The Boston Globe published an opinion piece on Tuesday declaring that violence against transgender people was "going down" under President Donald Trump, contrary to warnings from transgender advocacy groups.The article, written by former USA Today columnist David Mastio, cited statistics from Advocates for Trans Equality and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) that Mastio said showed substantial declines in recorded violent deaths in recent years.Despite this, Mastio noted that the organizations have continued warning about violence against transgender people."Advocacy groups insist the data is incomplete and shouldn’t be used to draw any conclusions about the prevalence of anti-trans violence," Mastio wrote.
"That’s due, they say, to the bigotry of families and authorities who misname and misgender the victims, making it hard to discern from public records how many transgender people are dying."MOTHER JONES' WNBA 'TRANS PANIC' STORY SHOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ACTIVISM MASQUERADES AS JOURNALISMDavid Mastio wrote in The Boston Globe that the number of transgender victims of violence has declined in recent years.(Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)The article's headline read, "In Trump’s America, violence against transgender people isn’t going up — it’s going down." He continued, "Still it’s hard to imagine that as awareness about the transgender community has grown, misgendering and pronoun-swapping have become more common in police reports and news accounts than they were a decade ago, when another prominent LGBTQ organization, the Human Rights Campaign, began publishing its own numbers on violence against transgender people.
The HRC tallies, too, find a declining number of violent transgender deaths to mourn.The group found a peak in 2021 of 47 deaths falling to 27 last year.
HRC described that 40 percent drop as an 'ongoing onslaught of violence.'"Mastio wrote, "But despite a hostile Trump administration and a barrage of anti-trans legislation ...