As Kansas laws grow hostile, deadly violence against trans people declines | Opinion
With a press release calling on transgender people to flee Kansas in the wake of an anti-transgender law targeting the embattled minority’s right to use the restroom or control how they are portrayed on driver’s licenses and birth certificates, the Trans Liberty political action committee set off a blizzard of national headlines about Kansas last week.
Trans Liberty thinks trans Kansans should flee not just because the Republican supermajority in the Legislature is making their lives difficult, but “for their safety.”
The Kansas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union backs that concern in its lawsuit about the now-notorious law that authorizes civil suits against transgender people who use the wrong bathroom. The ACLU lawsuit contends that the inability to obtain documents will “result in discrimination and violence against them when others learn they are transgender.”
Those local concerns about violence against transgender people have been fueled for more than a decade by the rhetoric and distressing annual reports of national civil rights groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, Advocates for Trans Equality and the national ACLU.
“ Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislative attacks are translating to anti-LGBTQ+ violence,” says the Human Rights Campaign. “Transgender and gender-expansive people continue to be marginalized, ostracized and excluded from full participation in communities across the country, in ways that contribute to … discrimination and violence against transgender and non-binary people. The last few years have seen thousands of anti-LGBTQ+ attacks, many of which have been explicitly anti-trans,” the group’s website says.
Questions about ACLU research
The ACLU published a research brief that says: “Research also points to a growing fear, lack of safety, and increase in antiLGBTQ+ violence as a result of these laws. Trend analysis of FBI crime data and social media harassment indicate an uptick in violence against LGBTQ+ people following anti-transgender legislation.“
In an online memorial for transgender people murdered in 2025, Advocates for Trans Equality states, “Right-wing extremists are endangering our democracy and our very right to exist. Trans people — especially Black trans women — continue to bear the brunt of discriminatory policies, political scapegoating, and violence. These forces are interconnected and deadly.”
The problem is that the very report on which Advocates for Trans Equality includes the language about the “deadly” violence, the group documents the second year in a row in which the number of murdered transgender people in their annual memorial has gone down, in total from 53 in 2023 to 27 in 2025, a nearly 50% decline.
As of today, the group has never publicly acknowledged the improvement, nor has it made any public comment on the fact that their reports document a similar, but smaller, decline in suicides by transgender people over the same period.
The group’s finding is not a fluke. Every November, the Human Rights Campaign releases a report called “An Epidemic of Violence” or “Fatal Violence Against Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People in the United States.” This November, the report documented the same 27 deaths as the Advocates for Trans Equality and like the Advocates, HRC’s report did not list the number of killings in previous years. Anyone wanting to know the trend has to look up past years’ reports to compare the numbers.
The collected reports of the Human Rights Campaign show a decline in the murders of transgender people from a peak of 47 in 2021 to the 27 in the November 2025 report, a drop of 42%.
Human Rights Campaign, federal statistics
A spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign cautions that its data is far from complete and that federal statistics are far better at capturing the full picture of bias crimes against transgender people. Such concerns did not stop HRC from promoting its own data to the press when it showed a peak in such killings in 2021, and it did not stop the media from covering HRC’s claims about a record death toll. HRC promised to give me an interview with one of the researchers for their report, but never followed through.
While federal government statistics are not as up-to-date as the activist groups’ data, the FBI’s annual hate crime report released in August 2025 shows a decline in hate crimes based on gender identity of about 10% between 2023 and 2024, as well as an even larger decline in hate crimes based on sexual orientation.
State by state data is even further behind, but from 2022 to 2023, the latest years available on the FBI website, hate crimes based on gender identity in Kansas fell from five to two. We’ll see what the 2024 update brings.
For what it is worth, in Missouri, the Kansas City Police Department “Bias Crime Incident Comparison Report” shows a decline from two gender identity crime victims in 2024 to zero in 2025.
And the data that transgender civil rights groups do collect on individual cases of the murders of transgender people shows that domestic violence and disputes around prostitution are the big killers of trans people, not hate crimes.
For sure, two years of improvement nationally is not enough for the problem of violence against transgender people to be considered solved, but the fact is that despite the transgender cause facing a record spike in anti-trans rhetoric, anti-trans state legislation and the election of a hostile president the “epidemic of violence” transgender civil rights groups warned of has not materialized.
In fact, the opposite has happened. As Americans grew less tolerant of transgender people’s civil rights agenda, we have become significantly more tolerant of actual transgender people. That’s something to celebrate. Maybe it is even safe to stay in Kansas.
David Mastio is a columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published March 3, 2026 at 6:27 AM.
