Researchers at the Manhattan Institute reviewed more than 300 murder cases of transgender individuals dating back to 2015. They found that 3.3% were confirmed hate crimes.
Three-point-three percent. That's the "epidemic."
Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright, the researchers behind the study, laid out findings that read like a controlled demolition of a narrative the Human Rights Campaign has been building since at least 2020. Their conclusion was blunt: "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."
That sentence does a lot of damage to a lot of fundraising emails.
The Human Rights Campaign declared an "epidemic" of violence against transgender people in 2020. The framing was clear and deliberate — conservative rhetoric, Republican legislation, and religious objections to gender ideology were creating a climate that got people killed. Vigils were organized. Legislation was drafted. Media coverage treated the premise as settled.
The Manhattan Institute study doesn't just challenge that premise. It flattens it. The leading identified circumstance of the murders wasn't ideological hatred. It was intimate partner violence. After that came sex-work encounters, disputes, robbery, and other forms of interpersonal conflict. The researchers were explicit: "This finding is not the result of one bad year or a handful of outlier cases."
One number stands out. In 2020 — the same year HRC declared the epidemic — the number of white suspects identified in verified cases was zero. The entire narrative infrastructure built around conservative white Americans driving anti-trans violence had no statistical foundation in the very year it was launched.
The study didn't come from a conservative think tank operating in isolation. As Colin Wright noted on Twitter, "The Boston Globe has just published a shockingly sober article about the nonexistent genocide supposedly targeting the transgender community." When the Boston Globe — not exactly a redoubt of right-wing thought — covers a study that dismantles progressive orthodoxy without burying the lede, something has shifted.
The HRC framework required a specific villain: a politically motivated, hate-driven attacker whose violence could be traced back to Republican policy positions. The data produced a different profile entirely — one rooted in domestic violence, personal conflict, and circumstances that have nothing to do with who controls the Senate or what bills are moving through state legislatures.
None of this makes the murders less tragic. Every one of those 300-plus cases represents a real person. But the question was never whether violence happens. The question was whether an entire political movement was responsible for it. The Manhattan Institute reviewed the cases. The answer was 3.3%.
The "epidemic" framing raised millions, shaped federal policy discussions, and gave media outlets a powerful emotional lever to pull every time a transgender person was harmed. It also, according to more than a decade of case data, had almost nothing to do with what was actually happening.
Fundraisers built on 3.3%.