A political scientist disputed claims that transgender people are victimized by violence at disproportionate rates, calling this an “insanely and verifiably wrong conspiracy theory.”
Dr. Wilfred Reilly, an Assistant Professor of Political Sciences at Kentucky State University, called out the White House for promoting this belief during a recent press conference on the “Transgender Day of Remembrance.”
“Today, on Transgender Day of Remembrance, we grieve the 26 transgender Americans who were killed this year. Year after year, we see that these victims are disproportionately Black women and women of color,” Jean-Pierre remarked. Her statistics come from the LGBTQ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, which purports in there annual report, there’s an “epidemic of violence” against transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in the United States.
“The only catch is that no such systemic violence exists,” Reilly wrote in the National Review, Tuesday.
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The conservative political scientist used the numbers provided by the HRC and recent homicide data to argue that transgender-identifying Americans actually face a much lower risk of violence than other communities.
“The total number of trans-identified Americans known to have been killed in 2023 is 26. If we round that up to 30 (to account for December) and assume that just 1 percent of the U.S. population is trans (given that, as one very limited survey shows, around 3 percent of young Americans are), we obtain an annual transgender-murder rate of 30 in 3.32 million, or just 0.9 people per 100,000 people. Even if we, alternatively, assume an American trans population of just 1.6 million — to gel with one high-quality but conservative recent estimate — the resulting murder rate would be merely 1.9 per 100,000 people,” he argued.
“To put that in context, the murder rate for Blacks in the U.S. is currently 30–33 per 100,000 people. The African-American community is an outlier but not necessarily a remarkable one: In a representative recent year, 4.5 percent of Black-male deaths were the results of homicide, versus 2.3 percent for American Indians, 2.2 percent for Hispanics, 2 percent for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders and 4.9 percent for all Whites under full majority,” he wrote.
Transgender advocates often claim that GOP laws regulating female sports and private spaces or transgender treatments for minors put transgender individuals at risk for violence. But Reilly claimed he couldn’t find one “proven or seriously alleged hate crime” anywhere on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2023 list.
“Also, few of the murders of these (mostly) trans-identified males seem to have occurred anywhere near MAGA country. Per my analysis of the list, which I ran by a research associate and a friend in law enforcement, only four of the 26 victims, and three or four of their killers, were White,” he added.
Reilly claimed other social movements championed by the left in recent years, such as Black Lives Matter, had caused “stupid and baseless panics” based on claims “wholly untethered from reality.”
He pointed to a study conducted shortly after the death of George Floyd, which found half of those who identified as “very liberal” believed 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed by police per year in the United States. The available data found the real number to be between 13 and 27 in 2019.
Reilly again charged that the White House was promoting “conspiracy theories” about the dangers transgender individuals face in the United States, to conclude his piece.
“On some level, the real question here is ‘Why?’ Why do powerful figures and respected institutions — the president of the United States and his spox, from behind the White House podium! — continue to propound insanely and verifiably wrong conspiracy theories about how dangerous the country is? I think that the answer is because, to paraphrase Larry Elder, there is a Narrative to save,” he wrote.
The White House and the Human Rights Campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
