28  Progressive Planning  No. 167  Spring 2006 Violence Against Transgendered People By Petra L. Doan The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) tracks violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people (LGBT) in eleven large metropolitan regions that include approximately 27 percent of the US population. NCAVP has highlighted repeatedly what it calls an “epidemic of hatred” in the acts of violence against the LGBT community. This brief article examines the nature and prevalence of violence against the transgendered community so that progressive planners can gain some understand- ing of the risks that this urban population faces on a daily basis. Overall, planners need to make public spaces safer for all people, including the LGBT population. In this article, the term transgender is used as an umbrella term to include a range of ways of expressing gender at odds with societal expecta- tions, including: transsexuals, transvestites, cross- dressers, drag queens, drag kings, androgynes and tranny bois.While other essays in this issue focus exclusively on violence and women, in this arti- cle the focus is more broadly on transgendered women and men, because no matter how a trans person identifies, he or she has had some experi- ence of at least being perceived as a girl or woman. Trans men are born with female bodies and were socialized as girls, but now identify in whole or in part as men. Similarly, trans women are born with male bodies and were socialized as boys, but now identify as women. In Western patriarchal culture, there is a deeply held expectation that gender is dichotomous and fixed at birth. It took the women’s movement years of organizing and protest marches to slow- ly erode the gendered restrictions on their behav- ior and to demand the right to vote, as well as the right to pursue work outside the home. But these freedoms were achieved at considerable cost to the individuals who dared to defy long-estab- lished gender roles. Feminist scholars have sug- gested that violence against women was, and continues to be, used as a tool of the patriarchy to discipline unruly women. One consequence of this tactic is the gender paradox revealed by numerous studies of women and violence. Although statistically men are more likely to be victims of violent crime, women exhibit much higher levels of fear of crime. For many years, women who were out in public by themselves or with other women, especially during evening hours, were “asking” for trouble and frequently got it in the form of harassment, intimidation and sometimes outright violence. While there is increasing acceptance of women whose actions stretch the boundaries of tradi- tional sex roles (working outside the home, wear- ing man-tailored clothes, playing sports), there continues to be little acceptance of those whose behavior fundamentally challenges socially accepted gender categories. People who trans- gress this rigid dichotomy are uniquely vulnera- ble. Darryl Hill, in a 2003 essay in Barbara Wallace and Robert Carter’s Understanding and Dealing with Violence: A Multicultural Approach , identi- fies three sources of anti-trans violence. First, violence against transgendered people may be a means to validate the attacker’s own values that transgressing gender is wrong (genderism). Second, violence may be a means for an attacker to gain the approval of his/her peers. And third, anti-trans violence may serve as a means of deny- ing the attacker’s anxiety about his or her own latent sexual or gender identity (transphobia). This anti-trans violence acts to reinforce a dichotomous social order and to control the pub- lic display of alternate genders. These attacks have had a powerful silencing effect on transgen- dered individuals, rendering them invisible for the most part to wider society. Only in the last half of the twentieth century has this population begun to emerge from the shadows of Western culture, following the success of the women’s movement and gay and lesbian liberation efforts. The social stigma, however, of displaying a gen- der orientation at variance with one’s birth sex is still quite high, imposing enormous costs on visi- bly transgendered people. According to 2004 statistics collected by NCAVP, The stigma of displaying a gender orientation at variance with one’s birth sex is still quite high