Hate crimes against trans people: assessing emotions, behaviors and attitudes towards criminal justice agencies

Based on a survey of 593 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the United Kingdom, this study shows that direct anti-LGBT hate crimes (measured by direct experiences of victimization) and indirect anti-LGBT hate crimes (measured by personally knowing other victims of hate crime) are highly prolific and frequent experiences for LGBT people. Our findings show that trans people are particularly susceptible to hate crimes, both in terms of prevalence and frequency. This article additionally highlights the negative emotional and (intended) behavioral reactions that were correlated with an imagined hate crime scenario, showing that trans people are more likely to experience heightened levels of threat, vulnerability, and anxiety compared with non-trans LGB people. The study found that trans people are also more likely to feel unsupported by family, friends, and society for being LGBT, which was correlated with the frequency of direct (verbal) abuse they had previously endured. The final part of this study explores trans people’s confidence levels in the Government, the police, and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in relation to addressing hate crime. In general, trans people felt that the police are not effective at policing anti-LGBT hate crime, and they are not respectful toward them as victims; this was especially true where individuals had previous contact with the police. Respondents were also less confident in the CPS to prosecute anti-LGBT hate crimes, though the level of confidence was slightly higher when respondents had direct experience with the CPS. The empirical evidence presented here supports the assertion that all LGBT people, but particularly trans individuals, continue to be denied equal participation in society due to individual, social, and structural experiences of prejudice. The article concludes by arguing for a renewed policy focus that must address this issue as a public health problem

Responding to hate crime: Escalating problems, continued failings

The need for fresh responses to hate crime has become all the more apparent at a time when numbers of incidents have risen to record levels, both within the UK and beyond. Despite progress within the domains of scholarship and policy, these escalating levels of hate crime – and the associated increase in tensions, scapegoating and targeted hostility that accompanies such spikes – casts doubt over the effectiveness of existing measures and their capacity to address the needs of hate crime victims. This article draws from extensive fieldwork conducted with more than 2000 victims of hate crime to illustrate failings in relation to dismantling barriers to reporting, prioritizing meaningful engagement with diverse communities and delivering effective criminal justice interventions. It highlights how these failings can exacerbate the sense of distress felt by victims from a diverse range of backgrounds and communities, and calls for urgent action to plug the ever-widening chasm between state-level narratives and victims’ lived realities

The Online Othering of Transgender People in Relation to 'Gender Neutral Toilets'

In this chapter we provide an exposition and critical analysis of some ways in which transgender people are ‘othered’ online and attempts to resist or challenge this. This is achieved through the discursive analysis of 1756 online comments made in response to ten YouTube videos concerning ‘gender neutral toilets’. Three themes were developed: ‘Gender neutral toilets as sites of sexual danger’; ‘Claiming victimhood: Gender neutral toilets as undermining the rights of cisgender people’; and ‘The delegitimisation and othering of transgender people’. The theme on delegitimisation and othering is elaborated in detail. It consists of subthemes concerning the invocation of nature and biology to construct transgender people as challenging the given order; the mobilisation of religious and moral values and norms; the delegitimisation of transgender people by constructing them as psychopathological; and the construction of transgenderism as a ‘modern trend’ created by media and social media. The discursive resources used in othering transgender people overlap with those that have long been used in the offline denigration of sexual minority groups. We conclude that sexual and gender non-conformity is responded to with a limited set of tropes that delegitimise and other non-conforming people in culturally recognisable ways. We note that the framing of effective resistance to anti-transgender, othering online talk is not straightforward but calls for creative, evidence-based, contextually-informed discursive labour