For years, leftist activists and influencers have insisted that the United States is carrying out a genocide against transgender people. You've seen the posts. You've heard the speeches. It doesn't take a genius to see through this one, but the left needs its myths, and this one does a lot of heavy lifting for the LGBTQ movement.
Ridiculous as it is, plenty of people believe it and repeat it constantly. That makes it all the more amusing that the debunking finally came from the Boston Globe, of all places.
On Tuesday, the Globe ran a piece by former USA Today columnist David Mastio with the headline "In Trump's America, violence against transgender people isn't going up — it's going down."
What’s even better is the fact that Mastio built his case on numbers from the very groups claiming that “trans genocide” is actually a thing. According to the Human Rights Campaign's own figures, violent deaths of transgender people fell nearly 50%, from 53 in 2023 to 27 in 2025.
I guess that’s supposed to pass as genocide? Your guess is as good as mine.
Anyway, HRC somehow described this stretch as an "ongoing onslaught of violence."
The activists have an explanation ready. Mastio wrote that advocacy groups "insist the data is incomplete and shouldn't be used to draw any conclusions about the prevalence of anti-trans violence." Their theory holds that families and authorities misgender or misname victims, so the deaths never make the tally. Right. Sure.
Mastio didn't buy it, writing that it's "hard to imagine" that misgendering and pronoun mistakes in police and news reports have become more common over the past decade as awareness of transgender identity has grown. That makes sense considering we live in an era when “misgendering” can end a career. We're supposed to believe cops and reporters got sloppier about it?
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Mastio also cited a Manhattan Institute report by Vincent Lundgren and Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright. The findings leave the bogus genocide narrative with nowhere to hide. "Transgender people are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, most transgender people are murdered by members of their own race, and intimate partner violence — not hate — is the leading identified motive for most such murders," Lundgren and Wright found.
On top of that, when Mastio asked HRC to rebut the report, the group never responded.
Wright praised the Globe column as a "shockingly sober article." He had less generous words for HRC.
HRC's silence is "unsurprising because the HRC is engaging in fundraising propaganda," Wright wrote on X. "They don't care about the truth, only promoting the narrative. Our report presenting the actual data is irrefutable. That's why they have nothing to say in response."
Speaking to Fox News Digital, Wright said he was glad a mainstream outlet finally reported on his data.
"I do hope this is a sign that the media is no longer being held hostage by activists and is slowly being allowed to think again," Wright said. "At the Manhattan Institute, we believe that real justice requires an unwavering commitment to the truth. We have presented that truth in our report, and now the media must decide whether to acknowledge it or hide from it."
As much as the Globe deserves credit for publishing the column, it is nevertheless a slave to the narrative and is distancing itself from the column.
"This is a guest op-ed. The views expressed in the piece are those of the author," the paper said in a statement. "Globe Opinion publishes a wide range of viewpoints and perspectives."
So a liberal paper printed the facts and then rushed to assure everyone it didn't necessarily agree with them. That's adorable. But the facts don't need the Globe's blessing. HRC's own data shows that there are barely any violent deaths of transgender people, and the absurdly small number was cut in half over two years… on Trump’s watch, no less.
The activists can keep shouting "genocide" all they want, but their own numbers keep contradicting them.
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