A report published by the Manhattan Institute, written by Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright, has been getting a lot of attention. Its central claims: trans people are murdered at lower rates than the general US population, confirmed hate crimes account for only 3.3% of the cases studied, and the leading identified motive is intimate partner violence rather than bias. The New York Post ran it under a headline suggesting these findings "debunk" claims of an epidemic of anti-trans violence. I want to talk about what the data actually shows, and what it does not.

What the report says, and what it does not

The researchers looked at more than 300 murder cases dating back to 2015. They found that Black trans women make up the majority of victims, that perpetrators are most often known to the victim, and that the homicide rate for young Black trans women is roughly one quarter that of young Black non-trans men. From this, they conclude that the narrative of white supremacist hatred hunting down Black trans people is not supported by the evidence. And on that narrow point, the numbers do not support that specific narrative.

But here is where the framing starts to do something I find worth examining closely. The report treats "intimate partner violence" and "hate" as mutually exclusive categories, as though one cancels the other out. It does not work that way.

Intimate partner violence is not the opposite of structural harm

Trans women, particularly Black trans women, are disproportionately likely to be living in poverty, to have been pushed out of family homes, to be engaged in sex work because other economic routes are closed to them, and to be in relationships where their legal status, housing security, and social isolation make leaving dangerous or impossible. When you trace the circumstances that lead to intimate partner violence, you find marginalisation at almost every step. The case file records a motive of "domestic dispute." It does not record the housing insecurity, the estrangement from family, the years of discrimination in employment, or the social conditions that narrowed this person's world down to the people who eventually killed them.

Saying intimate partner violence is the leading motive does not tell you that transphobia played no role in the life that led to that moment. It tells you that transphobia often works slowly, structurally, and quietly, long before it becomes visible as a single criminal act.

Who is making this argument, and why that matters

The Manhattan Institute is a right-leaning think tank. Colin Wright has spent a significant part of his recent career arguing against the existence of non-binary identities and against gender-affirming care. Neither of those things makes the data wrong. But they do tell you something about the questions the researchers chose to ask, and the questions they chose not to ask. The report is not a neutral audit of the evidence. It is an argument built from selected evidence, and it is being amplified by outlets like the New York Post for a reason.

The Human Rights Campaign's framing has sometimes been imprecise, and "epidemic" is a word that can be contested. But the answer to imprecise advocacy is more accurate analysis, not a report that uses technical precision to erase the structural reality of trans women's lives.

The comparison that tells the real story

The report notes that young Black trans women have a homicide rate roughly one quarter that of young Black non-trans men. It presents this as a rebuttal to the idea that trans women face unusual danger. But young Black men face an extraordinarily high homicide rate in the United States, driven by poverty, over-policing, disinvestment, and structural racism. Using that as a baseline and saying "trans women do better than this" is not reassurance. It is measuring one group of vulnerable people against another group of vulnerable people and concluding that everything is fine.

The question I keep coming back to is: compared to what? Compared to women, which is the comparison that makes sense if we are talking about the safety of women, including trans women? The report explicitly notes that trans women are usually compared to cis women rather than to men, and frames this as misleading. But trans women are women, so comparing their safety to that of cis women is not a methodological error; it is the appropriate comparison.

What this conversation costs

Every time a report like this lands, the conversation shifts away from the people who were actually killed and toward a statistical argument about whether their deaths count as the right kind of violence. I find that genuinely painful. The women at the centre of these 300-plus cases had lives, relationships, fears, and hopes. They were murdered. The circumstances that led to those murders were shaped in part by a world that made their lives smaller and more precarious than they needed to be.

That is not an epidemic in the clinical sense. It does not require a white supremacist with a manifesto. It requires a society that consistently fails to protect people who have been pushed to its edges. Naming that as a structural problem is not misinformation. It is the honest reading of what the data, taken in full, actually shows.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes and advocates on gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.