Really struck by the explicit religiosity of this #TDoR2020 display in Oxford yesterday. "Trans lives are holy."

Since it also featured this statistic I feel obliged to point out that it is totally baseless- thankfully, because if it was true that would be awful. I don't think it does anyone any favours to share alarming false statistics like this.

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2019/09/23/41471629/is-the-life-expectancy-of-trans-women-in-the-us-just-35-no

What's omitted from almost all #TDoR2020 statements from UK politicians, councils, universities, hospitals & police depts is that the majority of the 350 murders of trans people in 2020 happened in Latin America, mostly Brazil. In the UK there were zero. https://twitter.com/MayorofLondon/status/1329686216325861377?s=19

You can check these numbers going back to 2007 on Trans Murder Monitoring: https://transrespect.org/en/trans-murder-monitoring/

If you do, you'll see that the chance of being murdered as a trans person in the UK has been consistently below the population average of slightly over one per hundred thousand.

Further details here via channel 4 fact check: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-how-many-trans-people-murdered-uk

Of course, any murder is a tragedy, no less so because it happens in Brazil. However, I find it incredibly disingenuous, not to mention strange, for the Mayor of London to imply that there is an epidemic of fatal transphobic violence in the UK, when this is not the case.

Why do I care? Why can't I just do the polite thing and ignore it? I care because people are being misled and this is being used to push anti-feminist policies, such as self-identification of sex, which would be disastrous for women's rights. https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1329736137431199744?s=19

And actually, I nearly did just leave it, which I think shows how effective the strategy is. The language and imagery of remembrance makes it very difficult to challenge any of the factual or moral claims that are package up with it, even if the challenge is totally warranted.