Trump’s Civil Rights Achievement Goes Unrecognized by Trans Activists

The Trump administration is crediting its policies for a second year of declining murders of trans persons in the United States, despite a furious political reckoning in many states over transgender issues such as girls’ sports and gender affirming care for minors.On November 20, the next Trans Day of Remembrance, comprehensive statistics published by the LGBTQ rights group Human Rights Campaign and Advocates for Trans Equality will likely report as few as 19 murders this year targeting a minority whose members have been told they are under attack. That is down from 27 murders last year. The New York Sun double-checked the regularly updated Trans Lives Matter figures using local media and police reports with Google’s left-leaning Gemini AI and Elon Musk’s right-leaning Grok. Searching state by state for more victims, the Sun found no additional cases that the international database missed. If no sudden wave of anti-trans violence emerges, U.S. data will soon confirm a trend of declining trans murders that began under President Biden. This isn’t what was expected. When Mr. Trump began his second term by unleashing a barrage of policies that infuriated LGBTQ groups — on the military, identity documents, housing, health care and more — trans advocates thought that the “genocide” they had been warning of for more than a decade would soon arrive. They issued stark warnings:Danger: Advocates for Trans Equality wrote on a section of its website dedicated to tracking Trump anti-trans perfidy: “We deserve … to live without fear that the government will deny our existence, exclude us from public life, and put us in grave danger from extremists across the country.”Murder: British papers ran stories about trans people fleeing America, afraid for their very lives. “And I see an encouragement, a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to the worst elements in our nation. I fully expect murders of LGBTQ people to increase,” said one.Violence: In the Human Rights Campaign’s magazine, one of its staffers wrote that Mr. Trump’s “inflammatory rhetoric [is] driving rising anti-LGBTQ+ animosity and violence. LGBTQ+ people and our allies know all too well the consequences of a President Donald Trump.”Epidemic: In a September 2025, “emergency briefing,” the HRC president, Kelley Robinson, told journalists that under Mr. Trump, “Violence committed against trans Americans is an epidemic.”Terrorism: GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis said the same month: “The real trans terrorism is the terror experienced by trans people in this country.”Those warnings found a ready audience among trans people. A December 2024 UCLA Williams Institute survey found that 80 percent of gender diverse people “were more concerned about being the victim of a hate crime” after Mr. Trump’s election. But the feared onslaught of violence never materialized. While the pro-trans Trevor Project reported a 700 percent increase in calls to its crisis hotline on election day and another spike at the inauguration, the latest FBI hate crime statistics show a mild downturn. After the inauguration, a trickle of anti-transgender state laws turned into a tsunami that swept the redder parts of the country. There were 63 such laws passed in 19 states in 2026, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker. That’s down from the hectic pace of 2025 when 126 laws passed in 29 states.As the nearly 200 state laws piled up, one of America’s oldest civil rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, sounded the alarm. “Anti-transgender laws endanger LGBTQ+ people and their allies. Research also points to … [an] increase in antiLGBTQ+ violence as a result of these laws. Trend analysis of FBI crime data and social media harassment indicate an uptick in violence against LGBTQ+ people following anti-transgender legislation,” the group’s researchers warned. That wave of violence didn’t happen, either, an absence attributed by an ACLU spokeswoman, Gillian Bransetter, to an overall pattern of declining crime across the country. “If violence is down for everyone else (and it is) it only makes sense that it is down for trans people, too, and that doesn’t change or contradict the impact of anti-trans laws on our risk for violence or our overall higher risk for violence when compared to our cisgender peers,” Ms. Branstetter told the Sun.The trans rights spokeswoman cited an unpublished honors thesis, an unpublished master’s thesis and a peer reviewed study that found correlation but not causation between the passage of anti-trans laws and violence from 2015 to 2022. However few anti-trans state laws were enacted during that period compared to the roughly 200 passed in the past two years. Ms. Branstetter did not respond to followup questions.When confronted with the decline in murders by Fox News, Advocates for Trans Equality changed the subject, releasing a statement that said, “Anyone claiming trans people are safer today under the Trump administration is ignoring what’s happening. Right now, everyone in this country, trans people included, is facing Medicaid cuts, soaring gas prices, ICE terrorizing our communities, and attacks on the right to vote. On top of that, attacks on trans people have been relentless.”The Trump administration is happy to take credit for the actual decline. “The data proves the president’s law-and-order policies have benefited all Americans,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Daily Signal in a statement. “President Trump delivered the largest decrease in violent crime in American history.” Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at Trump-allied Heritage Foundation, told the Signal, “It should have been obvious to critical thinkers that it was unlikely that murders of people who identify as transgender, nonbinary, etc. would be increasing as such individuals become more common and commonplace.” He added: “It always struck me as marketing by the Human Rights Campaign, and their media stenographers.” Indeed, even as the same groups documented 2025’s decline in such murders, LGBTQ advocates doubled down on their rhetoric and mainstream outlets printed it.“This year, these deaths are punctuated by a political movement and powerful politicians who have fanned the flames of hate and are driving our trans siblings even further to the margins of society,” said the president of the Human Rights Campaign, Kelley Robinson, to a reporter for a women’s publication called “the 19th” as the 2025 figures were released. “Every anti-equality politician, from Donald Trump and his cabinet, to those in Congress and state legislatures, needs to see these numbers, see these names and faces, and see the cost of the cruelty they have greenlit.”The press people at HRC didn’t respond to a request for comment, even given a full day to respond.CNN reported the same day that Ms. Robinson made her comment that “since last November, at least 27 trans and nonbinary people have been killed, according to the nonprofit Advocates for Trans Equality. … Some research has shown trans people are more than four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime.” The report did not mention that year’s actual decline in murders of trans persons.Meanwhile an extensive analysis of publicly available data by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that transgender people are murdered at significantly lower rates than more typical Americans of the same race and biological sex. No trans-equality group has stepped forward to dispute the analysis.Advocates for trans people attribute these declines to the difficulty in tracking trans people’s true identities as they are misnamed, misgendered and often ignored by the press and authorities. As one particularly eloquent anonymous trans activist put it, “anti-trans violence does not end with the act that takes a life. It continues through systems that misname, undercount, underreport, and ignore trans people after they are gone. When federal systems weaken gender-identity data, when local media misgenders victims, and when public attention disappears after the first report, the result is a record that makes anti-trans violence harder to see. Erasure does not always arrive as one dramatic act. It often arrives through ordinary institutional failure repeated enough times to look normal.”A trans advocate, who asked not to be named because their organization had decided not to talk to the Sun, argued that there were fewer trans murders reported because the Trump administration has restricted data collection on the subject and scrubbed existing data. The Trump administration did do that, starting with an executive order on January 20, 2025.But it really doesn’t have much impact on the data about trans murders. Murder, in almost all cases, is a state crime where data and crime reports are collected by local police, not subject to Mr. Trump’s order. Moreover, the vast majority of trans murders take place in cities where Democrats hold sway and are reported on by local and LGBTQ media sympathetic to the trans civil rights cause.Still horrific stories of trans murders persist. This year Juniper Blessing was stabbed to death in a Seattle campus laundry room. Her alleged assailant has repeatedly been found incompetent to stand trial. Jade Roberts was “found shot, wrapped in a tarp, and left inside an abandoned building in southwest Houston.” Police haven’t found a suspect. In both cases the death was an unspeakable tragedy for friends and family and their trans community.That doesn’t change the fact that for the last few years there have been fewer Junipers and Jades. That’s good news whether it was on Mr. Trump’s watch or not. Trans groups and journalists who report on them should stop pretending otherwise.

Trump’s Civil Rights Achievement Goes Unrecognized by Trans Activists

Trump’s Civil Rights Achievement Goes Unrecognized by Trans Activists

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