How Often Are Transgender People Victims of Crime?

The strongest source is the US National Crime Victimization Survey, run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It is a household survey of hundreds of thousands of people, it is nationally representative, and since 2017 it has asked respondents both their sex assigned at birth and their current gender identity, which allows transgender respondents to be identified. It also captures crimes that were never reported to police.

Two published analyses of it point the same way. Pooling 2017 and 2018 data, Flores and colleagues (American Journal of Public Health, 2021) found transgender people experienced 86.2 violent victimizations per 1,000 people, against 21.7 per 1,000 for cisgender people. That is about four times the rate. The Bureau's own report pooling 2017 to 2020 (Truman and Morgan, 2022) found 51.5 per 1,000 for transgender people against 20.5 for cisgender people, about two and a half times the rate. The two figures differ because the transgender subsample is a few hundred people, so a small number of incidents moves the rate, and the multiplier depends on which years are pooled. The direction is consistent across every published analysis.

The 2021 study reported no significant difference between transgender women and transgender men, with both above their cisgender counterparts. It also found that transgender and cisgender victims reported crimes to police at about the same rate, roughly half in each group, so the disparity is not an artifact of transgender people reporting more often.

One caveat sits inside these numbers. Transgender respondents in the survey are younger and more urban than average, and both raise baseline victimization risk. Research adjusting for those factors finds the gap narrows but does not close. Part of the disparity reflects who is in the group; part remains after accounting for it.

Here the data is weaker, and the honest description is that no nationally representative figure exists. The US Centers for Disease Control runs the main national survey on sexual and intimate-partner violence, but its most recent reports state that too few transgender respondents were sampled to produce estimates for them. The national instrument that could answer this question does not, yet.

What exists instead are large community surveys that recruit transgender participants directly. The largest, the 2015 US Transgender Survey, had 27,715 respondents and found 47% reported being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives and 54% reported some form of intimate-partner violence. A 2020 meta-analysis pooling 85 studies found transgender people were about 2.2 times as likely to experience physical intimate-partner violence and about 2.5 times as likely to experience sexual intimate-partner violence as cisgender people.

These figures are consistent and they are large, but they come from samples that recruit through transgender organizations and networks rather than at random. That method tends to reach people who are more connected to those networks, and it cannot be generalized to all transgender people the way a random sample can. The pattern is real within these studies. It is not a population rate, and this article does not present it as one.

Official hate-crime figures count incidents that police recorded as bias-motivated. In the United States, the FBI recorded 547 gender-identity bias offences in 2023, about 4% of all hate crime that year, up from about 2.2% in 2018. In England and Wales, police recorded several thousand transgender-identity hate crimes a year through the mid-2020s, the smallest of the five monitored strands, with year-to-year figures moving in both directions.

These are counts of recorded incidents, not a measure of how often hate crime happens. Both the FBI and the UK Home Office state that hate crime is under-reported: many agencies do not report to the FBI at all, and victims often do not report to police. The UK Home Office also notes that recorded rises can reflect better police recording or more public attention rather than more incidents. The numbers are a floor, and changes in them mix real change with changes in reporting.

There is no reliable homicide rate for transgender people, and no reliable pattern that can be stated as one. The reason is the same problem that runs through this whole subject: no official system records gender identity for people who are killed. US death certificates and FBI homicide files record sex as male or female. Counts of transgender homicides come from advocacy groups tracking news reports, which cannot produce a rate because there is no denominator, and which the groups themselves describe as undercounts.

Because the population figure is missing and the counts are assembled from media reports, any homicide rate calculated from them depends entirely on assumptions, and different assumptions produce results that disagree with each other. This article does not state a transgender homicide rate, in either direction, because the data cannot support one.

One narrower point is consistently reported across the advocacy counts and in the academic work that has examined them: within the transgender people who are killed, Black transgender women are the largest group, at a share far above their share of the transgender population. That is a statement about who, among transgender homicide victims, is most affected. It is not a rate compared to the general population, and it is not offered as one.

Every figure above is shaped by the same few problems, and they pull in both directions.

Transgender people are a small share of the population, so a national survey reaches only a few hundred of them, which makes estimates swing and confidence intervals wide. The largest surveys on sexual violence are not random samples, so they may over-represent people who are more connected to advocacy networks and more willing to disclose. Official records run the other way: police often misgender victims, death systems do not record gender identity at all, and hate crime is under-reported, so official figures understate. Definitions also differ between sources, with some counting nonbinary people and some not, which changes who is being measured.

The result is that the direction of the findings is clear, and it is consistent across independent sources: transgender people are victimized more than cisgender people, particularly for non-fatal violence, where the data is strongest. The precise size of the gap, the true prevalence of sexual violence, and any homicide rate are not things the current data can pin down.