In politics, voters are used to some chutzpah from politicians claiming credit for policies they had nothing to do with or even voted against. 

But then there’s this: a White House spokesperson is now – just weeks before the midterm elections – claiming that Donald Trump has actually “benefited” trans people, citing the number of known violent killings of transgender people. 

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“The data proves the president’s law-and-order policies have benefited all Americans,” White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Lauren Bis told the Daily Signal this past Thursday. “President [Donald] Trump delivered the largest decrease in violent crime in American history.”

“Radical Democrats want sex-change surgeries for children, cashless bail, and to abolish our prisons. President Trump and commonsense Republicans will continue to restore law and order and take strong action to protect children from these dangerous, life-altering medical practices.”

Bis was referring to HRC’s 2025 report on violence against trans and nonbinary people, released in November 2025. The report found “27 known trans people who have died to violence since November 2024.” This is lower than the previous report, which covered November 2023 to November 2024 and found 36 deaths.

There are several issues with using this data to show that unspecified Trump administration policies have protected trans and nonbinary people. First, the 2025 HRC report doesn’t cover the calendar year 2025, but the period from November 2024 to November 2025. Joe Biden was president during a portion of that time, and it’s unclear when the policies Bis was referring to were actually implemented.

Moreover, reports on the number of trans people who have died due to anti-trans violence that get released around the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR) are notoriously incomplete and sometimes include cases that don’t always qualify as anti-trans hate crimes. Many crimes don’t get reported in the media at all, and media reports are often drawn from when creating these lists for TDOR. The people compiling news reports to produce a list of people to remember at TDOR events can miss cases, since there is no central database for these kinds of crimes that all police departments report to.

Further, police departments and local media often misgender victims of such crimes, meaning that there may be many trans women who were killed but were identified as cis men in the media. 

Last, the HRC report doesn’t include anti-trans hate crimes that don’t result in death.

“The statistics presented in this report likely undercount and misestimate the true scope and magnitude of fatal violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people,” the 2025 HRC report warns readers on the first page.

Bis said that crime generally decreased in 2025, according to FBI statistics. Experts believe this likely happened because the surge in crime that started during Trump’s first term finally petered out.

“In 2020 and 2021, homicide rates surged across the country,” NPR criminal justice correspondent Meg Andersson explained last year. “So now that surge is coming down. Most of the crime analysts I spoke to broadly pointed towards the pandemic and its rippling effects on society and the world as a reason murders went up so much.”

Trump has implemented numerous policies that target transgender people in his second term in office, including banning federal agencies from recognizing trans people’s identities, banning trans people from serving in the military, and using executive powers to deny gender-affirming care and participation in team sports.

Looking at data more broadly than just a couple of TDOR reports, the Williams Institute at UCLA found that anti-trans hate crimes rose significantly from 2018 to 2024, more than general population crime increased in that period, which lines up with increasing anti-trans rhetoric used to promote a wave of state-level laws that were passed starting in 2020. Unlike the HRC report, the Williams Institute’s report was not limited to just one year or just to homicides. 

A 2025 Williams Institute report found that 93.7 trans people out of 1000 reported experiencing violence in a 2022-2023 survey, up from the 2017-2018 version of that survey.

“Violence against LGBTQ people is on the rise. It’s no coincidence that this hate crime occurred following a campaign and legislative season that saw increasingly vicious attacks against our community,” Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, then the executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE), said in a 2022 statement following the Club Q shooting. “The rhetoric and the legislative attempts to erase transgender people sends a signal that violence toward us is tolerated.”

“Members of our community deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and we shouldn’t have to fear for our lives just for living as our true selves.”