Yesterday, for the first time ever, the FBI released a report on bias crimes based on gender identity, as called for in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act. The report refers to bias crimes committed in 2013. Unfortunately, the report massively underrepresented the problem, listing only 33 instances of bias crimes against transgender and gender-variant people. This in spite of the fact that the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) issued a comprehensive report in May finding that 344 people were victims of hate crimes on account of being gender-variant. NCAVP's report noted that the number had risen from 305 such crimes in 2012.
The phrase that comes to mind is tip of the iceberg. That is an incredibly low number.
--Osman Ahmed, the education coordinator of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP)
NCAVP found that 23 transgender people in the US were murdered in 2013 in bias attacks.
The FBI's report found that 7242 people were victims of single-bias incidents in 2013, nearly half of which were racially motivated, and that 1461 people were targeted for actual or perceived sexual orientation (60% of which were gay men). Thus according to the FBI gender-identity bias crimes comprise only 0.5% of hate crimes.
The fact that they are collecting this data for the first time is encouraging but there is a long way to go.
--Ahmed
I would have added the word "clearly."
In Ohio alone, three transgender women were killed in 2013 in bias-driven incidents. The Buckeye Region Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO) found 14 incidents of non-fatal hate-motivated attacks in 2013. But the FBI report lists a grand total of 0 gender-identity bias crimes in Ohio in 2013...because Ohio has no statewide law to prosecute hate crimes against LGBT victims.
According to Ohio, there have been zero hate crimes committed against people in those categories.
--Aaron Eckhardt, BRAVO
Many law enforcement agencies also have notoriously hostile relationships with transgender communities. Police frequently misgender victims and sometimes subject transgender victims to taunting and further violence, Ahmed said. The result, he explained, is that many transgender people do not report violence to police at all.
The weak laws and a lack of cultural competency can create a paradox: Progressive states, which have the greatest legal protections for marginalized populations, tend to report higher hate crime rates than states with reputations for the worst civil rights violations. And some states simply do not report all the crimes to federal officials. For example, the FBI report released today finds Alabama reported six total hate crimes against all protected classes, including crimes against people for their race. By contrast, Maine, which has approximately the same population, reports 25 hate crimes. Similarly, New York has a smaller population than Texas, but New York reports more than four times the number of hate crimes as Texas.
A large problem is the insistence of groups who do not accept our humanity that their God-given right to discriminate on the basis of religion must be protected...and therefore any attempt by government agencies to list us for any purpose must be fought tooth and nail.
Only 24% of hate violence incidents reported by LGBTQ people were classified by police as bias crimes in 2013. In 2012 77% of hate violence incidents report by LGBTQ people were classified as bias crimes by police.
--NCAVP
I got out my trusty calculator and find that if the NCAVP data were included in the FBI report, the percentage of hate crimes attributable to gender-identity bias would be 4.5% of the total...rather than the 0.5% the FBI acknowledges.