.png){kind=small}
The Washington Post found that nearly half of transgender women killed between 2015 and 2020 died at the hands of an intimate partner. Louisiana had the highest number of killings of transgender women per capita of any state.
In 2020, at least 44 transgender or gender-nonconforming people were fatally shot or killed by other violent means, the largest number since the Human Rights Campaign began keeping track in 2013 and a figure experts say probably undercounts the true toll on a community that is often misgendered in police and news reports. Details about these women and their deaths are often limited, their lives shrouded in stigma and relegated to the margins of society.
The Washington Post identified 140 transgender women who were killed nationwide between 2015 and 2020, using news reports, court records, and interviews with police, advocates and prosecutors. More than 75 percent of those killed were Black transgender women.
In over 60 percent of the cases, police identified a suspect. The Post categorized these killings as being “solved.” According to a Post analysis, only a minority were killed in random acts by strangers; the majority — roughly 69 percent of solved cases — were thought to have been killed by someone with whom they’d had prior contact. In roughly half of those cases, the victim and the suspect knew one another intimately, including in sex-work relationships.