At first I thought, "there is no way all of these happened in the same year." Then I clicked through a few links to check the date, and a few more. o_O
In November each year there is an International Transgender Day of Remembrance. In memorials around the world the names of those murdered for being, or appearing to be, transgender individuals during the previous year are read [1]. These lists include sources verifying the details of their murders.
Counts differ widely because some sources will discount 'gender identity' as a motive, not count a violent crime against a transgender person as a 'hate crime'. For example, the very first link in the OP quote the police as stating, “It’s obviously a man, right? He doesn’t have a female name. I am not going to get into a debate about if he was transgender or not.” Meanwhile a friend of the victim who was at the scene of the crime –i.e. knew the victim personally and interacted with the perpetrator– stated, “If a person gets mad at you for being transgender and then comes back and kills you because his pride was crushed, and he was interested in someone he thought was a woman, it’s a hate crime,” So the police didn't categorize her murder as transgender-related, even though there is reasonable evidence that it was.
Even with differing counts, the number of transgender people murdered in the U.S. this year, and we're only in August, is at a historic high [2].
Counts differ widely because some sources will discount 'gender identity' as a motive, not count a violent crime against a transgender person as a 'hate crime'. For example, the very first link in the OP quote the police as stating, “It’s obviously a man, right? He doesn’t have a female name. I am not going to get into a debate about if he was transgender or not.” Meanwhile a friend of the victim who was at the scene of the crime –i.e. knew the victim personally and interacted with the perpetrator– stated, “If a person gets mad at you for being transgender and then comes back and kills you because his pride was crushed, and he was interested in someone he thought was a woman, it’s a hate crime,” So the police didn't categorize her murder as transgender-related, even though there is reasonable evidence that it was.
Even with differing counts, the number of transgender people murdered in the U.S. this year, and we're only in August, is at a historic high [2].
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[1] Here's the list of known victims, internationally, from 2014 - http://tdor.info/memorializing-2014-2/
[2] http://transequality.org/blog/gender-based-violence-against-... , http://time.com/3999348/transgender-murders-2015/ , and http://www.metroweekly.com/2015/08/transgender-targets-trans... (must deal with advertisements and a survey, but the article itself illustrates well some of the challenges that transgender people deal with.