New York Post
Murders of transgender people primarily motivated by ‘intimate partner violence’ — not hate: report
By Victor Nava
Published Sep. 22, 2026, 8:53 p.m. ET
Transgender people are murdered at lower rates than the overall US population — and when they are, the killer’s primary motive is usually not bias, according to a pair of researchers.
The findings, published by the right-leaning Manhattan Institute’s Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright earlier this year, seemingly debunk claims by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and other nonprofit organizations that there is an “epidemic” of deadly violence against the trangender community driven by “transphobia” and even “white supremacy.”
“Transgender people are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, most transgender people are murdered by members of their own race, and intimate partner violence — not hate — is the leading identified motive for most such murders,” Lundgren and Wright found.
The researchers investigated more than 300 murder cases dating back to 2015 where the victim was transgender.
In the cases where suspects were identified, black suspects accounted for 65% of perpetrators, while white suspects accounted for 18%.
“This finding is not the result of one bad year or a handful of outlier cases,” the researchers stated.
The report noted that in 2020 — the year HRC attributed the deaths of “our Black trans siblings” to “an epidemic of violence” fueled by “systems of white supremacy” — not a single white suspect was identified in the cases the Manhattan Institute researchers verified.
Confirmed hate crimes were only found in 3.3% of cases the Manhattan Institute studied.
“The leading identified circumstance of the murders was instead intimate partner violence,” the researchers wrote. “Other common circumstances included sex-work encounters, disputes, robbery, and other forms of interpersonal conflict.”
“In other words, the dominant pattern is not hateful white men hunting down black transgender victims because of racism and transphobia,” they continued. “It is violence between people who know each other, sleep with each other, live around each other, or encounter each other in high-risk contexts.”
The researchers also found that between 2010-2014 the transgender murder rate was roughly one-seventh what it was for the general population.
During that 5-year stretch, 3.66 per 100,000 transgender people were murdered. The rate among the general population was 25.8 per 100,000.
They found the homicide rate of young black transgender women (69% of all victims) to be “approximately one quarter that of young Black non-transgender men.”
“Misleadingly, these male victims are usually compared with black non-transgender women (females), which makes their homicide rate look unusually high for ‘women,’” the researchers noted.
HRC did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
