This is the article that appeared in the May 2024 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release, here.
Transgender Day of Visibility is an international event that is held every year on March 31. This year it fell on Easter Sunday.
Left-wing government officials, led by President Biden and his administration, along with left-wing LGBT activists, led by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), called attention to the heroics of transgender persons. They should instead have called attention to their lifestyle, which too often is marked by drugs and violence.
At the end of 2023, HRC listed 32 incidents of transgender persons who died a violent death. It took the occasion to say that “These victims, like all of us, are loving partners, parents, family members, friends and community members. They worked, went to school and attended houses of worship.”
Well, not so fast. We examined each of the 32 cases and found that, while all are tragic, many of the incidents are still open to investigation; there was a lot of random violence. Importantly, there was not one incident that clearly merited the tag “hate crime” (in one instance, the police said it was a possible hate crime).
The fact is that a large portion of the violence was the result of an altercation between the transgender victim and the assailant. Too often the victim was not the kind of model citizen that HRC portrays.
Why was it necessary to get into a confrontation with someone who was innocently “misgendered”? Asking a stranger for sex is not a smart thing to do—it often results in violence. Assaulting a security guard can end in death, as happened in one instance. When an ex-con robs a store and is killed by a security guard, we shouldn’t be shocked. When an ex-con shoots at state troopers, that is really stupid. And so on.
Even HRC admits that in more than a third of these cases (36 %), the killer was a “romantic/sexual partner, friend or family member.” We found that in five of these cases, the killer was another transgender person. Which raises the question: Why are these people so violent?
Just looking at the pictures of these transgender persons who were killed is enough to conclude that they are not just like the guy next door. That obviously doesn’t justify violence. Still, the idyllic portrayal that HRC presents is nonsense.
No innocent person deserves to die a violent death. Unfortunately, in too many cases the transgender persons that HRC mourns were not innocent victims. Their lifestyle is very much in need of a corrective.
