Twitter Bans Journalist Andy Ngo for Teaching Chelsea Clinton the Facts on Trans Murder Rates
Twitter put conservative journalist Andy Ngo in its version of a time out on Monday after Ngo sought to engage Chelsea Clinton in a debate over statistics regarding the murders of transgender individuals.
“Since 2013, more than 150 trans people have been murdered in the U.S., the majority Black transgender women. On #TDoR2019, we remember and honor the lives lost, hold their loved ones in our hearts and must commit to doing all we can to end this epidemic of violence and hate,” Clinton tweeted last week in response to a post from the Human Rights Campaign about the death of transgender individuals, “the majority of whom were Black transgender women.”
Since 2013, more than 150 trans people have been murdered in the U.S., the majority Black transgender women. On #TDoR2019, we remember and honor the lives lost, hold their loved ones in our hearts and must commit to doing all we can to end this epidemic of violence and hate. https://t.co/c1pYPPmpxD
— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) November 20, 2019
Ngo, who is editor at large at The Post Millennial, suggested Clinton’s spin on the facts was off target.
“The US is one of the safest countries for trans people. The murder rate of trans victims is actually lower than that for cis population. Also, who is behind the murders? Mostly black men,” he tweeted.
For that, he was cited by Twitter for “hateful conduct” and told he was not allowed to publicly tweet for 12 hours.
“Stating a verifiable empirical claim with no value judgement attached is determined to be ‘hateful conduct’ by Twitter,” Ngo said in a statement to The Post Millennial.
“The platform most used by journalists to communicate and counter ‘fake news’ also actively punishes individuals for communicating truths when they are deemed politically inconvenient.”
Writing for The Federalist earlier this month, writer Chad Felix Greene said his research showed that, based on data compiled by the Human Rights Campaign, “67 percent of the victims are indeed black, and the majority are trans women, as reported, the majority of their killers are black as well. This is true for white victims and a single Native American victim who was murdered by a Native American killer.”
Greene found the largest cause of death was an incident of domestic violence. Although deaths with no known explanation placed second in the data, deaths as a result of sex work, or prostitution, came in third.
In its reporting on the death of 22-year-old Tracy Williams, a transgender individual from Houston, ABC News found that some transgender advocates were concerned about domestic violence claiming the lives of those who identify as transgender.
“It just reminds me that not only do we have a society that comes against us to hate us, we also have — many times — our loved ones and the people that are close to us when we transition who do the same things,” said Dee Dee Watters, chair of the advocacy group Black Trans Women Inc.
“The people that we actually open ourselves up to and try to be as vulnerable as humanly possible with are the ones out here murdering. It brings you to a place where you’re always concerned about dating.”
Loree Cook-Daniels, policy and program director at FORGE, a Milwaukee-based advocacy group, said about half of transgender murder victims knew their killers.
“When I’ve looked at the stories informally, it looks to me like about half of them are intimate partner violence,” Cook-Daniels said.
“Now, that may be long-term boyfriends or it may be dates. But it looks like people who knew the trans woman as opposed to street-based violence,” she said.
To put the number of trans murders in context, the FBI has reported that in 2018, there were 16,214 murders in the U.S. The Human Rights Campaign reported there were 26 murders that year in which the victim was known to be transgender or gender non-conforming.
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