New Database Tracks Deaths of Transgender Homicide Victims

By Kenrya Rankin Dec 08, 2016

Last year, more transgender people were the victims of homicide in the United States than in any other year since the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs began tracking their deaths in 2010. They were overwhelmingly people of color, casualties of what the Human Rights Campaign calls an “epidemic of violence that occurs at the intersections of racism, sexism and transphobia.” And the recorded numbers are likely not truly reflective of the lives that have been lost. Transgender people are often misgendered both in life and death, whether by families who reject their identities or law enforcement officials who are not trained to properly record them.

Today (December 8), Mic launched an initiative that aims to account for the lives of transgender and gender nonconforming people who die violent deaths. Unerased tells the stories of the 111 trans-identified people killed between 2010 and now because of their gender identities—75 percent of who were Black trans women and gender nonconforming femmes. The journalists behind the database aim to regularly update the list to keep the epidemic in the news.

 

Access the Unerased database—which lets users break out the victims by year of death, race, age, gender identity and circumstances of death—here.