We’ve reached a point where even statistics can be bigoted and hateful. That’s why journalist Andy Ngo was recently suspended from Twitter — he reported verifiable, statistically based facts.
Ngo received the punishment from the social media site after he attempted to correct misinformation from Chelsea Clinton. The former First Daughter decided to ring in this year’s “Transgender Day of Remembrance” by spreading the outrageous and dangerous, yet exceedingly common, lie that trans people are falling victim to a hate crime epidemic.
“Since 2013, more than 150 trans people have been murdered in the U.S., the majority Black transgender women,” Clinton posted. “On #TDoR2019, we remember and honor the lives lost, hold their loved ones in our hearts and must commit to doing all we can to end this epidemic of violence and hate.”
An “epidemic,” she calls it. One of “violence and hate,” clearly implying that these trans people are all, or mostly, being murdered by anti-trans militants. Racist, anti-trans militants, she seems to suggest by making special mention of the race of the victims. Ngo responded by objectively and dispassionately relaying the actual facts of the mater.
“The U.S. is one of the safest countries for trans people,” Ngo said in his banned tweet. “The murder rate of trans victims is actually lower than that for cis population. Also, who is behind the murders? Mostly black men.”
Not a word of this is untrue. And not a word of it constitutes “hateful conduct,” as Twitter alleged. If 150 trans people have been murdered in six years, and there are about one and a half million trans people in the country, that puts the murder rate at 1 in 60,000. By comparison, the overall murder rate in this country is more than double that figure. This already conclusively puts to rest any talk of an “epidemic.” If there’s an epidemic of trans murders, there must be a double epidemic of murder in general. Which means there can’t be an epidemic of trans murders because trans people are less likely to be murdered than non-trans people.
As for race, the leftist organizations behind this “epidemic” myth admit themselves that most of the black “trans women” murdered are falling victim to other black men. This makes the murders very sad, as all murders are, but it completely destroys any attempt to turn this into a manifestation of racial bigotry, as Chelsea Clinton and her friends in the media try to do. This is the point Andy Ngo was making, though he made it far less passionately than I have here. All he did, literally, was state statistical facts. But statistical facts are forbidden when they contradict the established narrative.
In fact, the “trans murder epidemic” is even more baseless that it already seems. Chad Felix Greene over at The Federalist has looked into nearly ever trans murder reported over the last few years. He demonstrated convincingly that only four of the 118 cases he investigated could be called anti-trans hate crimes. His search goes back to 2015, which means the real “epidemic” consists of one anti-trans murder per year. If one a year can be called an epidemic, then almost every crime — indeed, almost every bad thing that can happen to a person — is also an epidemic. The word “epidemic,” in that case, loses all meaning.
The vast majority of the murders are related to domestic violence, prostitution, or random tragedy. For example, as Greene explains, one of the murders lumped into the “epidemic” label was the accidental shooting of a trans person by a friend on New Year’s Eve. Another was a trans person killed along with 19 other people in a mass shooting. The media take these cases, and the cases of prostitution and domestic violence-related murders, and pile them on top of the tiny handful of actual hate crimes to pad the stats and create an epidemic out of whole cloth. It’s dishonest. It’s disgraceful. And I’d say it’s far more “hateful” than anything Andy Ngo tweeted.