New National Survey Finds 84% of Trans Respondents Have Experienced Intimate Partner Violence

New national survey data released today puts a number on something trans people and the organisations that serve them have been describing for years without the evidence base to make anyone act on it.

Eighty-four percent of trans and gender-nonconforming respondents reported experiencing intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Eighty-five percent reported experiencing sexual violence. The comparable figures for women in the same survey are nearly two-thirds for intimate partner violence and 68 percent for sexual violence — themselves higher than previous national estimates, and the reason the study’s overall finding is that gender-based violence in the United States is more widespread than researchers had measured.

The findings come from the first national round of the Violence Experiences Survey, run by the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University with the University of California, San Diego, and reported by The 19th.

How the study was done

This matters for reading the numbers properly. NORC at the University of Chicago, one of the country’s established survey research organisations, administered the questionnaire to a nationally representative sample of 2,720 people last autumn. The survey had previously been fielded at state level in California, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas; this is its first national picture.

Anita Raj, executive director of the Newcomb Institute and a co-leader of the research, described it as one of the most expansive assessments of violence conducted in the United States. The design choice that produces the higher numbers is a deliberate one: where federal surveys have historically separated domestic violence, sexual violence and community violence into distinct instruments, this survey asks about them together, and adds questions about coercive and controlling behaviour that federal studies generally do not include.

“Many people bucket violence,” Raj said. “They think in terms of community violence, family violence, domestic violence and sexual violence — not understanding that these are issues that intersect.”

That is the methodological reason the totals are higher, and it should be stated alongside the figures rather than buried. A broader definition captures more. It is not inflation; controlling and coercive behaviour is intimate partner violence, and has been recognised as such in UK and Irish law for a decade. But the numbers are not directly comparable to older CDC estimates, and anyone citing them should say so.

Why the trans figures are what they are

Eighty-four percent is not a statement about trans relationships. It is a statement about the conditions in which trans people are living, and the structural reasons are reasonably well understood.

Housing and economic precarity. Leaving an abusive partner requires somewhere to go and the means to get there. Trans people in the US face documented rates of employment discrimination, family rejection and housing instability that make both harder. A partner who controls the lease or the income has more leverage over someone with fewer alternatives, and abusers are generally accurate judges of how few alternatives a person has.

Identity as a weapon. Abuse in trans people’s relationships frequently takes forms that have no equivalent elsewhere: threats to out someone to an employer or family, withholding or controlling access to hormones, undermining someone’s confidence that they would be believed or accepted by anyone else. These are not variations on ordinary controlling behaviour; they are specific tools available because of the social position the person occupies.

Barriers to reporting. Raj’s own argument on this is worth quoting, because it applies well beyond trans people. “Most people don’t turn to the criminal justice system when these things happen,” she said. “You can’t have a criminal justice response for 50 percent of the population — that’s not going to work.” For trans people, the calculation is starker still: a call to the police carries a meaningful risk of being misgendered, disbelieved, arrested instead of assisted, or placed in a facility that does not match your gender.

Exclusion from services. Domestic violence provision in the US is built substantially around gender-segregated shelter, and trans women in particular have historically been turned away or admitted conditionally. Where trans-specific services exist, they are small and thinly funded.

That last point has got sharply worse. The 19th reports that grants earmarked for LGBTQ+ survivors were not released last year following the executive order defining only two genders, that organisations have removed resources from their websites to comply with revised Department of Justice funding requirements — requirements that have since been paused by courts — and that the reorganisation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gutted the federal government’s violence prevention arm. Prevention work, advocates have long said, is the first line cut when budgets tighten and the last to be restored.

What the researchers actually recommend

The study’s own conclusion is not about punishment. Raj’s argument is for prevention, education in schools and support services, and for what she calls community and economic responses — the things that change whether someone can leave, rather than what happens after they have been hurt.

She also insisted on a piece of context that gets lost when numbers like these circulate. Nine percent of respondents said they had perpetrated sexual or intimate partner violence — 14 percent of men and 5 percent of women — though, as the report acknowledges, self-reporting is an imperfect instrument for this. The overwhelming majority of people are not abusive. And the survey found that people who had experienced violence themselves were more likely to go on to commit it, which is the strongest available argument for treating this as something interruptible rather than fixed.

“I think that there are a lot of good people out there,” Raj said, “and we need to be raising those voices higher.”

What to do with a number like this

There is a way of reporting statistics like 84 percent that leaves a trans reader feeling like a statistic, and it is worth avoiding. The number describes a set of conditions that were built and can therefore be unbuilt: housing policy, employment protection, whether a shelter takes you, whether a police response is safe to summon, whether prevention programmes exist in schools.

Support does exist, and it is designed to be usable by people who do not want to involve the police. The National Domestic Violence Hotline operates confidentially around the clock, and The Network/La Red runs a confidential crisis line specifically for LGBTQ+ people. Neither requires you to have decided anything.

The reason to publish a survey like this is that funding follows evidence. Advocates have been describing these patterns for two decades and being told the data did not exist. It does now, it has a nationally representative sample behind it, and the full report is public. The next question is whether anyone with a budget reads it.