My relationship with Transgender Day of Remembrance (November 20) changed after I realized I was a trans woman. So much of it is an occasion for cis and non-Black trans allies to gain performativity points by lamenting the living conditions of trans women of color only after they have been murdered. Cis people in particular seem so eager to enforce their belief that trans women are subsisting in pure misery that anything justifying our (trans women’s) suffering is credible.

We see this in the oft-repeated, decontextualized lie that the average age of a trans woman of color in the United States is 35 years. Restoring the context, as done in this article, desensationalizes the factoid almost to inanity: a trans woman of color’s life expectancy is 35 given that she is a murder victim in Central or South America.

For comparison, Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research says the mean age of a homicide victim in Chicago is 29 years old. Even with Chicago’s status as a racist dogwhistle for poverty and violence, no one is claiming that the average Chicagoan won’t live past thirty. Nor, of course, does reality bear this out: the average life expectancy there is 71.4 years for Black people and 80.6 years for white people, according to Illinois Department of Vital Records data reported on in the Sun Times.

A similar phenomenon is at work in tobacco control when it comes to reporting smoking rates among trans women. On multiple occasions I’ve heard it quoted or read it printed that “the smoking rate among trans women (or sometimes, ‘trans people’) is as high as 83%.” Like the TDoR statistic, it is true among a certain population, but the asterisks and givens are rarely given. Like the TDoR statistic, my feeling is that it has so much currency because the symbolism of poor, unfortunate, and in this case nicotine-addicted trans women is more interesting than the truth.

83% comes from the 2016 paper Minority Stress, Smoking Patterns, and Cessation Attempts: Findings from a Community-Sample of Transgender Women in the San Francisco Bay Area by Kristi Gamarel and colleagues. The top-line result is accurate as reported: 83% of their sample reported smoking a cigarette in the last month. However, the title alone tells us that we should be careful in generalizing.

To say the obvious, a community sample is a sample of a community, a subset of the overall population. Reading the methods and results sections, we learn that this paper subsets data from a previous project in the early 2000s whose trans women participants all had a history of sex work. We learn that two thirds of the participants did not graduate high school and nearly two thirds had an annual income of less than $12,000.

“83% percent of very low income trans women with a history of sex work report smoking” is still much higher than the national female smoking rate of 21% in the year 2000, but much less surprising. We see high rates reported among other populations facing severe socioeconomic adversity, such as 70-80% among US adults experiencing homelessness, or 71% among female sex workers in one Brazilian city versus 8.3% among all Brazilian women (Devóglio et al., 2017).

In neither the TDoR case nor the tobacco case is the impulse to identify trans precarity inaccurate. Trans people do face specific violence for being trans. The cis male sex partners of Gwen Araujo, whose 2002 murder in Newark, California spawned Trans March, killed her because she was trans. Trans people do use tobacco in part to deal with stressors that they would not have if they weren’t trans (e.g. McQuoid et al., 2021, Hinds et al., 2021). Discussion of these issues, when about us but especially when with us, does not benefit from exaggerating what trans women can see for ourselves is demonstrably untrue. Most trans women are not murder victims, and most trans women are not smokers.

Allies’ discussions on TDoR would often benefit from restoring the agent in discussions of trans people, who rarely have the power to oppress themselves. Trans socioeconomic failure and deaths that become spectacle are most often at the hands of cis-dominant institutions and borne out of imbalanced relationships with cis people, be they intimate partners, as with Gwen Araujo, or family, doctors, or employers. Similarly, when it comes to trans smoking, we should ask why trans people might smoke more. Ironically, Gamarel et al., 2016 gives us some hints. Among their sample, they find that discrimination for being trans correlates with increased odds of being unsuccessful in quitting smoking or not trying to quit in the first place.