We’re in the midst of an epidemic of violence against trans people, shrieks Paris Lees. He goes on to say "I won’t bombard you with statistics from around the world but I can tell you that a 2014 report concluded that the average life expectancy of trans women in the Americas is between 30 and 35."
"Would you believe me if I told you the life expectancy for transgender women of color in the United States is 31?" says Kendra Allen (at the bottom of her blog she says "*Transgender activists in the US often cite a life expectancy of early thirties to mid-thirties. I am using 31 because a local activist used this number."
This so-called fact is as perennial, as pervasive, and as true (so that’s very, very, and not at all) as the equally familiar 42% of “trans youth attempt suicide” so-called fact. The life expectancy of 35 is endlessly quoted and recycled by trans activists. Munroe Bergdorf ramped up the drama further by quoting an average life expectancy of 30 in an interview in the Guardian in September 2017, and he quoted it again in the infamous #GenderQuakeDebate on Channel 4. But where does this statistic come from?
I went looking for the first place this statistic appeared, and as far as I can tell, its first outing was in an article entitled "Factors associated with healthcare avoidance among transgender women in Argentina", published in Sept 2014 in the International Journal for Equity in Health. The article's assertion that the "life expectancy of TG women is approximately 35 years (compared to 79 years in other women)" is drawn from a 2007 publication entitled "Cumbia, copeteo y lágrimas: informe nacional sobre la situación de las travestis transexuales y transgéneros" by the late Lohana Berkins, a transsexual activist who founded Argentina's Asociación de Lucha por la Identidad Travesti y Transexual (ALITT) in 1994 and who died at the age of 50 in February 2016.
The International Journal for Equity in Health article is less than 5000 words in length and is well worth reading in its entirety. 452 subjects were interviewed, of whom more than 60% were engaged in sex work at the time of the interview (more than 80% had been involved in sex work at any time), and of whom nearly 30% were HIV positive. A tragic picture emerges of the very difficult lives of Argentina's trans-identified men and the hazards they encounter, from "mental health problems, substance use and sexually transmitted infections" to frequent interactions with police including "arbitrary arrest and detentions, which are common among this population, have been reported as an excuse to exploit TG women for bribes or coerce them into providing sex in exchange for release from detention" to "use of non-prescribed hormones or injection of industrial silicone in non-sterilized environments".
Is it legitimate for trans-identified British and American men to quote a life expectancy statistic of 35, clearly expecting their audience to leap to the conclusion that the speakers themselves will die so young? Not really. The lives of poor people in a villa miseria in Buenos Aires are frequently nasty, brutish and short. A disproportionate number of people of both sexes resort to peddling drugs or prostitution, both of which are dangerous and life-shortening pursuits, to make a living. Both men and women who sell sexual services have injections of industrial-grade (rather than medical-grade) silicone from an unlicensed quack in order to make themselves more desirable to clients. The lives of the unfortunate men that this statistic is based on are very different from the lives of middle-class men in London or LA or Melbourne.
It’s also notable to those of us of a woman-centred turn of mind that no activists with huge media followings ever expressed any interest in the hard lives and untimely deaths of people in prostitution in Latin America until some men noticed that some of those unfortunate people were men.
So no, Paris and Munroe, I wouldn't believe you if you told me that the average life expectancy of a man like you in the US or the UK was 35. I would tell you where the statistic actually originates, and your reaction would tell me whether your appropriation of the genuinely appalling circumstances of a group of people whose lives are utterly different to your own was a genuine misapprehension, or a cynical hand-wringing, tear-jerking ploy to garner yet more sympathy for the World’s Most Oppressed.