Finding reports of murdered trans and gender-diverse persons in particular is also problematic, as not all trans and gender-diverse people who are murdered are identified as trans or gender-diverse.

I.e., survivorship bias. It's thus reasonable to expect these numbers significantly understate the actual number of murders. Indeed, there are whole countries (like Thailand, famous for trans people) with no murders during 2020 in the database.

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  • Do they have any comparison between the trans murder rate and the overall murder rate? Nov 30, 2020 at 5:42

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