This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Are transgender people more likely to kill or be killed? This is the question that sociologist Professor Michael Biggs pondered as he observed a vigil in central Oxford. In March 2024, he watched around 50 students gathered outside the university’s Radcliffe Camera to mourn a stranger who had died thousands of miles away. They had never met Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old from Oklahoma who had taken her own life. Yet they lit candles, laid flowers and recited poems, convinced they were honouring a victim of institutional transphobia.
Had Benedict not identified as non-binary, her suicide would have been regarded as a local tragedy. Instead, it was framed as a consequence of anti-trans bullying, based on nothing more than the fact she had been involved in a fight with some girls at school earlier in the day.
Across the United States, more than 350 organisations and public figures signed a letter accusing Republican politicians of “foster[ing] a culture of violence and hate against the 2SLGBTQI+ community” that led to her death. Four thousand miles away, the co-chair of Oxford Student Union’s LGBTQ+ campaign went further, declaring that Benedict had been “murdered for being trans”.
Professor Biggs was struck by the dissonance and dishonesty. A suicide on another continent was recast as political violence. Yet an actual murder in the same city, committed by a member of the “queer community”, attracted no heartfelt poems or flowers.
Trans vulnerability has entranced
Days earlier, at a court less than half a mile away, Scarlet Blake, a man who identified as a transwoman, had been convicted of murder. He had also livestreamed himself torturing a cat. Under guidance aimed at avoiding offence, the BBC initially reported the murderer as a woman.
Biggs says he “began to think that the progressive view of transgender people only as victims needed scrutiny” and set out to investigate the ratio of transgender homicide victims to perpetrators in Britain. Because statistical comparisons of ratios are challenging, especially with small numbers, he worked with Dr Ace North of the University of Oxford’s department of Biology.
Dr North was prompted to collaborate after noticing that, in his workplace, the idea was constantly reinforced that transgender people were frequent victims, an assertion that “piqued my curiosity to test the accuracy of the underlying claims”. To account for the uncertainty arising from small sample sizes, the researchers applied a statistical model to estimate a range for the true ratio of victims to perpetrators in this group. “We found,” says North, “that trans-identifying males were more often perpetrators than victims of homicide during the study period [2000-2025].”
In total, there were 11 trans victims and 19 trans perpetrators of homicide — or 14 excluding those who began to identify as trans once in prison. Of the 11 victims, only the widely reported killing in 2023 of the teenager, Brianna Ghey, involved a female assailant; the rest were killed by men. No women who identified as trans were murdered over the same period. As with the broader population, men were more likely to be killed and to kill. North explains, “We thus arrived at a conclusion that directly challenges the victimhood narrative: transwomen follow a male-typical pattern of violence.”
As for the murder victims, at least four were engaged in prostitution, three of whom were murdered by clients. Two others were killed by men they had met online and one by another trans-identified male.
None of this lessens the pain felt by families and loved ones of murder victims. But it is inaccurate to suggest that they died because of transphobia or that identifying as trans increases the risk of being murdered.
The researchers found this was not reflected in the coverage. The BBC in particular published more than four times as many articles on transgender victims as on perpetrators, “contributing to perceptions of exceptional vulnerability”.
Yet the persistent perception of trans vulnerability has entranced everyone from television producers to politicians. It even has its own calendar of mourning, a cycle of grievance that runs through Trans Day of Visibility (31 March), Pronouns Day (21 October), Transgender Awareness Week (13-19 November) and the holy month of Pride (June).
Over the past decade, councils have solemnly raised their trans flags for Trans Day of Remembrance (20 November). London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has been particularly assiduous about displaying his solidarity with the trans community, announcing on social media in 2023, “On Transgender Day of Remembrance, we honour the lives taken by anti-trans hate crimes.”
Thankfully, there are vanishingly few British deaths to mark. The public messaging, however, implies otherwise. In schools, children are taught that the cross-dressing, drug-addicted male prostitutes Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson were pioneering transwomen activists who led the Stonewall riots. There is no escape even outside institutions. For the past 18 months, the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square has displayed a cube of 726 pseudo-death masks of trans and non-binary people. The artist, Teresa Margolles, says her work highlights the vulnerability of the trans community.
Mainstream trans activism has now taken on the trappings of a death cult. At protests, signs calling for the arming of “Trans Kids” are waved and mock guillotines paraded. Ideological opponents, most notably J.K. Rowling, are threatened with violence. Meanwhile, the militant direct action group Bash Back! has engaged in a campaign of intimidation, hacking websites and vandalising buildings, claiming: “All of our targets have blood on their hands. We refuse to let them wash it off in peace. Welcome to a new era of trans rage.”
Groups such as Trans Kids Deserve Better daub slogans on cardboard coffins and coordinate “die ins”. It has become routine to accuse politicians who oppose the prescription of puberty blockers of “killing trans kids”. Previous research by Biggs in the peer-reviewed journal Archives of Sexual Behavior showed there is no robust evidence that halting puberty reduces suicidal ideation. But evidence has not swayed the young activists.
The words of Elliot (Riz) Possnett encapsulate this Manichaean, apocalyptic fervour. At Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera, Possnett, who previously glued herself to the debating chamber floor of the Oxford Union in 2023 whilst wearing a “no more dead trans kids” T-shirt to protest against a visit by Professor Kathleen Stock, read a poem declaring:
“I’m going to live out of spite. [Queer care] is the courage to love and be loved, it’s the wisdom to remain vigilant. Be ready to fight for your life.”
Thankfully, the privately educated Oxford student’s “spite” appears to be mainaining her in rude health.
Despite being as safe as any other group, these activists sincerely believe, or want to believe, that they are at risk and, consequently, must wage a one-sided war against reality and all who inhabit it. From celebrities parading in “protect trans kids” T-shirts to politicians who have disgracefully invoked the spectre of the Holocaust, the message has been relentless: the wider world hates you and wants you dead.
Groups such as Stonewall have reinforced this narrative, warning that trans people face “profound levels of discrimination and hate crime”. Taken together, it amounts to a worldview in which ordinary political disagreement is recast as existential danger, and reality itself becomes something to be resisted rather than reckoned with. As any fan of comics knows, you’re not a proper superhero until you’ve found a nemesis.
Given all this, it is hard not to feel a flicker of sympathy for these uncomfortably comfortable students, yearning for a cause. They will not be conscripted, nor are they likely to face death in childbirth. Social progress has done to civil rights campaigns what cheap travel and mass university education did to the gap year: once-remote frontiers now resound to the braying of middle-class backpackers.
The myth of trans vulnerability runs deeper than youthful cause-seeking, dim-witted public figures or the financially savvy pivot of lobby groups from gay rights to trans ideology. For some men who identify as women, the belief in their own vulnerability is a part of their identity and central to their fetish.
Spend any time in the more lurid corners of the internet and the desire to be vulnerable will be waved in your face. “Sissification” or “forced feminisation” porn is built on the erotic charge of humiliation and submission, where men are made vulnerable by being treated as “women”. And in the pornographic imagination women are sex objects for male use.
Imagined victims are sanctified and real violence is overlooked
Trans-themed content is wildly popular. Last year “trans” was the second most viewed category on Pornhub. Some heavy users come to understand themselves through the content they use, eventually embodying it. Given that vulnerability is core to these men’s identities as women, it’s only natural they react with extreme hostility when anyone dares contradict their belief in their own victimhood.
Notably in the United States, and as previously covered in these pages [A fetish that spurned a murder, November 2025], a pattern of porn-addled trans-identified school shooters is emerging. The perpetrators have stewed in a noxious mixture of grievance and sexual entitlement.
In Britain, the official figures are stark. Of the 245 male prisoners identifying as transwomen or non-binary in 2024, 151 are convicted of sexual offences, around 62 per cent. Amongst the male prisoners overall, the figure is closer to 20 per cent. For women, it is between one and three per cent.
Of around 50 female prisoners identifying as men, fewer than five are known to have sexual offence convictions. By comparison, the number of male prisoners identifying as women has grown sufficiently that a separate wing at HMP Downview, within the women’s estate, is used to house them.
Whilst I was researching this piece, yet another man who identifies as a woman was charged with murder. Aurin Makepeace stabbed his partner, Steven Rothwell, leaving him to die. In a statement, the CPS referred to Makepeace with female pronouns in accordance with their guidance, which instructs prosecutors to use a defendant’s “affirmed gender”. Even in the case of the most violent offenders, public officials will break language to protect an apparently fragile minority from being hurt by words.
From the candlelit vigil in Oxford to the courtroom, the same distortion prevails. Imagined victims are sanctified and real violence is overlooked. The story of trans vulnerability is protected because too much professional and institutional credibility depends upon maintaining this imbalance.
As Biggs and North conclude in their study: “If the extent of fatal violence suffered by transgender people in Britain is considered to be an epidemic, then the same epithet applies to the fatal violence inflicted by transgender people.”
Professor Michael Biggs expressed his thanks to the anonymous contributors to transcrimeuk.com, whose data proved valuable to his research.
