If you’ve been following the toxic anti-trans media coverage over the past few years, including a barrage of political attacks, then you have good reason to be concerned about the welfare of Australia’s trans community.
Well, things are even worse for America’s trans community. Back in April, queer lobby group Equality Australia issued a travel alert advising trans people or people with a history of queer activism to reconsider travel to the United States. Florida and Texas are among the worst states for trans people, due to the bathroom bans and efforts to record the details of and threaten fraud charges against people who have changed their gender marker on their driver’s licence.
To justify these laws, rich and powerful conservative figures across America have been doing all they can to dehumanise and outcast the trans community. Right-wing political commentator Benny Johnson has stated, “The trans movement is radicalising the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder.” White nationalist commentator Laura Loomer called for “the trans movement” to be classed as “a terrorist organisation IMMEDIATELY”.
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Republican leaders have also promoted false claims that trans people perpetrated mass shootings that we had no involvement in, such as Donald Trump Jr and Texas Senator Ted Cruz embracing a debunked claim that a transgender woman was behind the Lakewood Church shooting last year.
This phenomenon has continued with the recent shooting of Charlie Kirk. Even before the shooter was identified, accusations and violent threats were being made against the transgender community. Donald Trump Jr suggested that trans people were “more violent per capita” than al-Qaeda. Political strategist Joey Mannarino stated, “If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer. We’ve already tolerated far too much [from] those creatures.”
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For the record, trans people are not likely to commit violent crimes. According to Reuters, there have been an estimated 4,400 mass shootings recorded in the past decade; of those, the number of known suspects who are trans “is under 10”, or approximately 0.11%.
On the other hand, far-right extremist violence by cisgender people — individuals whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth — has increased in the past decade. Trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violence than cis people. Nonetheless, I hope cis people can imagine the sheer terror we felt as we awaited news on whether the shooter was a trans person or not.
Of course, Kirk’s alleged shooter Tyler Robinson was not “a transgender”, but he allegedly did live with a trans person who was also reportedly his lover. The most recent update is that Robinson was perhaps motivated to kill Charlie Kirk out of love for his partner, anger for Kirk’s anti-trans campaigning and deep fear for his partner’s well-being. In his words, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out … you are all I worry about love”.
The trans person reportedly had no involvement or knowledge of what Robinson was going to do, and has cooperated fully with authorities. They’ve been thrust into an international news story against their will, their name and face plastered across the world in major news networks.
Meanwhile, outlets like Fox News have used this loose connection to broadcast baseless claims such as “the transgender movement [is responsible for] many of the mass shootings we are seeing”. Here in Australia, the ABC and SBS published articles that included details about Robinson’s transgender partner, but glossed over how this information was being wielded against our community. Sky News Australia, of course, went even further, publishing the partner’s full name and face alongside a text conversation between them and Robinson, which the outlet described as “chilling”.
It’s amazing how desperate the Australian media is to maintain interest in this killing, but seemingly with no interest or care in how this story has been weaponised to attack my community.
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A report from the Trevor Project has stated that suicide rates of transgender teenagers across the United States have increased by as much as 72% in recent years. In 2023, a quarter of transgender teenagers had attempted suicide, with 10% of trans youth needing medical treatment following a suicide attempt. Last year, at least 350 transgender people across the world were murdered, with at least 32 in the United States.
This is the first year of the second Trump presidency. We are being banned from public spaces. We are being recorded on national databases. Even our flags are being banned. We are being called “creatures” who deserve “no mercy”. For all the talk of Trump’s presidency resembling the Nazi regime, let’s not forget that one of the primary victims of the Nazis was transgender people.
The media coverage of Charlie Kirk was borderline hagiographic. Kirk’s murder garnered statements from leaders in countries that many of his supporters probably had never heard of. In the wake of the killing, Australia’s US ambassador Kevin Rudd said his thoughts, as well as “those of all Australians” were with Kirk’s loved ones. If political violence is so “horrific”, as our prime minister claims, where is the outrage to the violence against my community? The rhetoric and the ghastly numbers connected to it should provoke even a sliver of condemnation from the PM who happily marches in Mardi Gras.
It won’t, though. As a trans journalist, I know how hard it is to find any role at all in the Australian media landscape. I can’t even imagine at what point the establishment starts taking an interest in the plight of my community. Even scarier is thinking about when that point might happen.
