Protesters shouted the mantra “Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter!” over and over as they interrupted CNN’s LGBT presidential town hall on Thursday night, waving around the pink, white, and blue transgender equality flag and shouting down the speakers. CNN host Anderson Cooper backed down to the protesters, praising the “long history of protest in the LGBT community” and basically acquiescing to their fierce insistence that transgender people are being slaughtered en masse. The 2020 Democrats are on board with the narrative too.
Presidential contender Pete Buttigieg used his next question to applaud the protests, check his own privilege as a “white cisgender male” and talked about how hard it must be to be a transgender woman of color. Earlier in the night, Cory Booker said “the suffering of so many LGBTQ people is shrouded in the ignorance and hate of this world” when talking about transgender deaths, clearly tying the violence to bigotry. Plus, when Kamala Harris was on stage, a protester shouted out, “How do we make them stop killing us? We’re being systematically hunted.” This narrative would send chills down the spine of any person with a heart and make you think transgender people are in grave danger.
There’s no doubt that it certainly must be difficult to live as a transgender person, but the Democratic narrative, repeated by almost every candidate at this point, that trans women of color face a neverending onslaught of hate crimes and violence is just not supported by reality.
Transgender deaths are incredibly tragic, no doubt, but most don’t actually have anything to do with the fact that the individuals were transgender. The way Democrats portray these deaths makes it seem as if they were all hate crimes, where these people were targeted for being transgender. Most of them weren’t.
When they’re reading off lists of names of transgender people who have been murdered, many of them are just people who died who happened to be transgender. It’s certainly sad, but hardly evidence of hate crimes or an oppressive existence.
The Human Rights Campaign cited 26 transgender people murdered in 2018, but notes that not all of these cases were due to anti-trans animus. That’s 26 deaths out of a population of roughly 1.5 million transgender adults, according to NPR.
Gay conservative writer Chad Felix Greene wrote for The Federalist about how “The Left Exploits Inaccurate Stories Of Transgender Victims For Political Gain.” He covered the case of Muhlaysia Booker, whose death was covered by the media as if it was an act of anti-trans violence. But according to Felix Greene’s reporting, it was really just a road rage incident gone wrong. This sort of misleading narrative is typical of many of these incidents.
Are these deaths a tragedy? Yes, of course. Are they evidence of an epidemic of rampant anti-trans murders? Not at all. Still, Democrats may think they’re doing the right thing by signaling their support for the transgender community, who undoubtedly have it harder than most, and whose interests are important to Democratic primary voters. But there’s never an excuse to fearmonger or scare people with exaggerated threats, even if it would help further your political ambitions.
