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:
- TDOR data: TvT research project (2014) “Trans Murder Monitoring results: TMM TDOR 2014 Update”, Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide (TvT) project website: http://www.transrespect-transphobia.org/en/tvt-project/tmm-results/tdor-2014.htm.
- Population data: Wikipedia list of countries by population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
