How bad is the epidemic of violence against transgender women? It's hard to know. - Vox

But are these murders a growing epidemic? The answer, worryingly, is we don't know. Local, state, and federal governments don't collect much data on trans populations or violence against them, which means the 21 deaths we know about are — at best — a bare minimum, and it's unclear how big of a problem those deaths signify.

"There's very little data on violence against transgender women of color," Chai Jindasurat, the co-director of community organizing and public advocacy at the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), told me. "There's so much data that needs to be collected for us to make the case that we know we can and should be making to policymakers about why this issue is so important."
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That's important, because if we don't know exactly how many trans people are in the US, we can't figure out the rates of violence they face. And further demographic breakdowns could give more insight into who, exactly, is more likely to face violence — whether, for example, trans women of color are at greater risk.

But we also don't know how many trans people are victimized by violence each year. The biggest issue is that trans people often aren't correctly identified by authorities. If a homicide victim has a penis, police will assume that person is a man. If a victim has a vagina, police will assume that person is a woman. That's it. Police will rarely question if the victim identified differently — at least until family, friends, and media bring it up. (As one example of how bad this can be, the Advocate, an LGBTQ news outlet, reported that one woman, Jasmine Collins, wasn't identified as trans for two months.)

How bad is the epidemic of violence against transgender women? It's hard to know. - Vox