A new analysis from the Manhattan Institute concludes that most killings of transgender people in the United States stem from intimate partner violence rather than anti-transgender hate, directly challenging the central claim of major advocacy organizations that a "crisis of violence" targets the transgender community.
The report, authored by Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright and researcher Vincent Lundgren, goes further: transgender Americans are actually murdered at a lower rate than the general population. That finding, drawn from the advocacy groups' own data, lands at a moment when those same groups have spent years building fundraising and legislative campaigns around the opposite premise.
Data compiled by two of the nation's largest LGBTQ advocacy organizations tells a story their press releases rarely emphasize. The Human Rights Campaign tracked a peak of 47 violent transgender deaths in 2021. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 27. Advocates for Trans Equality recorded a similar trajectory, with violent deaths dropping from 53 in 2023 to 27 in 2025, a decline of nearly 50 percent.
The Manhattan Institute report, as detailed by the New York Post, examined the circumstances behind these deaths and found that intimate partner violence was the primary driver, not the kind of stranger-on-stranger hate attacks that dominate activist messaging. FBI hate crimes data between 2024 and 2025 also showed a decline in anti-transgender incidents, reinforcing the broader downward trend.
Wright did not mince words about why the data and the advocacy narrative diverge so sharply.
"That's unsurprising because the HRC is engaging in fundraising propaganda. They don't care about the truth, only promoting the narrative."
The Manhattan Institute findings drew unexpected support from an unlikely venue. David Mastio, a former USA Today columnist, published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe that cited the advocacy groups' own statistics to challenge their claims. Mastio pointed out the steep drop in violent deaths and questioned why organizations ostensibly dedicated to transgender welfare would bury good news.
As Fox News reported, Mastio wrote plainly about the disconnect between the data and the messaging:
"But despite a hostile Trump administration and a barrage of anti-trans legislation across the country, the number of violent deaths the group documents has fallen nearly 50 percent from 53 in 2023 to 27 in 2025."
Mastio also offered a personal note that cut against the usual political lines on this issue. He said he has a transgender family member and expressed concern that relentless crisis messaging does real psychological harm.
"I care about trans people, and I love one in particular in my close family. What LGBTQ rights groups are doing to these folks with this unrelenting message that death is waiting for them around every corner is not healthy."
That framing, coming from a center-right columnist in one of the country's most liberal newspapers, underscored how far the gap between data and narrative has widened.
Transgender advocacy organizations have not conceded the point. Groups including Advocates for Trans Equality argue that raw murder statistics fail to capture the full scope of danger facing transgender people. They point to what they describe as a wave of hostile legislation: over 700 anti-trans bills introduced by state lawmakers across the country in the current year alone.
Their argument reframes the question. Physical violence statistics may be declining, they contend, but legislative actions and policy changes under the Trump administration create broader safety threats that cannot be measured in body counts. The logic is that a climate of political hostility produces harms, from housing discrimination to healthcare access barriers, that fall outside the murder data but still constitute a crisis.
The Manhattan Institute report and its supporters reject that reframing as a goalpost shift. If the core claim for years has been that transgender people face an epidemic of lethal violence, and the lethal violence is dropping by half while also occurring at rates below the general population, then the original claim was wrong. Pivoting to legislative hostility as a substitute metric, critics argue, confirms that the violence narrative was always more useful as a fundraising tool than as an honest assessment of risk.
The distinction between hate-motivated killings and intimate partner violence is not academic. It carries direct implications for law enforcement strategy, public policy, and how resources get allocated.
Hate crime frameworks drive specific federal and state responses: enhanced sentencing, specialized task forces, civil rights division investigations, and public awareness campaigns built around the idea that a targeted community faces unique external threats. Intimate partner violence, by contrast, calls for a different set of interventions: domestic violence prevention, shelter access, restraining order enforcement, and support systems that look nothing like hate crime infrastructure.
If the majority of transgender homicide victims are killed by partners or people they know, then the billions of dollars in advocacy spending and the legislative energy directed at hate crime narratives may be aimed at the wrong problem entirely. The people most at risk would benefit more from domestic violence resources than from another round of hate crime legislation.
Investigators and policymakers will need to determine whether existing domestic violence programs adequately serve transgender individuals, and whether the outsized focus on hate crimes has diverted attention and funding from the interventions that would actually save lives.
The report lands during a period of intense political conflict over transgender policy. The Trump administration has rolled back several Obama-era and Biden-era protections for transgender individuals, and Republican-led state legislatures have pushed forward bills restricting transgender participation in women's sports, limiting medical interventions for minors, and redefining sex in federal policy.
Advocacy groups have used the violence narrative as a cornerstone argument against these policy changes, framing legislative action as part of a continuum that begins with political rhetoric and ends with physical harm. The Manhattan Institute data complicates that argument by showing that the period of greatest legislative activity against transgender policy priorities coincides with the sharpest decline in anti-transgender violence.
Breitbart noted that the decline in violent deaths occurred even as advocacy groups ramped up their warnings, and argued that LGBTQ organizations are deliberately suppressing positive data to maintain a crisis posture. Whether or not the suppression is deliberate, the pattern is clear: the organizations tracking the data have not highlighted the trend in their public communications with anything close to the urgency they bring to fundraising appeals.
The core tension exposed by the Manhattan Institute report is not really about statistics. It is about whether major advocacy institutions will adjust their claims when their own data contradicts them, or whether the narrative has become too politically and financially valuable to abandon.
The Human Rights Campaign and Advocates for Trans Equality collect and publish the underlying numbers. Those numbers now show a population with a murder rate below the national average and a death toll cut nearly in half over two years. The primary motive in these killings, the report found, is not ideological hatred but the same intimate partner violence that devastates communities across every demographic.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether federal law enforcement agencies plan to adjust their resource allocation or threat assessments in light of the new analysis. No public statements have been released by the FBI or the Department of Justice regarding the Manhattan Institute findings.
When the facts change and the institutions refuse to, the question stops being about data. It becomes about who profits from fear, and who pays the price for it.
