Boston Globe op-ed says violence against transgender people is 'going down' despite activist claims

The Boston Globe published an opinion piece on Tuesday declaring that violence against transgender people was "going down" under President Donald Trump, contrary to warnings from transgender advocacy groups.

The article, written by former USA Today columnist David Mastio , cited statistics from Advocates for Trans Equality and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) that Mastio said showed substantial declines in recorded violent deaths in recent years.

Despite this, Mastio noted that the organizations have continued warning about violence against transgender people.

"Advocacy groups insist the data is incomplete and shouldn’t be used to draw any conclusions about the prevalence of anti-trans violence," Mastio wrote.

"That’s due, they say, to the bigotry of families and authorities who misname and misgender the victims, making it hard to discern from public records how many transgender people are dying." MOTHER JONES' WNBA 'TRANS PANIC' STORY SHOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ACTIVISM MASQUERADES AS JOURNALISM The article's headline read, "In Trump’s America, violence against transgender people isn’t going up — it’s going down." He continued, "Still it’s hard to imagine that as awareness about the transgender community has grown, misgendering and pronoun-swapping have become more common in police reports and news accounts than they were a decade ago, when another prominent LGBTQ organization, the Human Rights Campaign, began publishing its own numbers on violence against transgender people.

The HRC tallies, too, find a declining number of violent transgender deaths to mourn.

The group found a peak in 2021 of 47 deaths falling to 27 last year.

HRC described that 40 percent drop as an 'ongoing onslaught of violence.'" Mastio wrote, "But despite a hostile Trump administration and a barrage of anti-trans legislation across the country, the number of violent deaths the group documents has fallen nearly 50 percent from 53 in 2023 to 27 in 2025." Mastio also cited a report from the Manhattan Institute, which asserted that the transgender population actually has a lower murder rate than the population as a whole.

He added that the HRC did not respond to a request for comment when asked to rebut the report.

The report was written by Vincent Lundgren and Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright.

Fox News Digital reached out to the HRC for comment.

The Advocates for Trans Equality told Fox News Digital that a "dip in one datapoint" does not suggest that transgender people are any safer today.

DOUG SCHOEN: WHY DEMOCRATS CANNOT BREAK FREE FROM THE FAR LEFT’S TRANSGENDER DEMANDS "Anyone claiming trans people are safer today under the Trump administration is ignoring what’s happening.