In the past few years there has been an increase of transgender violence as well as an increase in anti-LGBTQ+ bills being introduced and enacted in state and national legislature. Since this has been a recent increase research takes time to provide there is a lack of data to discuss how these issues might be connected. It takes time to be able to collect and analyze data but there also inst a lot of discussion about trans violence in reference to gender violence. There has been a call for including trans individuals in reference to gender violence by the scholar Daniela Jauk who points out the exclusion of trans individuals by the United Nations in intergovernmental negotiations based on gender (2013). Without this discussion it has erased and silenced trans experiences creating an unbalanced power dynamic pertaining to what might be considered gender violence.
The matrix of domination is a concept that was built by Patricia Hill Collin and analyses how political domination occurs at a macro level. This concept was adapted by Laurel Westbrook and is called the matrix of violence, an analysis that aims to explain how structures such as institutions and social systems shape patterns of violence (2023). The data that Westbrook uses is an accumulation of trans murders from 1990 up until 2019; gathered from sources such as activists, mainstream news, and government sources to collect information about the victims. Even though this is a very thorough collection of documentation there are also still trans victims that have fallen through the cracks due to trans invisibility or mislabeling of trans individuals unless the trans individual was out before the murder there is no way of knowing if someone is trans. Even with trans some victims unaccounted for, this is still one of the biggest datasets on trans homicide and allows for a better understanding of how trans people are affected and are at risk of violence compared to their cisgender peers.
Scholars have discussed how inequalities between cisgender and transgender people have called for transgender violence but this does not identify why or why certain trans victims are targeted more than other trans individuals. Trans women are significantly more likely to be killed than Trans men but Trans women of color are killed more often than white trans women. The author points out that this race gap between trans homicides is significantly bigger than the race gap seen in homicides toward cisgender women. Trans women of color are also killed in different scenarios white trans women as trans women of color are killed more often in exchanges of sex for money while white trans women are killed more in nonmonetary sexual relationships.
Sex, gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and ability all shape how institutional systems work at an interpersonal level such as social, legal, educational, political, economic, media, family, religious, and healthcare institutions (Westbrook 2023). These social ideas can create a space for racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism, and ableism which in turn enables violence. Trans Homicide shows us how intersectionality plays a role in violence in a way that cis – gender violence does not.
Westbrook, Laurel. 2023. The Matrix of Violence: Intersectionality and Necropolitics in the Murder of Transgender People in the United States, 1990-2019. GENDER & SOCIETY. 37(3), 413-446.
Jauk, Daniela. 2013. Invisible Lives, Silenced Violence: Transphobic Gender Violence in Global Perspective. Advances in Gender Research. 18, 111-136.