Introduction

In April 2017, Kenne McFadden, a BlackFootnote 1 transgender woman who could not swim drowned after being pushed into the San Antonio River (in Texas). Five months later, in September of 2017, Ally Lee Steinfeld, a white 17-year-old transgender teen, was brutally murdered by three teenagers who stabbed her in the genitals, gouged out her eyes, set her on fire, and dumped her remains in a chicken coop near a mobile home park in Missouri. Two months later, Sherrell Faulkner, a forty-five-year-old Black transgender woman, was beaten and found behind a dumpster in Charlotte, North Carolina. She died at the hospital as a result of her injuries. Her murderer has not been identified. Kenne, Ally, and SherrellFootnote 2 were three of at least twenty-nine murders of transgender people recorded in the United States (US) in 2017, making it one of the deadliest years for trans women in recent history (Human Rights Campaign Foundation 2018). Indeed, the number of victims is likely much higher, as some murders may have gone unreported or, more likely, some victims may have been misgendered by law enforcement and/or the media (as was initially the case with many of the twenty-nine known victims). Most (twenty-six) of the known victims were transgender women, eighteen were women of color, and at least three of the victims were shot by police.

Between 2013 and 2019, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (2019) tracked 157 cases of fatal anti-transgender incidents; 2017 was the deadliest year—twenty-nine transgender women were murdered. Eighty percent of these victims were transgender women of color (Human Rights Campaign Foundation 2018). While LGBTQ organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, are calling these murders an “epidemic,” there is no formal data set to confirm this. The data available regarding the deaths of transgender individuals are primarily from non-governmental organizations (e.g., Human Rights Campaign Foundation, Transgender Europe) that rely on media reports from around the world to track fatalities.

Official data are hard to come by for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the experiences of transgender people are deprioritized by the governmental entities and officials that produce data. Even if transgender people were placed higher on the priority list, a lack of understanding by individuals throughout the reporting process could impact the reliable collection of data. For example, of the known transgender murder victims in 2017 and 2018, 74% were initially misgendered in police reports and/or by the media (Human Rights Campaign Foundation 2018). One instance of misgendering an individual by a police officer completing a report or a journalist reporting a story, even if unintentional, could negatively impact the accuracy of data and thus our understanding of violence against transgender people.

This lack of official data regarding the murder of transgender individuals is not unlike the historical dearth of official data regarding the lynching of Black Americans after emancipation. While it is currently believed that over 4000 lynchings occurred between 1877 and 1950, this number was produced in piecemeal fashion by researchers relying on civil rights organizations (e.g., National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), reports from archives at Tuskegee University (a historically Black college), and media accounts of lynching incidents (Equal Justice Initiative 2015; Tolnay and Beck 1995). As recently as 2015, new incidents of lynching have been uncovered by the Equal Justice Initiative (2015), suggesting that even today we may not have complete data on the tragedy of lynching in the US. Like our current understanding of the murders of transgender people, the only available information about lynching comes from independent researchers and advocacy groups without the support of governmental agencies, which makes progress painstakingly slow and accuracy questionable.

Thus, much like with lynching, we may not know the scope of contemporary violence against transgender people for decades to come. Epidemic or not, these murders are occurring regularly, are having a very real impact on the mental and physical wellness of the transgender community and, as lynching still haunts Black Americans, will have a long-lasting effect on Queer communities. The parallels between problems with lynching data and data on anti-transgender fatal violence, however, are not the only similarities that these two phenomena share. Using a socio-historical comparison, we demonstrate that the experiences of the Black American community historically and the experiences of the transgender community (particularly transgender women of color) today are in many ways aligned and connected. We argue that both historical lynching and contemporary anti-transgender violence are couched within what we call the “trifecta of violence”—a web of violent ideology, violent policy, and violent actions that ultimately entangle and incapacitate vulnerable populations.

Theoretical Framework

We define “violent ideologies” as those which carry the belief that a group of people (or several groups seen as “other”) are less than or unequal to a dominant group. For example, white supremacy, as an ideology, sets one group (whites) above all other racial groups. Patriarchy, to offer another example, is an ideology that situates men as superior to women. The ideology of heteronormativity, to offer a third, privileges heterosexual relationships over same-sex relationships. Transphobic ideology, which will be discussed in depth below, privileges gender identity which conforms to biological sex, and generates negative attitudes toward individuals who are transgender or gender non-conforming. Ideology is promulgated in a variety of ways, including socialization, reinforcement by social institutions, and through the media (see Reiman and Leighton 2020). Consequently, these ideologies create hierarchies in society that manifest privilege in informal ways, such as cultural beliefs or stereotypes, but also in formal ways, such as policies and laws that benefit the dominant group.

The informal and formal manifestation of ideologies creates a social and political climate conducive to the introduction and sustainability of what we call “violent policies.” Examples of violent policies based on the ideology of white supremacy include obvious examples, such as slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws, but also include less conspicuous policies, such as modern voter identification laws or requirements. While the authors of such laws would like us to believe that they possess no racial animus and that there is no racist ideology underlying the requirements, the measures do have racially disparate outcomes. Similarly, patriarchal and sexist ideologies have resulted in policies that have limited women’s access to equal employment, restricted women’s control over their own bodies (such as birth control or abortion), and that have provided women with few protections in the home and in their relationships with men. Likewise, heterosexist and transphobic ideology have resulted in violent policies that have endangered Queer people in employment, disallowed same-sex marriage, and created policies that regulate (and threaten the safety) of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in bathrooms and doctors’ offices, among other restrictions.

While violent policies (informed by violent ideologies) clearly result in “violent actions” (e.g., slavery, enforcement of Jim Crow laws), we argue 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.

Interactions among people, including violent interactions, are entrenched in ideologies that are reflected in the larger culture. Thus, social interactions are shaped by classism, racism, sexism, and a host of other “-isms” that are produced and enforced by social institutions defined by heteronormativity, patriarchy, transphobia, and white supremacy. We argue that violent ideology (e.g., heteronormativity, racism, sexism, transphobia) justifies and results in violent (discriminatory and exclusionary) policies and laws, and that these state-sanctioned policies and laws embolden state actors and citizens to commit violence against those individuals singled out by violent legislation (Abraham and Tastsoglou 2016; Crandall Lloyd 2013; Miller and White 2018; Mogul, Ritchie and Whitlock 2011). This pattern, however, is not linear. In fact, the relationship between violent ideology, violent policy, and violent acts is cyclical, and all three impact and work to reproduce the others, making it hard to disrupt the process and to bring about positive social change.

There is a connection between social systems—such as genderism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and racism—which are imposed both socially and legally—and the role of the government in creating and enforcing violent laws that lead to violent behavior by members of dominant social groups (Abraham and Tastsoglou 2016; Lloyd 2013; Kidd and Witten 2010; Mogul, Ritchie and Whitlock 2011). While we do not contend that all violence against transgender people is a direct result of a given political climate, we do maintain that there is a distinct correlation between the dehumanization of a group of people through state-sanctioned ideological rhetoric and violent policy, and the subsequent treatment of that group by citizens who are emboldened by a volatile environment.

The clearest historical example of this trifecta of violence in the US is that of racism, racist laws, and the lynching of Black Americans—a legacy that, to this day, shapes the experiences of Black people in the US, in general, and in the criminal legal system,Footnote 3 more specifically. In our view, the most striking and appalling contemporary example of this trifecta of violence is the prevalence of transphobic ideology, a rapid increase in policies and laws that discriminate against and exclude transgender people, and the recently reported surge of brutal murders of transgender people, especially trans women of color. In comparing the historical lynching of Black Americans to the contemporary murders of transgender women of color, we can see how even when one trifecta seems to have transformed, another, often with deep connections to the first, emerges.

Violence—even that which is interpersonal—does not occur in a vacuum. Myriad variables converge at any given moment, making violent episodes more or less likely to occur, and criminologists have long been trying to isolate them in an effort to understand which variable has the most predictive power (e.g., class, education, gender, race, sex). One by one, and in various combinations, the dominant and largely quantitative approach has been to try to uncover which of these variables are linked most closely to crime and criminality, with little to no attention to the cultural, political and social contexts in which these concepts, constructions, and institutions are produced. While a marginalized subset of researchers has drawn attention to these contexts, too frequently, they are omitted from the mainstream criminological literature (Henne and Shah 2015).

Exploring the impact of intersectionality regarding these issues is integral to any discussion of women of color being murdered. Not only are these women people of color, they are also gender minorities, who are often poor and marginalized. Potter’s (2015) discussion on intersectionality and criminology argues that we must “disrupt criminology” by using an intersectional framework that is strongly influenced by Black feminist criminology. Potter (2015: 2) highlights the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the first to coin the term, “intersectionality,” and adds that “[t]he standpoint is that Black women are typically oppressed within both the Black community and society-at-large based on subordinated statuses within each of these areas of classification, and that research on Black women should be conducted based on this perspective.”

The classifications to which Potter (2015: 2) is referring include “race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and socioeconomic status.” As we look at the trifecta of violence through an historic lens, we must take into consideration the long-lasting impact violent ideology has had on minority populations in this country and how that violent ideology continues to persist and increase under the administration of Donald J. Trump. Critical criminologies—whether cultural, feminist, queer or otherwise—have attempted in their own unique ways to highlight issues regarding power—who possesses it, who does not, and how the absence of power continues to impact the daily lives of marginalized individuals and groups.

For purposes of this article, we focus on the lack of power afforded to trans women of color and how that lack of power impacts not only everyday life, such as something as simple as walking down the street, but how it bears on the entire cultural and political landscape. Calls for diversity within criminology are not new, and intersectional criminology is another step toward achieving that goal. For instance, as noted by Henne and Troshynski (2013: 466; see also Henne and Troshynski 2019):

The intersectional location is thus an inarticulable space that prompts us to reflect on how our ‘subjects’ become obscured through the disjuncture between their experiences (which we cannot know) and their representations in the form of texts, images and other ‘data’. This, an otherwise unintelligible move, prompts a necessary rethinking of how criminological tools depict a variety of subjects and persons such as victims and perpetrators (often as separate and opposing categories), the chronically surveilled, the disenfranchised and bodies that fall in between or outside representative categories.

We believe this is exactly what the current research presents—how violence against transgender women, primarily transgender women of color—is indirectly and directly influenced and carried out by the state. Through this socio-historical comparison, we highlight how this link has persisted—perhaps in different forms with different victims—in ways that are rooted in foundations of white supremacy and heteronormativity, and the powerful influence of state-sanctioned discrimination.

We begin by recapping the trifecta of violence—violent ideology, violent policy, violent acts—endured by Black people historically and today. We then offer a treatment of the current experiences of transgender people—particularly transgender women of color—which we find to be strikingly similar to the historical legacy of racism, racist laws, and lynching. Finally, we discuss how the similarities between these eras demand our attention as criminologists, how the trifecta of violence serves as a framework for understanding violence against marginalized populations, and how a lack of data perpetuates the idea that trans people are second-class citizens who are less worthy of our attention than other crime victims. Through this research, “we are motivated to produce knowledge that can be used to inform policy and practice” (Cook 2016: 335). In addition, as Cook (2016) notes, androcentric criminology of the past has a history of what she refers to as “missed opportunities,” positing that progressive approaches to criminological research, such as critical, feminist, and queer criminologies, are more likely to combat these issues than the status quo. Delving deeper into these current issues through a socio-historical lens will enable us to be better aware of these human rights violations as they are happening and allow us to draw much needed attention to them.

Racism, Racist Laws and Lynching

In this part, we demonstrate and explain the trifecta of violence using the example of racism, racist laws and lynching. The violent ideology of white supremacy and racism is embedded in the history of the US. This violent ideology has informed many violent policies, most notably slavery, but here, we focus on the violent policies of the Jim Crow era. The interaction between the violent ideology of white supremacy and the formal violent policies of Jim Crow came together to create an environment where the violent action of lynching became an informal form of social control. As discussed above, the three components of the trifecta do not happen in linear fashion: ideologies ebb and flow, as do the policies and actions connected to them. Just as we cannot understand one’s personal experiences through the lens of only one of that person’s identities, neither can we understand one component of the trifecta as isolated from and unrelated to the others.

The hostile racial climate in the US from the Reconstruction era (1865–1877) onward created an environment where white citizens felt empowered to enforce racial hierarchies through violence, specifically lynching. This “empowerment” was couched in a culture riddled by an ideology of white supremacy and supported by racist laws that were arguably as restrictive as slavery had been. Supplementing the slave codes, which existed prior to emancipation, “Black Codes” (also known as “Black Laws”) emerged following slavery under the pretense of providing guidance and legal rights for freed Blacks, but they were soon co-opted into a method of controlling them (Raza 2011). By the late 1860s, “Black codes paternalistically sought to make newly freed slaves fit within the framework of the larger society by placing them into a subjugated position—one that was eerily similar to their position as slaves” (Raza 2011: 162). Leading up to and following the Civil War, the informal slave patrols, which captured and returned runaway slaves, as well as suppressed slave uprisings, morphed into the formal establishment of the first police force in Charleston, South Carolina (Barlow and Barlow 2018). From enforcing the institution of slavery to maintaining the racist social order after the Civil War, the history of policing has largely focused on the control of Black bodies. Between 1868 and 1908, the convict-lease system also helped the struggling South with economic recovery by providing a captive labor source for the state and private prison industries, through the control of Black bodies, as well as assisted in reasserting the racial social order in the South (Raza 2011). Since the end of the Civil War and continuing to the present, the criminal legal system has played a primary role in maintaining the ideology of white supremacy.

A report from the Equal Justice Initiative (2015) outlines the ways that the ideology of white supremacy in the South evolved through stages from Reconstruction to sharecropping and other forms of involuntary servitude (based on the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception that outlawed slavery except as “punishment for crime”) to the Jim Crow laws in the 1890s. Jim Crow laws enforced the ideology of white supremacy and promoted law enforcements’ lack of response to, or at times actual involvement in, individual violent acts, such as lynching. Indeed, complicity on the behalf of law enforcement sent a clear message of state support for this form of violence. The Equal Justice Initiative (2015: 5) uses the term, “racial terror,” to refer to the message from all whites to all Blacks to stay in their place, arguing that “racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation—a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime.”

The Equal Justice Initiative (2015) reports that there were at least 4075 lynchings in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950, and that racial terror lynchings share several characteristics. The Equal Justice Initiative (2015) found that almost twenty-five percent of racial terror lynchings originated from accusations of rape and sexual assault, or a fear of interracial sex. The Equal Justice Initiative (2015) also found that lynchings were sometimes a response to minor social transgressions, such as how a Black person addressed a white person or a Black person’s failure to step off the sidewalk when passing a white person. Half of all lynchings identified by the Equal Justice Initiative (2015) surrounded accusations of serious violent crimes committed by Blacks, such as rape and murder. These lynchings echoed the fear whites had of Blacks and emerged as part of the extra-legal system that whites used to maintain the social order. Finally, lynchings existed as a public spectacle in the South—events attended by the white community that sent a message of intimidation to the entire Black community (Equal Justice Initiative 2015). As we will discuss below, contemporary violence against transgender women, particularly trans women of color, share some of these characteristics.

Garland (2005) documents the ways that Southern whites were proud of their involvement in extra-judicial violence against Black people, boasting of the lynchings and allowing themselves to be photographed at these public “events.” People would share postcards with the images of lynchings with friends and family around the country with statements such as, “This is a token of a great day we had in Dallas” and “a good day out” (Garland 2005: 75). For Garland (2005: 795), lynchings were “collective criminal punishments.” Viewed in the context of “punishment and criminal justice history, such “public torture lynchings,” as Garland (2005: 796, 797) refers to them, were “highly publicized, took place before a large crowd, were staged with a degree of ritual, and involved elements of torture, mutilation, or unusual cruelty.”

What is significant, for our purposes, is Garland’s (2005) argument that this period of lynching is specific to the historical moment, when the prior period of racial domination, slavery, shifted to the new period, Jim Crow. This left Southern whites uneasy about the emerging social, political and economic order that would replace the past: “In a process that is not uncommon, a dominant group that perceived itself to be weakened and under threat responded by lashing out at its enemies with an intensified punitiveness and a spectacular show of force” (Garland 2005: 799). Politically, whites were threatened by Black votes; economically, they felt threatened by Blacks taking their jobs; and socially, they were fearful of the socially-constructed criminal, the so-called sexual Black man, which led to the formal exclusion of Blacks from these spheres through Jim Crow laws and informally, through public lynchings. “The dominant political narrative blamed lynching on its victims, insisting that brutal mob violence was the only appropriate response to the growing scourge of black men raping white women” (Equal Justice Initiative 2015: 18). Even President Theodore Roosevelt insisted that “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape” (quoted in Equal Justice Initiative 2015: 18).

Oliver (2001) connects the social fears that whites had of freed Black slaves with cultural racism, as opposed to the more traditional institutional racism that one might associate with Jim Crow laws. In the context of cultural racism, lynching allowed the white community to demonstrate public support for the white racial order, as well as to show the next generation of white children how to continue to enforce this social order (Oliver 2001). Thus, “acts of violence generally committed by individuals acting outside of formal institutional authority” were to “maintain and reinforce the institutionalized racial status quo” (Oliver 2001: 10).

Research has also investigated the use of lynching in the South as a mechanism for social control. Corzine and colleagues (1983: 786) research on lynchings found that “substantial increases in rates occur only when Blacks comprise a large percentage of the population.” They argue that because whites were able to exert control through formal mechanisms, where the population demographics were different, such as areas which had larger percentages of Blacks in the population, whites would be more likely to resort to informal social control, such as lynching.

Smangs’ (2016) research takes a similar approach, focusing on the ways that violence between racial groups constructs symbolic and social boundaries, as well as shapes group identities. Collective actions, such as lynchings, become part of the process through which symbolic social boundaries, in this case, the belief in racial superiority, transform into institutionalized social boundaries, such as laws (Smangs 2016). Smangs (2016: 1330) argues that “the co-occurrence of the lynching era with the rise of Jim Crow was no mere coincidence; these developments were symbiotically intertwined” and that this historical stigmatization of Black men through the in-group, out-group identity process continues to have a negative impact on Black men in the criminal legal system today.

In the current social and political climate, negative and hostile reactions to #BlackLivesMatter with claims that “All Lives Matter” or that “Blue Lives Matter,” as well as the increased visibility of white nationalist hate groups demonstrate how little, in some ways, things have changed. State violence by the police and corrections continue against Black men and women, and state policies often target and marginalize minorities, such as state voter identification laws, mentioned above. Contemporary mistrust of Black citizens by the police originate in the formation of police departments (Barlow and Barlow 2018); as such, Black people have been distrustful of the police—sentiments that have been fueled, over time, by the racist policies the police are tasked with enforcing. King and colleagues (2009: 292) argue that because the legacy of white supremacy and lynching is so “deeply ingrained in culture (i.e., it dies hard),” this history continues today in those same communities through a lack of protection of minority groups. Their research has found that in locations associated with past lynching, law enforcement is less likely to comply with and enforce hate crime legislation today.

Furthermore, as Alexander (2011) argues, the similarities between slavery, Jim Crow, and the mass incarceration of Black people that we see today echo the previous authors on lynching. Mass incarceration functions to create a subordinate status based on race: it operates as an “elaborate system of control, complete with political disenfranchisement and legalized discrimination in every major realm of economic and social life,” and it contributes to “the production of racial meaning and racial boundaries” (Alexander 2011: 20). Research conducted by Garrett and colleagues (2017: 567) on twenty-five years of death sentences from 1990 through 2016 “found that across a range of measures, inertia in county death sentencing practices, or prior death sentences, [was] strongly associated with death sentencing,” as well as a higher concentration of death sentences in counties with high populations of Black residents.

Racial “othering” is, of course, not limited to Black Americans. Today “othering” by race has taken on additional forms, such as the anti-immigrant mentality that has become a trademark of the Trump Administration. For example, recall President Trump’s famous declaration that Mexican immigrants “are not our friend….They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” or his 2013 tweet claiming that “the overwhelming amount of violent crime in our major cities is committed by blacks and hispanics” (Reilly 2016 n.p.). Since taking office, President Trump’s violent ideology has even characterized formal statements by the White House, such as an article, called “What you need to know about the violent animals of MS-13,” which referred to members of the El Salvadorian gang as animals no less than ten times (whitehouse.gov 2018). This sort of dehumanizing and violent ideological rhetoric has supported a host of violent policies, such as the Trump Administration’s travel bans on individuals and refugees from predominantly Muslim countries coming to the US, as well as a continued emphasis on building a southern border wall with Mexico.

There is no doubt that the Trump campaign’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was intended to imply that the US had fallen from some high or respected perch. Based on the rhetoric described above, Trump’s message was—and continues to be—clear: the “something” is the “other” and that “other” is Black or brown. This is not to say that the only people falling into the “other” category are racial minorities: LGBTQ people have also been labeled a threat. After all, a major component of maintaining white supremacy is the promotion of values and characteristics deemed symbolic of whiteness and of “mainstream America”—namely, heterosexuality, toxic masculinity, and strict adherence to antiquated gender norms (Blee 2002; Ferber 2003). LGBTQ people, especially transgender women of color, are seen as imperiling these values, and are subject to violence (ideological, legal, and physical) as punishment for violating them. In the next part, we delve deeper into how transphobic ideology, policies, and actions—the trifecta of violence—are applicable to the murders of Black transgender women today and also reflect these legacies of the past.

Transphobia, Transphobic Laws and Murder

Like lynching, it is imperative to understand the current phenomenon of violence against transgender women in its historical context. Historical lynchings of Black Americans were by and large about controlling Black bodies, most often Black male bodies, in the name of protecting white women from them. Miscegenation laws (that criminalized interracial marriage and sex) were the states’ attempt to formally enforce white supremacy, while lynchings of people like Emmett Till were the public’s informal enforcement (i.e., violent actions) of those ideals. The case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy who was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955, exemplifies the sort of impact that the trifecta of violence has on the control of Black men’s bodies. Emmett Till was, all at once, a victim of violent ideology, violent policy, and violent action. As we describe below, transgender people, especially trans women of color, find themselves at the center of an eerily similar, and in many ways parallel, trifecta.

At the crux of this trifecta is a white racial framework that “has long legitimated, rationalized, and shaped racial oppression and inequality in this country” (Feagin 2013: x). More specifically, these policies exist within a “[w]hite male racial frame” (Potter 2015: 4) that dictates the everyday experiences of minority populations. Today, this is especially true regarding sexual minorities and gender non-conforming individuals who are forced to live within a power structure that is at odds with their very existence. The obstacles presented by these “whitecishetero” frameworks leave transgender women of color especially vulnerable to a broad range of violence—from discrimination to murder.

Much like the Black community, Queer people and their bodies have endured a long history of criminalization in the US (Buist and Lenning 2016). For most of our country’s history, masquerade laws and sodomy laws served to police how transgender people could present themselves and how lesbian, gay, and bisexual people could be intimate. Queer people have been and continue to be denied rights and protections under the law. Consequently, Queer (especially transgender) people have lived in the shadows as second-class citizens.

It was not until the last twenty or so years that transgender people gained (positive) visibility in the US—in both pop culture and politics. Indeed, the first part of the twenty-first century looked to be very promising for Queer people, especially during the Obama Administration. During the Obama Administration, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed, the US Department of Education began focusing on the needs of LGBTQ students, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—the policy regarding the service of Queer people in the military—was repealed, and marriage equality came to fruition. The list of advancements for Queer people made under the Obama Administration is impressively long and includes nearly every major federal agency. In his remarks on Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), the decision by the Supreme Court of the United States regarding marriage equality, President Obama (2015) stated: “This decision affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts: When all Americans are treated as equal we are all more free.” By and large, it seemed that millions of Americans did, indeed, have an eye on equality and that the US had begun the process of healing from centuries of racism, heterosexism, and cisnormativity.

The Obama Administration was a pivotal moment in history. While many saw an opportunity for progress and positive social change and many LGTBQ people felt a sense of impending liberation, others saw a threat to the racial order and the cishetero hierarchy (vis à vis a Black president successfully gaining rights for marginalized groups) and, by extension, “traditional American values.” This fear lead to what Gantt Shafer (2017: 2) refers to as a “’whitelash’ against ‘political correctness’” that was fueled by Republican candidate Donald J. Trump throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and that continues to unfold on social media.

Social scientists, including criminologists, have long studied the impacts of policies introduced, signed, and enforced by specific administrations, but they have never focused so much on the climate created by a specific candidate’s ideological values as they have in the case of President Trump (e.g., Bobo 2017; Crandall et al. 2018; Gantt Shafer 2017; Maas et al. 2018). As mentioned above, violent ideology can be promulgated through many sources. For purposes of this article, however, we highlight how popular and therefore accessible social media platforms are used to support the violent ideological rhetoric used to engage the institutional level biases against the LGBTQ populations, more specifically, in this case, the transgender population. Outlets such as Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube have proven to be forums for promoting homophobic, racist, sexist, and transphobic beliefs. Politicians, celebrities, and average Americans have taken to social media to voice their hate speech toward marginalized populations, using depictions of Black Americans as barbaric, and LGBTQ people as mentally ill predators. Examples include celebrities (such as Drake Bell) tweeting that they would continue to refer to Caitlyn Jenner by her former name or attorney and political activist Todd Kincannon tweeting that transgender individuals should be put in a concentration camp.

Social media has also created a forum for increased reciprocity between “everyday citizens” and celebrities and politicians. A poignant example is Jeff Amyx of Tennessee, who has had a “No Gays Allowed” sign on his hardware store’s front door since 2015. Amyx’s hardware and roofing supply store’s Facebook page is filled with anti-trans memes such as: a picture of an outhouse that reads, “transgender bathroom out of service indefinitely”; a picture of two dollar bills that reads, “if I had a dollar for every gender there is, I’d have two dollars and a bunch of counterfeits”; and a meme that reads, “transgendered [sic] people want to be accepted for who they are yet they weren’t able to accept themselves for who they were.” Footnote 4 Certainly, all of these are within one’s First Amendment rights and it can be argued that Amyx and his Facebook page have little influence over the populace. What is of more pressing concern, however, is the violent ideology of elected politicians who, in theory, represent the values of their constituents. For example, several Republican politicians have expressed views similar to those of Amyx, such as Tanne Blackburn, the Chairman of Colorado’s Douglas County Republicans, who tweeted the exact meme regarding transgender acceptance of the sex they were assigned at birth (Salzman 2017: n.p.).

Social media is not innocuous, and it can play a significant role in shaping collective consciousness and violent ideologies. Over half of Americans receive their “news” from Facebook (Shearer and Grieco 2019) and the nonprofit organization, Media Matters for America, recently found that 65.7% (over 43 million) of Facebook engagements (clicks and “likes”) with transgender-related articles were articles produced by right-leaning sources, such as LifeSiteNews, The Daily Wire, and The Daily Caller (January 2020). Most of these articles focused on maintaining cisgender spaces, namely sports, by disallowing trans athletes to compete on teams with which they identify and protecting the cisgender norm. One of these articles, titled, “Biological Male is Top-Ranked NCAA Women’s Track Star,” came from the Tucker Carlson-affiliated, far-right, white-nationalist website, The Daily Caller. When Donald Trump, Jr. retweeted the article, he called the athlete’s success a “grave injustice to so many young women” (Evans 2019; Zirin 2019). Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, Jr., and others use these media forms to perpetuate and enforce violent anti-transgender ideology through public and intentional misgendering and humiliation.

A wave of violent anti-transgender legislation, also focused on maintaining cisgender spaces and protecting the cisgender norm, has been introduced on the tails of this wave of violent ideology. In February 2018, the Trump Administration reversed protections for transgender students in public schools. These protections allowed students to use the bathroom and other personal facilities that corresponded with their gender identity, rather than their sex assigned at birth. In addition, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced that the US Department of Education would “no longer investigat[e] civil rights complaints from transgender students barred from school bathrooms that match their gender identity, a development those students say leaves them vulnerable to bullying and violence” (Balingit 2018: n.p.).

Bathrooms and public facilities have been a major focus of anti-transgender legislation in the last several years. The most well known of these bills is North Carolina’s Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act (known as “House Bill 2” or “HB2”), which was introduced in 2016 and, among other things, would have forced transgender individuals to use the restroom that matches the sex designated on their birth certificates (Gordon 2016). After a year of political and economic pressure, HB2 was repealed and replaced by the equally problematic HB142, which prohibited any local government from enacting (or amending) any non-discrimination ordinances related to employment or public accommodation until 2020 (Stern 2017). During the 2017 legislation session, sixteen other states introduced their own “bathroom bills” and twenty states introduced legislation specific to bathroom use by transgender students and/or the prohibition of new non-discrimination ordinances (Kralik 2019). Just as Jim Crow laws were about limiting the free movement of Black Americans, these laws limit transgender people from living freely and are predicated on the myth that transgender people are a danger to cisgender people in private and public spaces (Maza and Brinker 2014). Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who served as the 83rd attorney general of the US (from 2015–17), noted this relationship when she called HB2 “state-sponsored discrimination” and pointed out that “it was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had other signs above restrooms, water fountains, and on public accommodations” (Krieg 2016).

Bathroom bills, such as North Carolina’s HB2 and HB 142, provide an opportunity for perpetuating the violent ideology of transphobia, enforcing gender conformity, and emboldening citizens to engage in violence. While bathroom bills may not be about controlling Black male bodies, per se, we argue that they are, for the most part, promulgated to control those who are perceived to have male bodies. 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. The overarching narrative ignores trans women’s womanhood and instead focuses on the danger that “men” pose in “girls” bathrooms, despite the lack of any evidence of danger. Thus, the justification for violent anti-trans laws, such as bathroom bills, is to protect women and children in these “private” spaces from transgender individuals. While the discussion centers largely on the threat facing cisgender women in women’s bathrooms, no one appears concerned about cisgender men being attacked by transgender men in the men’s bathroom. This perpetuates the stereotype that men are sexual predators and that cisgender women are perpetual victims. It also endorses the idea that some men require control and some women deserve protection, specifically cisgender women. Ultimately, these violent policies serve as a formal attempt to enforce violent ideologies which punish individuals who fail to comply with social gender norms, especially if those individuals were assigned male at birth. Conversely, trans women (and trans men) are denied safety and protection by laws designed to force them into using restrooms that do not match their identity.

The arguments over transgender women in bathrooms reflects a logic similar to the Jim Crow era of the need to protect white women from Black “men.” In this case, there is a refusal to recognize the womanhood of transgender women and rather an insistence upon identifying them as men. We contend that the introduction of these laws is specific to the historical moment, yet with a deep connection to the past—a response to a perceived threat due to the increased visibility (and presumably, an increased demand for rights) of transgender people, much like with Black Americans in the aftermath of slavery. In both cases, it is women who need protection from those who have, or are perceived to have, male bodies. In both instances it is the Black “male” body that is disproportionately scrutinized and seen as a threat.

Another damaging change in legislation came in the form of a tweet from President Trump, who announced a ban on transgender individuals serving in the US military. In a series of tweets posted on July 26, 2017, Trump stated:

After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.

Although initially, the ban was blocked by four federal courts, it was eventually implemented in March of 2018 with one caveat—if an individual currently serving in the military has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, that person would continue to be allowed to serve. As indicated by American Civil Liberties attorneys, however, “the actual policy is that if you are transgender, you can’t serve” (Block et al. 2018: n.p). In January of 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that it would lift the injunctions that were issued by the lower courts, essentially greenlighting the ban during any further litigation. Much like the bathroom bills, the military ban hinges on the very essentialist notion and violent ideology of genderism—that the essence of one’s gender is rooted in that person’s sex assigned at birth and thus the acceptance of one’s sex assigned at birth should be what determines one’s “right” to engage in everyday social life.

Federal policy regarding the placement and treatment of incarcerated transgender individuals was also changed under the Trump Administration. Most jails and prisons in the US continue to classify and place prisoners in facilities based on one’s sex assigned at birth. What this means is that if a transgender woman has been living her life as a woman for decades and has not had gender-affirming (genital) surgery, she will be sentenced to a men’s correctional institution. The disproportionate percentage of violence that transgender inmates face, including sexual assault (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2013; Jenness et al. 2019), has no bearing on the decision from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in May 2018 that “while it will continue to make these determinations on a case by case basis as is required, ‘biological sex’ will be used as the basis for the initial determination, and transgender prisoners will be assigned to facilities conforming to their gender identity only ‘in rare cases’” (quoted in McLemore 2018: n.p.). There have been some exceptions to this with some jails and prisons housing transgender inmates in special units—although this, in and of itself, can be problematic and is often used under the guise of “protection” (Sumner and Sexton 2016).

In addition, constitutional challenges have already been and will continue to be heard by a Supreme Court that now includes two Trump appointees: Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch revealed his ideas about the LGBTQ community by ruling against the right of transgender prisoners to receive proper medical treatment and against a transgender woman pursuing a Title VII complaint against an employer for refusing her access to the women’s bathroom despite government documents that confirmed her female identity (Morrow 2017). On the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Gorsuch joined the majority opinion that held in favor of a Colorado baker who refused service to a gay couple, and he dissented when the Court struck down an Arkansas law that would not recognize same-sex parents on birth certificates. In his concurrence in the Colorado case, Associate Justice Gorsuch justified siding with the baker because “it was the kind of cake, not the kind of customer, that mattered to the bakers”—insisting that the cake shop would have gladly sold the same-sex couple a birthday cake. In addition to Associate Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, President Trump has nominated at least fifty-nine individuals for federal judgeships, including Jeff Mateer, who has described “transgender children as ‘Satan’s Plan’ and suggested that gay marriage could lead to polygamy and bestiality” (Sopelsa and Associated Press 2017).

In addition to judicial appointments, Trump’s anti-transgender ideology has also been evident in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). For example, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) of the HHS is, as of this writing, run by Roger Severino, previously the Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation—a self-proclaimed conservative thinktank. As director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, Severino wrote extensively about the problems of “gender ideology”—a supposed Marxist conspiracy to erase the categories of male and female (Gessen 2018). Not surprisingly, his transphobic beliefs followed him to the HHS, and he is spearheading a campaign to change the definition of “gender” under Title IX to “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth” and “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.” President Trump has said this definitional change is intended to “protect everyone,” but it will effectively deny protection to transgender Americans. In addition, in October 2018, US officials at the United Nations attempted to replace the word “gender” with “women” in human rights documents, spreading this violent ideology beyond our own borders. They are continuing to seek to remove what the Trump Administration argues is “vague and politically correct language, reflecting what it sees as a so-called ideology of treating gender as an individual choice rather than an unchangeable biological fact” (Borger 2018: n.p.).

Although the US claims to support the human rights of all its citizens, we continue to see legislation and policy that specifically denies members of the LGBTQ population the ability to obtain human agency as readily as heterosexual and cisgender citizens. Beverly Tillery, the Executive Director of the Anti-Violence Project (as quoted in Johnson 2018 n.p.), insists that.

Our communities live in an increasingly hostile and dangerous climate, after a year of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policies coming from the White House, federal government agencies, state and local sources and in our communities across the country…Anti-LGBTQ violence has long been a crisis, and NCAVP has watched the escalation of violence this past year with great concern.

Although the US may not officially sanction this ongoing violence against the transgender population as other countries do, the complacency of the US government serves as tacit support of this systemic violent ideology in a way that continues to promote disproportionate rates of murder and overall violence against members of LGBTQ communities.

All of these measures dehumanize and devalue members of minority groups and impact their daily lives. Moreover, as we contend, when the leaders of the world support the dehumanization of groups of people, some civilians see this as condoning—indeed, encouraging—violent acts against these communities in ways that are not dissimilar from the history of white supremacy that laid the groundwork for the violence of lynching. Just as the institutionalized segregation of Jim Crow laws promoted an in-group/out-group dynamic, so, too, do laws that specifically remove transgender people from full participation in social life, either by dictating how they must accomplish basic functions (such as which bathroom they use) or whether they can participate at all (e.g., military, sports). Furthermore, in the same manner that Jim Crow laws emboldened white people to maintain the racial social order through fear and lynching, many acts of violence against transgender people (especially trans women of color) serve the same purpose. Essentially, past racial and gendered control of Black bodies continue today in altered forms. Indeed, the racialized and gendered murders of Black transgender women is another way we can see the continuation of these practices, particularly in the southern part of the US, where fifty-eight percent of trans murders have occurred since 2013 (Human Rights Campaign Foundation 2019).

The paucity of data on violence against transgender individuals is concerning. Hate crime statistics gathered by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are limited because reporting hate crimes is not mandated by federal law and most states do not include gender identity in their hate crime statutes (Human Rights Campaign Foundation 2018). Despite the lack of consistent data, we do know that in 2013, there were thirty-one reported incidents of anti-transgender or anti-gender non-conforming hate crimes, but that in 2017, there were 119 (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2013, 2017). This may reflect better reporting by law enforcement or a true increase in hate crime incidents. Either way, the data do not provide insight into other demographic information about the victims and thus into the effects of class, gender presentation, race, or other identities, further obfuscating our understanding of how the intersection of ideologies and identities operate. A study conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality (James et al. 2016) suggests that anti-transgender violence is more pervasive than the FBI data would lead us to believe—with 46% of respondents reporting verbal harassment and 9% reporting physical attacks as a result of their transgender identity in the year prior to completing the survey.

This lack of data on anti-transgender violence resembles the poor record-keeping on lynchings. Statistics on lynching were spotty, relying mostly on media reports, documentation by civil rights organizations, and firsthand accounts, but not official records. Today, we see a very similar situation emerging with the violent murders of transgender women of color. In some cases, the police and the media report these deaths by misgendering individuals and using the name they were given at birth, leaving family and friends to set the record straight. If the family does not accept the transgender person’s transition, then the correction might never be made, leading to an undercounting in official and unofficial data. Policies across the country, which make name and gender identity changes on official documents complicated, exacerbate these problems for transgender individuals, further hindering data collection by the few non-governmental organizations determined to track these incidents.

The data that do exist highlight the constant threat of violence faced by transgender individuals—similar to the constant threat faced by Black people during Jim Crow (and today). Because of this constant threat, many transgender people find the idea of using public accommodations, such as restrooms, terrifying. A 2015 study of 27,715 transgender individuals found that 59% avoided using public bathrooms in the past year for fear of harassment and violence (James et al. 2016). This fear is not baseless, as highlighted by a 2019 incident in a Raleigh, North Carolina bar, where a transgender woman was sexually assaulted in a bathroom by two cisgender women (Associated Press 2019). According to witnesses, the women exposed themselves, verbally harassed her, and touched her inappropriately. Even though the suspects were charged with kidnapping and sexual battery, the offense was not classified as a hate crime because North Carolina is one of the states that excludes gender identity from its hate crime law.

Violence against transgender people, especially trans women, is recorded and broadcast all over the internet, reaching a far broader audience than was possible during the era of lynching. Though social media sites are often used by people to spread information, they can also be used as a platform for further humiliating and dehumanizing a group of people—made easier by the anonymity afforded by the internet. For example, a 2016 study by Witness Media Lab revealed that everyday people are recording, uploading, sharing, and “liking” a shocking number of videos of violent acts against transgender people—mostly transgender people of color (Stevenson and Broadus 2016). Over the course of fifteen weeks, the organization analyzed 329 videos found on YouTube and other social media sites, such as World Star Hip Hop, Live Leak, and Fly Height. Using the search terms “tranny fights” and “stud fights,” they found that these videos received nearly 90 million views, were shared over 600,000 times, received over 550,000 “likes,” and that 39% of the videos were classified as “comedy” or “entertainment.” Arguably, the sharing and “liking” of these videos is very much the modern-day version of sending lynching postcards. The contemporary murders of transgender women echo lynchings of the past in that they frequently involve “elements of torture, mutilation, or unusual cruelty” and, in more modern fashion, involve elements of public spectacle.

Regardless of the widespread show of violence through memes and the sharing of videos on social media sites, the news media continues to ignore the day-to-day violence experienced by transgender people. It is challenging to find much information about transgender murder victims in the mainstream media, with the exception of cases that can be sensationalized, such as that of Ally Lee Steinfeld, whose death was so gruesome and shocking it made a few national headlines. In another case, a transgender woman of color, Muhlaysia Booker, was beaten in a parking lot in Dallas, Texas, in April 2019. Her attack was given a significant amount of media coverage because it was captured on a cellphone camera. The video, itself, made headlines in numerous news outlets including various social media sites and YouTube. The beating took place after a traffic accident and the video reveals Muhlaysia being beaten by a mob of men yelling homophobic and transphobic slurs. The video then shows a group of women surrounding Muhlaysia and dragging her to safety in a nearby vehicle. The video generated much debate online, and some argued that the attack was not an anti-transgender hate crime but occurred because Muhlaysia prompted the attack by her behavior after the traffic accident. Comments such as these certainly highlight the prevalence of victim-blaming and fail to recognize that as Muhlaysia was brutally beaten, anti-transgender slurs were shouted. While Muhlaysia survived this violence, a month later she was shot to death in what police are calling an unrelated incident (see Fortin 2019). Essentially, victims of anti-transgender violence, as victims of lynching were in the past, are often blamed for their victimization. Blacks were often considered responsible for the acts of violence committed against them during the Jim Crow era, such as our prior examples of Black men being lynched based on accusations that they raped white women. In both cases, the victim-blaming focuses on the individuals who experience the violence and ignores the violent ideologies and policies that drive these violent actions.

Interactions between law enforcement and the transgender community highlight another parallel between the trifecta of violence that transgender people encounter and that of Blacks in the Jim Crow era (and into the present). Nearly a quarter of transgender people report harassment by police—an experience so routine that it has become known as “walking while trans,” whereby police stop transgender women on the baseless presumption that they are sex workers—a phenomenon far more widespread for trans people of color (Grant et al. 2011). For example, in New York City, Black and Latinx transgender women make up 49% of those arrested for suspicion of “loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution” (Piser 2020). These interactions often include mistreatment and misgendering, even when officers are aware of a person’s transgender identity (Human Rights Campaign Foundation 2018; James et al. 2016).

“Walking while trans” not only highlights the historical distrust of police by the Queer community, in general, but it also echoes centuries of racist policing tactics from slave patrols to the enforcement of Black codes and Jim Crow to the phenomenon of “driving while Black.” Repeated assumptions that people of color are “suspicious persons” and that transgender women, especially transgender women of color, are prostitutes, violate not only one’s civil rights, but in doing so, continue to create distrust and invalidate an individual’s personhood and human agency. Indeed, police occupy a unique position situated within the trifecta of violence in that they exist within the larger violent ideology of the culture, and are tasked with enforcing violent policies and social control (frequently on their own with a great deal of discretion), which can lead to violent actions. In turn, the violent actions by police officers, who represent legitimate actors of the state, reinforce, and justify the violent actions by others. Reflective of the role of police during the era of lynching (specifically, their involvement in and/or lack of response to lynching), the behavior by police today can help us understand the low levels of enforcement and investigation of the violence experienced by trans individuals.

Research has found that the negative experiences facing transgender people are more pronounced for transgender people of color. That Black trans women of color are at the greatest risk of violence in the transgender community should come as no surprise, given the “multiplicative effects of several identities” (Potter 2015: 34 (emphasis in original)). Black feminist criminology has called for us to realize that intersecting identities “are shaped by larger social forces” (Potter 2006: 110). Thus, it is important to point out that not only do these violent acts occur within the LGBTQ community, but that this violence highlights the very meaning of intersectionality and the multiplicative identities of many of these victims.

Justice is denied to transgender people in a variety of ways—from discriminatory laws to their interactions with the criminal legal system—all of which culminate in a general distrust of state actors at all levels. When examining the history of Queer communities, the criminal legal system, as a representative of the state, has taken steps to control the behavior of sexual and gender identity minorities in the US (Buist and Lenning 2016). We must recognize the complexities of these experiences and the way that policy can have a ripple effect on marginalized populations.

Thus, we agree with the recent work of Musto (2019) that the answers to these injustices should not necessarily be policy-oriented. Indeed, even some so-called critical approaches have served to “extend the reach of the carceral state and, in so doing, contribute to the harms and punishment survivors of violence face” (Musto 2019: 48). As Potter (2015: 157) notes,

Policy built from an intersectional perspective is one where great attempts are made to remove stereotypical and inferior views about groups of people from theoretical conceptualization and from policy and practice. Intersectional criminology promotes heavy scrutiny of crime-related policies to assure they are nonracialized, nonsexist, nonsexualized, and simply, bias-free in all relevant ways.

As illustrated throughout our analysis, US policy, criminal justice-related or otherwise, has historically been, and continues to be, constructed in racialized, sexist, and sexualized ways that embolden state and non-state actors to engage in brutal violence against trans people. This, of course, presents us with a more difficult challenge than simply offering ideas on how to re-envision existing policy. Instead, we are challenged to question the status quo and to engage and confront the violent ideologies that support these inhumane policies, and to expose the violence that occurs as a result.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to highlight the similarities between how the trifecta of violence has been experienced by both Black Americans and transgender people, especially trans women of color. We have shown that historically and today, both groups of individuals have had their lives changed because of a web of violent ideology, violent policies, and violent actions. Reflective of Jim Crow laws, today’s violent and discriminatory anti-transgender laws reinforce the transphobic ideology espoused on social media and by political leaders. Individual violent acts that are not investigated and are ignored, as well as law enforcement’s own actions, show a similar pattern of informal state support for these forms of violence today as they were with lynching.

Following Garland’s (2005) observations regarding public spectacles, we assert that videos of violence against transgender people and subsequent social media expressing support thereof have gone well beyond the postcards of the past. If we recall and mirror Oliver’s (2001) argument, interpersonal violence against Black transgender women acts in the social and cultural environment to enforce these institutionalized policies and maintain the cis-heteronormative status quo. Furthermore, Garland’s (2005) discussion about the historical moment representing a societal shift where a dominant group feels a threat to a “traditional” way of life, as well as Smangs (2016) analysis of in-group and out-group identity process, both show how violent responses targeted at a minority group, such as transgender women of color, fits the historical pattern.

Almost fifteen years ago, Meda Chesney-Lind spoke of “backlash politics” and, sadly, we see this repeating itself at present. Highlighting these systems of oppression can result in “backlash against feminism and other progressive movements and perspectives,” including advances in civil rights for LGBTQ individuals—much like we saw during the Obama era (Chesney-Lind 2006: 6). Nevertheless, the applications of queer as well as feminist criminologies can have a major influence on moving this discussion and research forward in order to call attention to these homophobic, racist, sexist, and transphobic ideologies and policies and their tangible consequences.

In the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” While we do not want to undermine the tragedy of lynching that stains our nation’s history, and while we are not predicting a future with town square lynchings of trans people as there were of Black Americans (unless one considers YouTube to be the new “town square”), there are similarities between our legacy of lynching and the present-day treatment of transgender individuals. Today, no transgender person is free from discrimination, ridicule, or the threat of violence. Violent transphobic ideology has become an increasingly dominant and acceptable narrative, more and more violent policies are being introduced every day at every level of government, and more and more transgender people are losing their lives every year. This violence, trauma, abuse—sanctioned by the state—serves to instill fear, which contributes to invisibility and/or “othering,” which leads to an entire group of people being, at a minimum, controlled, and at worst, slaughtered.

The trifecta of violence has become clearer as Donald J. Trump’s presidency has brought about national conversations about homophobia, racism, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia. Criminology, in general, and queer criminology, in particular, would be remiss to ignore the effects that pervasive hateful ideology has on vulnerable populations such as transgender people, especially trans women of color. If one of the tasks of queer criminology is to investigate the ways in which the state has been used as a mechanism of enforcing heteronormativity and gender conformity (Buist and Lenning 2016), then the Trump Administration’s attack on the transgender community cannot be ignored, particularly as transgender women of color are being murdered in record numbers.