Emailed response to PolitiFact Texas from Rep. Garnet Coleman, May 8, 2015

At question is the statement "Transgender individuals have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. The average person has about a 1 in 18,000 chance of being murdered."

We cannot find verification the number in question. We should never have used that information without fully establishing it as a fact.

It looks like this is what happened: the number initially appeared in a report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Program's (NCAVP) 2012 study on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and HIV-affected hate violence. A press release at the time from a Human Rights Campaign publicized this number, which has since been floating around and picked up by other advocacy groups, including Equality Texas. When we first got the number from Equality Texas, our normal effort to verify led us back to the original report. We stopped there. We should not have.

Further research to respond to this inquiry has made it clear that using this number was a mistake. We can find nothing indicating that this 1 in 12 number is a fact and cannot say that it is true. Even the numbers in the original report do not allow one to arrive at this number. Our diligence should have been before the hearing, not after.

The fact is that the FBI's “Uniform Crimes Reports, Crime in the United States 2000,”shows the murder rate of 5.5 people per 100,000 (pg. 14, attached). This computes to a 1 in 18,818.818 chance of being of an ordinary U.S. citizen being murdered, or 18,000 roughly, based on reported crime data. Unfortunately the rate is difficult to pin down as violence against transgender Americans is more likely to go unreported or underreported. Bias-motivated attacks on the basis of gender identity are not tracked on the federal level.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that hate crimes against LGB and transgender persons are under-reported in the United States. Some victims do not report sexual orientation-motivated hate crimes because they do not want to be identified (“outed”) in police reports as lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender. Moreover, sexual orientation- and gender identity-based hate crimes may not be perceived as bias-motivated by responding officers because of their inexperience, lack of education or their own biases. Many police departments do not have protocols in place for the accurate reporting of bias crimes. In addition to this, many hate crime victims occupy more than one out-group position in terms of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin and/or disability. As a result, hate-based attacks may be identified in simpler terms than was actually the case, or their details may be lost as these characteristics are grouped as “multiple bias” attacks in federal reporting."  (all this information is from the Human Rights Campaign). The available data demonstrates the potential for murder is potentially higher for transgender individuals in comparison to the population at large.  

But again, we cannot verify that the number in question is factual; indeed we now believe it us likely false. And the unfortunate result of our mistake is that it undercuts Representative Coleman’s advocacy for the transgendered community.

As always, thank you for keeping us honest.