Friday 21 November 2014

TDOR in numbers

    It's Transgender Day Of Rememberance time again. Our service was last Sunday, a group of us in a darkened church holding candles. My job this year was to Blu-tac the list of the last year's victims to the wall, the line of A4 sheets went up and down each wall twice.

    There were a lot of names this year. 221 people. People like me, all murder victims.

    One country seems to appear more than others: Brazil. 112 victims. In fact the Americas don't look like a very safe place at all for transgender people. Brazil, Mexico, USA, Venezuela... The only non American country in the top ten was India, in at number 10 with 4 victims.
    But hang on, Surely Brazil and India have huge populations, shouldn't that make a difference? A few minutes with a spreadsheet and some population data from Wikipedia yielded a list of victims per 1000 head of population. Yet again it's not looking good for the Americas, the first non-American country is Hungary in at number 13.
    I am however ready to take these figures with a slight pinch of salt. In at the top is Belize, with 1 victim for 349728 people. But is one victim statistically significant, or is it simply noise within the error bars? I have to take the latter course, this tells me much less about the real threat to Belizian transgender people than the 112 deaths in Brazil tells me about that country even though on paper Belize is more dangerous.
    The figures do tell one clear story though. Some parts of the world are not safe for transgender people, and the Americas do not come out of it smelling of roses. Come on, you can make your countries safer than this!
    You wanted the data? Here you go:
Country Number of deaths
Population
Victims per 1000 head of population
Belize 1 349,728 0.002859365
Guyana 2 784,894 0.0025481148
Honduras 8 8,725,111 0.0009168938
Brazil 112 203,466,000 0.0005504605
El Salvador 3 6,401,240 0.0004686592
Ecuador 5 15,871,500 0.0003150301
Venezuela 9 30,206,307 0.000297951
Uruguay 1 3,404,189 0.0002937557
Mexico 31 119,713,203 0.0002589522
Peru 6 30,814,175 0.0001947156
Argentina 6 42,669,500 0.0001406157
Colombia 5 47,871,500 0.0001044463
Hungary 1 9,879,000 0.0001012248
Dominican Republic 1 10,378,267 9.63552007285995E-005
Netherlands 1 16,877,400 5.92508324741963E-005
Chile 1 17,819,054 5.6119701977445E-005
Malaysia 1 30,405,400 3.28888947358035E-005
USA 10 319,117,000 3.13364690693382E-005
Thailand 2 64,871,000 3.0830417289698E-005
Philippines 3 100,573,700 2.98288717626974E-005
Canada 1 35,540,419 0.000028137
Uganda 1 36,600,000 2.73224043715847E-005
Turkey 2 76,667,864 2.60865491178938E-005
Spain 1 46,507,760 2.15017880886975E-005
UK 1 64,105,654 1.55992480788044E-005
Bangladesh 1 157,345,000 6.35546092980393E-006
Pakistan 1 188,181,000 0.000005314
India 4 1,262,720,000 3.16776482513938E-006
Total
221



This data came from these places:

1 comment:

  1. Clearly the Macho Men of Latin countries are people to avoid.

    The statistics are of course skewed towards those countries who at least kept a count of these deaths, and were prepared to release the figures. What, for instance, is the picture for China and Russia? Or Africa generally? We can be sure that few countries in the world are truly 'safe', and that the global total is very much understated, and even more horrific.

    I'm attending the Brighton TDOR event next Sunday.

    Lucy

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