10.4: Violence Against Trans Women

Trans women experience extraordinarily high rates of violence, rooted in the policing of gender. Transmisogyny appears throughout this book as a form of misogyny, but it gets focused attention here because of the scale and specific mechanisms that might otherwise be overlooked. From interpersonal aggression up through courtroom defenses like ‘trans panic’ and anti-trans legislation, social and political systems work to justify and perpetuate the systemic devaluation of trans feminine people. Recall from Chapter 1 that the philosopher Kate Manne (2018) describes misogyny as the enforcement arm of patriarchy, the system of punishments that fall on those who violate its expectations of gender. Historian Jules Gill-Peterson (2024) extends this analysis to trans misogyny (she purposefully splits the term), to show how the patriarchal nature of colonial rule and the policing of public space have long singled out anyone perceived as trans feminine, whether or not they identify as trans. She frames the marginalization and violence that occurs as a result, as an effort to police and punish trans femininity. Understood in this way, violence against trans women, and anyone assumed to be trans, is patriarchy attacking those whose existence directly challenges the validity of patriarchal assumptions that man is superior to woman. The same cultural marginalization pushes many trans women, and trans women of color most of all, out of stable housing and employment and into criminalized street economies, where they are exposed to heightened danger (Gill-Peterson, 2024).

These dynamics are not relegated to colonial history. They persist in the everyday violence trans women face now. In one study of trans women in San Francisco, more than 80% reported verbal abuse and more than half reported physical abuse tied to being trans (Arayasirikul et al., 2022), consistent with national data placing trans people, and trans women of color especially, among the most victimized groups researchers have measured (Wirtz et al., 2020). Much of this comes from strangers in public. Perpetrators tend to target visible gender nonconformity, so trans women who are read as trans, or simply as failing to conform to gender expectations, draw the most hostility (Wirtz et al., 2020). The violence is not only interpersonal. The state participates too. Since 2013, more than a third of the murders of trans women have produced no arrest, and fewer than half have ended in a conviction (Human Rights Campaign Foundation, 2024), while a rising tide of anti-trans legislation, like banning gender-affirming care and restricting which bathrooms trans people may use, makes trans lives more precarious still (Arrayales & Redfield, 2026). A study of more than 61,000 transgender and nonbinary young people found that suicide attempts rose by as much as 72% after their states enacted anti-trans laws (W. Y. Lee et al., 2024).

A distinctly dangerous source is sexual and romantic interest itself. Some men are drawn to trans women and then experience that attraction as a threat to their own manhood or heterosexuality. They respond with violence, a reaction fueled by fetishization and by stereotypes that cast trans women, particularly trans women of color, as less than fully human (Gamarel et al., 2022; Ussher et al., 2022). This reaction has been "justified" in courts of law through the "trans panic" defense (see research highlight below), in which a man claims he was provoked to violence by discovering a partner or date was trans. In one analysis, a substantial share of the murders of trans women occurred during sexual interactions. Trans women of color, pushed disproportionately into street economies, were more often killed in connection with sex work, while this was uncommon among White victims (Westbrook, 2023).

Research Highlight: The "Trans Panic" Defense When a man kills a trans woman after learning she is trans, his lawyers have sometimes argued that the discovery so provoked him that he should be held less responsible. This is the "trans panic" defense, a cousin of the older "gay panic" defense. It is not a formal law. It works by inviting a judge or jury to treat the violent, sometimes lethal, enforcement of masculinity and heterosexuality as an understandable loss of control (C. Lee, 2020). Does it sway jurors? Michalski and colleagues (2022) had mock jurors read about a man who stabbed a trans woman after discovering she was trans, then choose a verdict. Jurors given the trans panic defense returned somewhat more lenient verdicts, more manslaughter and fewer murder convictions, than those given a neutral provocation story. Separately, jurors who scored high on masculine-honor beliefs, the idea that a man is justified in meeting an insult to his manhood with aggression, were more lenient across the board, and that leniency ran largely through feeling: high-honor jurors felt more anger and disgust toward the victim and blamed her more, which in turn softened their verdicts. The defense leans on the same honor-based model of manhood the chapter has been tracing, and the jurors who hold that model most strongly are the ones most inclined toward leniency. The "trans panic" defense is a place where a cultural belief about manhood becomes a legal excuse. A growing number of states (20 plus DC, so far) have moved to ban it, but where it survives it converts transphobic panic into grounds for leniency.

Analyses of transgender homicides find the victims are overwhelmingly young trans women of color, and Black trans women most of all. In one study Black trans women accounted for 78.6% of the trans women killed (Halliwell et al., 2025). These counts are widely treated as undercounts, because victims are frequently misgendered and deadnamed in police and news records, which also makes their killings less likely to be solved (Lantz et al., 2025). That trans women of color bear the greatest share of this violence, and that their deaths are most often erased, is a reflection of what Gill-Peterson (2024) calls a "global trans panic," the same fusion of state and interpersonal violence that ran through colonial history, still operating today.

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