Criminal Justice

The Challenge

The scale of criminal justice failure facing transgender Americans is not anecdotal—it is a matter of record. The two largest surveys of transgender people ever conducted in the United States—the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS, 2011) and the U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS, 2016)—document a system that routinely brutalizes the people it is supposed to protect.

According to the USTS, 58% of transgender people who interacted with police and were perceived as trans experienced mistreatment—including verbal harassment, repeated misgendering, and physical or sexual assault. The NTDS found that 22% of trans respondents had been harassed by police due to bias, 6% physically assaulted by officers, and 2% sexually assaulted by police. These are not encounters with an imperfect system. They describe a pattern of institutional abuse.

The consequences extend into incarceration. The NTDS found that 16% of trans respondents had been incarcerated in their lifetime—compared to roughly 3% of the general population. Discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare pushes trans people into poverty, survival economies, and homelessness, which in turn funnel them into the criminal justice system at disproportionate rates. Once inside, they face extraordinary danger: the USTS found that 20% of those held in jail, prison, or detention in the prior year had been sexually assaulted by staff or other inmates—nearly ten times the rate for the general incarcerated population.

Perhaps most revealing is the trust gap. The USTS found that 57% of trans respondents would be uncomfortable asking police for help; the NTDS placed that figure at 46%. When more than half the community will not turn to law enforcement, hate crimes go unreported, violent offenders face no accountability, and the data that should drive reform never materializes. The system fails twice—first through direct harm, then through the silence that follows.

Why This Matters

I come to this issue as someone who helped document these failures and who has lived them. I served on the research committees for both the NTDS and the USTS—the first national surveys to comprehensively map how the criminal justice system treats transgender Americans. That research gave a national evidence base to what many of us already knew: the system is not broken for trans people by accident. It is structured to produce harm.

I also come to this as a hate crime survivor. I know what it means to need the justice system and find it unresponsive. I know the calculus survivors make when deciding whether to report—weighing the possibility of help against the near-certainty of re-traumatization. When the USTS reports that 57% of trans people would be uncomfortable seeking police assistance, that number reflects thousands of individual decisions shaped by direct experience or well-founded fear.

This is not only a transgender issue. The same structural failures—overcriminalization of poverty, racial bias in policing and sentencing, inadequate victim services, and reliance on incarceration over accountability—harm communities of color, immigrants, and low-income Americans nationwide. Transgender people sit at the intersection of many of these vulnerabilities, which is precisely why the NTDS and USTS data reveals the system’s deepest fractures.

Criminal justice reform is not about being “soft on crime.” It is about confronting what the evidence shows: the current system makes many communities less safe, not more.

What I’ve Done

My work spans the research that documents criminal justice failures and the community-level programs that offer an alternative approach to safety:

• Served on the research committees for both the NTDS (2008–2009) and the USTS (2015)—the two landmark national studies that produced the definitive data on how the criminal justice system treats transgender people
• Created the Community Security Program (CSP) through the Gender Justice League, providing safety planning, accompaniment, and crisis response as an alternative to relying solely on law enforcement—a nationally replicable model for communities where trans people cannot depend on police for protection
• Advocated for improved law enforcement training on transgender issues at the federal and state level, including proper identification, respectful interaction, and awareness of the vulnerabilities trans people face as both victims and suspects
• Worked to reform hate crime reporting systems so that anti-trans violence is accurately documented, tracked, and addressed—closing the data gaps that let policymakers ignore the scope of the problem
• Built community safety programs rooted in mutual aid, bystander intervention, and violence interruption—approaches that address harm before it escalates without relying on institutions that many communities have well-documented reasons to distrust

Where We Go From Here

Scale community-based safety nationally. Programs like the Community Security Program demonstrate that effective safety infrastructure can be built outside traditional law enforcement. Violence interruption, restorative justice circles, and mutual aid networks produce measurable results. These models should be funded as core public safety infrastructure—not treated as supplementary or experimental. Every community where trans people cannot safely call the police deserves a viable alternative.

Expand restorative justice at the federal and state level. Diversion programs, sentencing alternatives, and post-conviction restorative processes can reduce recidivism while addressing the needs of those harmed—something incarceration alone consistently fails to do. Federal incentives and state-level reforms should make restorative approaches available in every jurisdiction.

Address the incarceration crisis. With trans people incarcerated at roughly five times the general rate—driven largely by the criminalization of poverty and survival—decarceration must be part of any serious reform agenda. That means investing in upstream systems—housing, employment, healthcare—that keep people out of the criminal justice system in the first place.

Protect transgender people in custody. Federal and state policies must ensure that incarcerated trans individuals are housed according to their gender identity, have access to gender-affirming medical care, and are protected from the sexual violence the USTS documents at staggering rates. Solitary confinement must not serve as a default response to the vulnerability of trans inmates.

Close the data gap. Hate crime reporting systems must be reformed so that anti-trans violence is consistently tracked at the local, state, and federal level. Without accurate data, the resources and policy reforms communities need will never materialize. The NTDS and USTS proved what rigorous data collection can reveal—that standard should extend to every law enforcement agency in the country.