Anti-transgender hate crime reports have jumped almost a third in one year in England and Wales.
There were 1,651 reports of anti-trans hate crimes in 2018, up from 1,248 in 2017. This is a 32.1 percent increase.
The increase outpaces percentages for most other categories, such as sexual orientation-motivated hate crimes (27.1 percent) and race-motivated hate crimes (13.7 percent). Only religious hate crimes saw a bigger increase at 40.1 percent.
Despite its place behind religious hate crimes, anti-trans hate crimes were more likely to be violent offences over any other category of hate crime. Anti-trans hate crimes have almost doubled since 2015-16, and trans individuals are twice as likely to be victims of a hate crime than other members of the LGBTQ community.
LGBTQ+ rights groups told PinkNews that the figures are concerning. A spokesperson from transgender non-profit Gendered Intelligence said, “We feel that over the past year the mainstream media has contributed to a hostile environment for trans people, and trans women in particular, that may have emboldened those who have committed these crimes.”
These statistics suggest an alarming uptick in hate crimes, but Laura Russel, the Head of Policy at Stonewall, calls them just the “tip of the iceberg.”