Anti-Transgender Ideology,Laws,and Homicide: An Analysis of the Trifecta of Violence

The Trifecta of Violence

The trifecta of violence posits that there is a direct, though not necessarily linear, relationship between violent ideology (e.g., sexism, racism, cis/heteronormativity, etc.), violent policies (i.e., laws and practices created for the purpose of marginalizing or criminalizing a particular group of people), and violent actions perpetrated against groups that are “othered” within the broader culture (Lenning et al., 2021). Drawing a socio-historical comparison between the past lynchings of Black Americans and the contemporary murders of transgender women of color, Lenning et al. (2021) argue that, just as racism fueled (and continues to fuel) racist laws which emboldened both state actors and everyday citizens to commit the brutal act of lynching Black Americans, a culture saturated in transphobia is making way for the introduction of a shocking number of anti-transgender laws that similarly embolden people to commit acts of violence against transgender people. Essentially, the trifecta model posits that “that governmental endorsement of violent ideologies through enacting, and thereby codifying the ideology into law, increases violent actions on an interpersonal level. In other words, enacting violent policies reaffirms violent ideologies in the eyes of the public which, in turn, emboldens individuals (both citizens and state actors) to take violent actions against the subjugated and marginalized groups in society with little sense of culpability or fear of consequence” (Lenning et al., 2021, p. 153). Thus, it would be expected that the more steeped the cultural landscape is in transphobia, and the more anti-transgender legislation is introduced or enacted, the higher the rate of transgender homicide we would see.

Beyond drawing a connection between violent ideology, policy, and acts, the trifecta model calls into question the culpability of the state, recognizing that the state can and does play a role in the perpetuation of gender-based violence (Collins, 2021). Indeed, violent policies are also violent actions, inasmuch as the creation, enactment, and enforcement of these policies are expressly intended to oppress a particular group of people. The current wave of anti-Queer and anti-transgender legislation seen across the United States is a concerted effort to exclude Queer people, especially transgender people, from full recognition and participation in public life (Astor, 2023). Such laws are designed to reinforce an antiquated gender binary and severely limit bodily autonomy (especially of women and folks assigned female at birth). Central to the introduction and passage of these laws is the use of ideological rhetoric, steeped in fear-mongering, that is used to garner public support in the absence of evidence supporting their necessity (see Maza & Brinker, 2014). For example, in discussing the rhetoric used around so-called “bathroom bills” (i.e., laws forcing transgender people to use bathrooms that align with their sex assigned at birth) Lenning et al. (2021, p. 162) note that, “the violent ideological rhetoric that has been used to justify bathroom bills hinges almost exclusively on the idea that it is transgender women who are the threat—not because they are women, but because they are presumed to be men, or have predatory (read: masculine) sex drives.” These violent ideological narratives deny trans women’s identity and insist on applying language which creates a false threat of “men” using “girls” restrooms. The use and abuse of this language leans into the fear-mongering used to justify bathroom bills and other anti-trans laws as being necessary to protect women and girls from transgender individuals. Politicians, social commentators, and gender-critical feminists (see Fradella, 2023) have used similar rhetoric to gain public support for a variety of anti-transgender laws and policies, both historically and today.

Since the 2016 introduction (and failure) of the now infamous North Carolina Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, also referred to as House Bill 2 (HB2) or “the bathroom bill,” there has been a firestorm of new anti-Queer legislation introduced around the United States. Some of this legislation is specifically geared toward the transgender community, such as legally limiting trans people’s ability to participate in sports and making it a felony to provide children with gender affirming care, while other proposed legislation appears to target the Queer community more generally, such as restricting drag shows and drag queen story hours to severely regulating school curriculum as it relates to gender and sexuality (American Civil Liberties Union, 2023; Choi, 2023). Given the current climate around trans people and their agency, it is reasonable to presume that they, as opposed to cisgender Queer people, are the primary “concern” being addressed by all of these bills, even those that will result in the discrimination of a broader swath of citizens. To set the stage for the present study we will now discuss the nexus between violent anti-Queer and anti-transgender ideology and policy, followed by a brief overview of some of the violent actions, specifically homicides, being experienced by transgender people.

Violent Ideology and Violent Policies

Though it is easy to distinguish between physical acts of interpersonal violence and the violent policies and laws that encourage them, the lines between violent ideology and violent policies are far more blurred. Laws and policies are tangible manifestations of a particular state or institution’s ideological values. Laws that fuel mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex in the United States, for example, are artifacts of our fervent histories of racism and capitalism. Laws that criminalize and limit the autonomy of transgender people, likewise, are artifacts of contemporary culture wars that are played out between “liberals” and “conservatives,” largely through the use of rhetoric. Despite claims that both types of laws are meant to “protect” the public from danger and harm, in actuality they are about protecting the social order, particularly as it relates to hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality (see Alexander, 2011; Buist & Lenning, 2023; Mogul et al., 2011).

Violent anti-Queer ideologies and rhetoric intersect with violent anti-Queer policies and laws from the local to national level. At the local level, one example of violent policies can be seen in the movement to ban queer-affirming books in school classrooms and libraries. These bans can be centered around individual school districts, such as Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania, the fourth largest in the state, or as statewide policies and initiatives, such as in Florida and Texas (Friedman & Johnson, 2022; Rizzo, 2023). In Central Bucks, the revised library policy allows for challenges to books, which triggers a review of the book as well as allows for the removal of the book by the superintendent of the district during the review (Rizzo, 2023). As the implementation of the policy in Central Bucks was rolled out, four of the five challenged books contained LGBTQ content (Rizzo, 2023). “Concerned” parents claim these books are “sexually explicit,” “pornographic,” and are used to “groom” and “indoctrinate” students (Rizzo, 2023).

While it might appear that these school book policies are an organic movement of (ignorant-yet) concerned parents, the Bucks County Courier Times (Ullery, 2023) reported that the policy was reviewed and edited by a Pennsylvania conservative group linked to the national anti-Queer organization, the Family Research Council, which is a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated hate group (Rizzo, 2023). Authors of a 2022 report by Pen America (Friedman & Johnson, 2022) found that across the country, nearly 50% of efforts to enact book bans in schools involved organized groups at the local and national level, including Moms for Liberty and MassResistance. In 20% of cases a direct link to an organized movement was found and in another 30% the authors found “some evidence of the groups’ likely influence, including the use of common language or tactics” (Friedman & Johnson, 2022, n.p.).

Of the 37 complaints made about school curriculum in a Tennessee school district targeted by Moms for Liberty, 14 of the complainants weren’t even parents to students in the school district (Friedman & Johnson, 2022). This number demonstrates that this issue goes beyond genuinely “concerned parents” and is instead a coordinated effort to attack the Queer community by a national network of organizations. Some individuals associated with these organizations have gone even further than lobbying and influencing the school boards, and have filed criminal charges against the boards and school leaders over books in at least four states (Friedman & Johnson, 2022).

Anti-Queer book attacks are not limited to schools, but have also targeted drag queen book readings at local public libraries and other venues, as well as more generalized targeting of traditional drag shows. For example, in June of 2022, ten members of the Proud Boys targeted a “Drag Queen Story Hour” at a library in California, with one of the members wearing a “Kill your local pedophile” t-shirt (Anti-Defamation League, 2022). An anti-Queer Twitter account, Libs of TikTok, had recently drawn attention to the event through their tweets (Anti-Defamation League, 2022). The Anti-Defamation League (2022) identified five other incidents where drag shows or drag queen story hours were threatened or disrupted following tweets by Libs of TikTok, again suggesting that the attention brought to these events is not from “concerned” locals alone. These are activists operating on a national level, using local politics to promote their rhetoric, which is largely anti-transgender in nature. Even a cursory review of Libs of TikTok’s Twitter page reveals that they aren’t deeply concerned about the threat posed by gay men (which most drag queens identify as)—rather they are hyper-focused on the way that drag queens challenge their limited understanding of gender.

In December 2022, a widespread power outage in Moore County, NC, where a drag show was being held, was caused by deliberate attacks on electrical substations, with investigators identifying two avenues of inquiry; either anti-government extremists or domestic extremists connected to the anti-Queer disruptions of similar drag queen events around the country (Salahieh et al., 2022). The attack on the substations left thousands in the county without power for days while they were repaired. Attacks against drag queen story hours and drag shows, however, are not limited to violent rhetoric and intimidation. They have expanded to include violent laws and policies aimed at severely limiting or eliminating drag performances altogether. At the beginning of the 2023 legislative session, 14 bills which would prohibit or limit drag shows were introduced (and more were being drafted) across ten states (Ruane et al., 2023). In four states, these bills would ban schools and public libraries from holding drag performances, while other laws would prohibit minors from attending or participating in drag shows (even making it a felony if they do), or would alter the definition of “sexually oriented” and “adult” businesses. Redefining “sexually oriented” or “adult” to include drag shows is intended to restrict the locations in which they can operate, such as around schools and residential areas, and fines would be imposed for violations (Ruane et al., 2023). Within these laws drag performers are typically defined “as someone performing while using dress, makeup, and mannerisms associated with a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth” (Ruane et al., 2023, n.p.). With only some of the bills specifically referencing lip syncing, they could easily be used to limit transgender people from participating in many forms of artistic expression (e.g., acting or being in a band)—a consequence surely not unintended.

Statewide attacks have occurred in Florida with the March 2022 passing of the “Parental Rights in Education” law, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by opponents, which doesn’t allow any information to be shared about sexual orientation and gender identity with students in K-3rd grade (Friedman & Johnson, 2022). The law additionally restricts what can be taught to 4^th to 12th graders, according to standards set by the state (Friedman & Johnson, 2022). In Texas, lawmakers and Governor Abbott have applied statewide pressure, through the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), for school districts to adopt a new model policy, of which two school districts have already done (Friedman & Johnson, 2022).

It is important to reiterate that the trifecta of violence is not linear, but rather interactive in a way where violent ideologies fuel violent policies and violent actions, and violent policies encourage violent ideologies and violent actions. Violent ideologies can push agendas for violent policies and laws, like we see with the policies described so far, but we can also track how violent ideologies increase following the enactment of violent policies. For example, following the passing of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Human Rights Campaign published a collaborative report tracking the increase of online rhetoric and hate speech against the LGBTQ community (Digital Hate Report, 2022). The Digital Hate Report (2022) analyzed tweets from January to July 2022 and found that, in the month following the passing of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, online anti-LGBTQ content using slurs such as “grooming” and “OK groomer” increased by 406% from the month prior. The anti-LGBTQ grooming narrative is a new form of an old trope which falsely equates the LGBTQ community with pedophilia and child molestation (Anti-Defamation League, 2022).

The Digital Hate Report (2022) traces the origins of “OK groomer” to March 2020 and a post on 4chan, which is an anonymous forum that has evolved to be an alt-right platform. The “grooming” rhetoric further was circulating on social media in 2021 by a few conservative talking heads and Twitter accounts, but really took off in March 2022 following a tweet by the press secretary of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Christina Pushaw (Anti-Defamation League, 2022). Pushaw attempted to reclaim the narrative around the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by rebranding it as an “Anti-Grooming Bill” and followed that with a tweet framing people who don’t support the bill as “probably a groomer” (Anti-Defamation League, 2022). Following Pushaw’s “anti-grooming bill” tweet, the phrase was tweeted 44,028 times (Digital Hate Report, 2022). Following Pushaw’s tweets and the passage of the bill, the Digital Hate Report (2022) also identified spikes in these sorts of tweets following a segment on Fox News discussing “grooming” and elementary students, as well as media appearances by right wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming that Democrats were the “party of pedophiles.” On Twitter, the Digital Hate Report (2022) found that Marjorie Taylor Greene had the largest reach of the small number of individuals who promote the anti-LGBTQ hate filled grooming narrative. Just 10 Twitter users, including Greene, tweeted or promoted the top 50 hateful tweets for a combined viewing of 48 million times (The Digital Hate Report, 2022).

The Disney Corporation also stepped into the political fray in Florida by opposing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it was signed. According to the Digital Hate Report (2022), tweets connecting “grooming” with Disney increased by 10,854% in the month after the bill passed from an average of 37 tweets a day to 4,053. The anti-LGBTQ targeting of Disney was not confined to Twitter or the media. Protesters, including members of the Proud Boys, descended on Burbank, CA in April, 2022 and at Disney World in Orlando, FL in April and May of 2022 to protest their “woke” agenda (Anti-Defamation League, 2022). Both the surge in violent ideological rhetoric and violent anti-Queer laws are anchored in a “protect the children” narrative that is hard for the general public to resist and which has been used over and over to get hasty legislation passed.

It is important to identify the ways that these national anti-Queer hate groups, many with local branches, tie into the national political agenda of creating violent laws and policies. For example, the hate group the Family Research Council, associated with the Central Bucks case previously discussed, employed or had relationships with many politicians, and even broke away from the religious right organization Focus on the Family due to how overtly political the work of the Family Research Council was (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.). In 2016, a Senior Fellow from the Family Research Council, Ken Blackwell, became the head of domestic policy on Trump’s transition team (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.). In that role, Blackwell focused on many anti-Queer federal policies, such as the ban of transgender troops in the military, which was announced in 2017 to the surprise of some in Trump’s cabinet and the Republican leadership (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.).

Violent ideologies and rhetoric are most easily identified in online environments, given the proliferation of social media, but their expression is not limited to these spaces. Major news networks and newspaper organizations also contribute to the anti-trans ideological narrative in the U.S. The New York Times and the Washington Post have both been identified as newspapers with anti-Queer and anti-trans perspectives and messaging (Simon & Tirrell, 2023). Media Matters, for example, found that Fox News aired programing attacking Queer people 59% of the days in the first 6 months of 2022, with those numbers increasing during Pride Month to 87% (Paterson, 2022).

The 2022 midterm elections highlight the ways that politicians and organizations whose members have political histories invest significant money in promoting violent ideologies to influence the vote of the public and, in the long run, set political agendas. For example, America First Legal, which was founded by Stephen Miller who was an aide to Trump, spent 4 million dollars on anti-trans ad campaigns in 25 states (Human Rights Campaign, 2022). Marco Rubio, 2022 Republican Senate candidate in Florida, spent the most money of any candidate on anti-trans ads, at over $7.2 million dollars (Human Rights Campaign, 2022). In total, the Human Rights Campaign (2022) estimates that more than $50 million was spent on anti-trans political advertising in 2022. Many of these 2022 ads specifically targeted transgender youth by spreading lies, false information, and attacking gender affirming care for trans children and young adults.

Gender affirming care for trans children and trans young adults has become the most recent target of anti-trans law makers and right-wing groups. Gender affirming care can take on a variety of forms of care including social transitions (also called gender affirmation), puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender affirming surgeries. The first two forms of care, which are both reversible, are the most common among trans youth and can actually prevent the need for some surgeries in the future (see Rafferty et al., 2018; Respaut & Terhune, 2022). Gender affirming medical care is not done in isolation of mental health care and family support. Furthermore, a developmental approach is recommended to ensure that the proper care is given based on the child/young adults physical and emotional development. According to the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (2023), 29 of the leading medical organizations recognize and endorse the medical necessity of gender affirming care.

In 2019, banning gender affirming care was not on the legislative agenda for any states, but by 2020, 16 states began to consider these bans and proposed bills in various forms, however none were passed (Movement Advancement Project, 2021). That changed in 2021, when Arkansas became the first state to ban gender affirming care by targeting the licensing of providers and allowing for civil lawsuits (Movement Advancement Project, 2021). Twenty-one other states considered legal bans in 2021, which included criminalizing providers, revoking licenses of providers, civil fines, penalties or lawsuits for providers, and charging parents criminally for child abuse (Movement Advancement Project, 2021). In 2022, the Attorney General, Paxton, and Governor Abbott of Texas took the extraordinary move to claim that gender affirming health care was a form of child abuse and directed a state agency, the Department of Family Protective Services (DFPS), to investigate families (Paxton, 2022). The Governor’s directive has been challenged in the courts, and currently there is no law in the state to enforce it. As of March 2023, ten states have either a full ban, partial ban, restrictions, or criminal penalties relating to gender affirming care for trans children and young adults (Movement Advancement Project, 2023).

The violent bills being proposed and passed that restrict, ban, or criminalize gender affirming care, among the many others outlined here and those we do not have the space to unpack ¹ (e.g., trans sports bans), and the violent ideology that underlines them, highlight some of the violent actions which can result. The harms which result are multifaceted. First, the lack of access to care can increase the risk of suicide, depression, and anxiety that trans children and young adults face (Rafferty et al., 2018). Second, they increase actual dangers to the public, as exhibited by recent bomb threats (provoked by Libs of TikTok) at hospitals providing gender affirming care in Boston and Washington D.C. (Venhuizen, 2022) and the refusal of federal HIV prevention funds from states like Tennessee following the far-right attacks directed at the gender affirming care provided by Vanderbilt University Medical Center (Ryan, 2023). Most significantly, we turn our attention to the increase in violent actions which can result from violent ideologies and violent policies—homicides committed against transgender individuals.

Violent Actions: Transgender Homicide

Research on transgender homicide has indicated that, even in death, transgender people are subject to dehumanization and disrespect. Although improving as of late, police departments and media coverage have routinely misgendered and dead-named transgender homicide victims (DeJong et al., 2021; Wood et al., 2019). Victim-blaming is also common for transgender victims of homicide, who are sexualized, stereotyped as “prostitutes” and drug addicts, and accused of being deceitful for hiding their “true” gender (MacKenzie & Marcel, 2009; C. Williams, 2009). The dehumanization, misgendering, deadnaming, and victim-blaming can contribute to the undercounting of transgender victims, as no official (and accurate) recordkeeping is done. When the police misgender, or families fail to acknowledge preferred gender pronouns, transgender victims can be incorrectly reported and for now, media reporting and social media reporting are the ways most of the homicides come to light. Therefore, the data collected may be an undercount of the actual homicides that occur.

Better data sources are urgently needed to understand the nature and extent of violence against transgender people specifically, and LGBTQIA+ people more broadly. Measuring hate crime data in the United States is fraught with reporting issues, including police departments counting crimes against officers as “hate crimes” in their reports to the FBI (M. L. Williams, 2021). Because our understanding of gender continues to become more nuanced, official data sources are likely missing homicides that don’t fit neatly into categories of “male/female/transgender” (Stoltzer, 2017).

Comparing rates of transgender homicide to the overall homicide rates of the United States, Dinno (2017) finds that Black and Latine ² transfeminine people are at higher risk of homicide than their cisfeminine counterparts. Race and ethnicity intersect with gender to shape patterns of homicide, with Black transgender women the most likely victims (Momen & Dilks, 2021), and Black trans people more likely to be killed with extreme violence (Teal, 2015). Despite what is known about transgender homicide in the United States, there have been few attempts to explain patterns in transgender homicide beyond victim and offender characteristics. In this study we seek to explore broader phenomena and investigate whether increases in anti-trans legislation and anti-trans rhetoric are correlated with increases in transgender homicide.

Data and Methods

Anecdotally, it is easy to infer a relationship between anti-transgender ideology, policy, and acts of violence such as homicide, as evidenced above. The present study seeks to explore whether a quantitative correlation can be established between these concepts, and whether violence against the transgender community is correlated with anti-trans rhetoric and anti-trans legislation over time.

Findings

Homicides against transgender people increased markedly in 2020 and 2021, with a trend back down in 2022 (see Table 1). This trend has partly reflected increases in homicide overall, which rose substantially in 2020; however, the number of homicides against transgender people increased faster than the overall homicide rate of the United States. Thus, the general increase in homicides alone is not enough to explain the increase in transgender homicide.

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Table 1.

Transgender Homicide, General Homicide, and Percentage of Total.

Year	Trans homicides	All homicides (FBI)	Percentage of total
2015	21	13,852	0.15
2016	23	15,368	0.15
2017	25	15,311	0.16
2018	29	14,594	0.20
2019	26	14,548	0.18
2020	43	17,815	0.24
2021	53	14,677	0.36
2022	38	n/a

As seen in Table 1, the homicide of transgender victims that we know about ³ represents a small percentage of overall homicides in the United States. In 2015, transgender victims made up 0.15% of all homicides in the United States, and this increased to 0.24% in 2020. ⁴ In addition, the number of homicides committed against transgender people remained relatively stable from 2015 to 2016, with a mean of 24.2 murders per year. This number increased 73.5% in 2020, and 119.0% in 2021, reflecting increases that outpaced the general homicide rate in the United States.

The increase in homicide victims may represent an actual increase in homicides against transgender people, or may be an artifact of other social processes. For example, it may be that greater awareness about reporting homicide victims means that the Human Rights Campaign has improved their ability to find these cases and report them. Other sources, however, support increases in violent crime against transgender people (Seely, 2021), and Westbrook’s (2023) recent analysis using multiple data sources also finds an increasing rate of homicide against trans people. Next, we attempt to determine whether the increase in homicide against transgender people is correlated with anti-trans legislation and ideology over time. As a starting point, we present a plot of anti-trans rhetoric, anti-trans legislation, and transgender homicide from 2015 to 2022 (Figure 1). All scores have been standardized to better view their trends simultaneously. All three measures have a general upward trend, which becomes more pronounced in 2020 and 2021.

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Figure 1.

Anti-trans rhetoric, legislation, and homicide over time.

Finally, we present some preliminary quantitative analysis to determine the extent of the correlation between these concepts. Examining homicides of transgender people by month is problematic for quantitative analysis, as there are too few cases in some months to provide evidence of trends. Thus, we must aggregate our data by year, which results in a total of 8 data points (2015 through 2022). Lacking legislation data for 2015 and 2016 reduces the pairwise sample to N = 6 for that variable (reducing sample size even further), thus we present this analysis and suggest it provides a preliminary examination of these issues as a starting point for more advanced analysis in the future. The correlation matrix for these items is presented in Table 2.

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Table 2.

Correlations Between Anti-Trans Rhetoric, Anti-Trans Legislation, and Transgender Homicide.

	Rhetoric	Legislation	Homicide
Rhetoric	1.00 a
	8
Homicide	.68	1.00
	8
	.07
Legislation	.77	.88	1.00
	6	6
	.07	.02

a

For each pair of variables, coefficients are (1) Pearson Correlation, (2) Pairwise N, (3) p-level.

Our preliminary analysis of yearly data indicates that the trends displayed in Figure 1 do share correlation in the expected direction. According to our data, transgender homicides increase when anti-trans rhetoric and anti-trans legislation increase as well. Thus, while the current study is exploratory, our findings provide general support for the trifecta of violence model and the need for future research.

Discussion

Our findings indicate that anti-trans rhetoric and transgender homicide are correlated and consistently increased from 2015 to 2022, and anti-trans legislation and transgender homicide are correlated and consistently increased from 2017 to 2022. While our analysis was able to provide a preliminary view into the trifecta of violence against transgender people, more data points are needed to conduct time series analysis. Overall, however, these findings are consistent with the trifecta of violence model (Lenning et al., 2021).

First, the research shows that violent ideology, violent policies, and violent actions committed by individuals are strongly correlated over time. These actions require a multi-pronged response, including denouncing violence against the trans community by public officials, the media, and activist organizations. In addition, when violence does occur, there must be a strong response by the criminal legal system. Prosecutors must charge individuals who commit violence immediately, and add enhancements for violent crimes, such as hate crime legislation. The recognition that most transgender victims of violent crime are Black, transfeminine people speaks to the vital role that intersectional perspectives play in understanding these crimes (Westbrook, 2022). Motivations for violence can be rooted in transphobia, homophobia, racism, or (likely) all of the above. Also, transgender people are more likely to experience family rejection and subsequent homelessness than cisgender people, as well as discrimination in the workforce, and sometimes turn to illegal economies to survive, such as sex work (Masa et al. 2023). These high-risk behaviors increase the risk of violent assault, so the decriminalization and/or regulation of sex work may help reduce the danger that these occupations pose for transgender people (Westbrook, 2022). Finally, enhancing opportunities for legal employment can reduce the pressure for some transgender people to resort to survival crimes. This can be done, in part, by strengthening legal protections for transgender people (Romero et al., 2020).

Second, it is important to reiterate that the policies discussed here are themselves violent. Voters and politicians need to push back against the many forms of anti-trans legislation being rushed in across the country. Significantly, both those that do and do not support such legislation must be educated about the misinformation and violent rhetoric which underlie the belief that these policies are necessary. Education on these issues must recognize that anti-trans bills fall into several specific groups: schools/education, legal identification, medicine/healthcare, youth athletics, use of public facilities, drag performances, and removal of legal protections against discrimination (Track Trans Legislation, 2023). Counter-messaging can be a valuable tool to oppose transphobic rhetoric. For example, communicating that access to gender affirming health care benefits both transgender and cisgender people, or that most drag bans would also prevent cisgender people from performing Shakespeare authentically, can point out the hypocrisy in many of these laws (Schall & Moses, 2023).

Lastly, addressing violent ideologies is necessary to reduce violent actions and policies. Tempering violent ideologies and rhetoric is not an easy task, but historical and contemporary examples demonstrate its necessity. Civic leaders, the media and even celebrities can denounce violent rhetoric on multiple platforms. In the age of social media, these businesses can take a bigger role in denouncing and censoring violent rhetoric on their platforms, or at the very least honor the community standards they profess to hold. Anti-trans rhetoric provides fuel for the many violent incidents against trans individuals which have been documented, thus playing a key role in their prevention as well. Importantly, our results show the interrelationship between the elements of the trifecta, which in turn shows the need to address these elements holistically in order to have an impact on the reduction of any violence against the trans community.

Future research needed to expand upon the measures identified here and additional areas of inquiry are recommended to further investigate the strength of the trifecta’s application. For example, the trifecta of violence model may also provide explanatory power for the increased violence against AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islanders), Indigenous American and immigrant communities. In each community, historical and current examples of the three elements of the trifecta of violence exist. Another avenue for future research may be to extend the analysis to document the violent actions of the state in the trifecta. We have already discussed how state policies themselves are violent (direct forms of state-violence), but the state is also responsible for indirect state violence and harms, akin to the violent actions, which need to be investigated (Collins, 2021).

Conclusion

Understanding the trifecta of violence can be an avenue to resisting and changing the harmful ideologies and laws discussed here. Stephanie Houston, for example, whose daughter Muhlaysia Booker (a Black trans woman) was murdered in Dallas, Texas in 2019, used her daughter’s death as a catalyst for addressing the many barriers that trans people, especially trans women of color, face. In announcing the launch of the Muhlaysia Booker Foundation, Houston said, “I have chosen to be proactive rather than reactive in helping to save these young women. The brutal assault and murder of my daughter will forever leave a hole in my heart, but it will also serve as motivation for myself and others to fight the current government agenda against transgender women and the increasing acts of violence” (Dallas Voice, 2019).

Ms. Houston’s words illuminate the connections between those spouting the anti-trans rhetoric and the anti-trans policies and laws we have discussed, and the need to stand up collectively against them. Recent disclosures of emails between lawmakers and anti-trans activists (Pauly, 2023) further demonstrate the need for the trifecta to shine a light on the mechanisms which lead to violent actions. In one of the leaked emails, Representative Fred Deutsch (R) of South Dakota sent the text of his bill that would “make it a felony for doctors to give transgender children under 16 gender-affirming medical care” to more than a dozen anti-trans activists, doctors, and lawyers (Pauly, 2023, n.p.). He warned them, “. . . this will be an uphill battle when we get to session . . . As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the better” (Pauly, 2023, n.p., emphasis added).

What the findings discussed here in particular, and the trifecta of violence in general, show is that violent ideologies, violent policies and violent actions are created and perpetuated by individuals and groups, and therefore, in solidarity, can be combated and undone by collective action as well. At her funeral, Muhlaysia Booker’s mother said that she “had many fights. Muhlaysia didn’t start trouble, but she would finish it. . . . She just always had to defend, defend, defend, defend” (Morgan-Smith, 2019). The trifecta of violence is so intricately woven and deeply entrenched in our society that trans people alone can no longer “defend, defend, defend, defend” themselves from harm, from everyday discrimination to fatal violence, alone. As this research shows, the trifecta can be used as an explanatory model, but also perhaps a predictive one, signaling the need for a call to action by illuminating the ideologies and laws which must be dismantled with the same fervor and coordination with which they are propagated.