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All rights © Eduarda Alves, 2025

I read once, somewhere I’ve never been able to find again, that a “what do you want to be when you grow up” writing assignment got a student into some trouble with, or at least scrutiny from, the teacher.

The students were, of course, supposed to write about career goals, not-yet-born children, future families, or dream vacations to Mykonos and Petra. Maybe they wanted to learn a new language, or instrument, or a martial art?

But this student didn’t write about spinning through the first dance at their barn-chic wedding or climbing Machu Picchu with their friends. They didn’t write about graduating from law school or decorating nurseries.

“I want to live to 27,” this student wrote.

Not, I want to be a rock star, or movie star, or star athlete. Not even picket fences or porch swings.

Just … not dead.

The teacher wanted to know if the student misunderstood the assignment or was just being casually rebellious.

“By 27, the average trans person is murdered or dies by suicide,” they explained to their teacher. “I hope I live longer than that.”

Any trace of remaining judgment or ignorance society or any church had ever imposed or preached or fear-mongered about trans people, any of my own comfortable apathy died inside me that day. Trans people were not only undeniably people, they were devastatingly vulnerable people.

“The average lifespan of a transgender person is twenty-three years. The statistic is shocking, until it begins to make sense. Gender non-conformists face routine exclusion and violence. Transgender people are disproportionately poor, homeless, and incarcerated,” Meaghan Winter wrote in Guernica 15 years ago. Not enough has changed since then.

“Many of the systems and facilities intended to help low-income people are sex-segregated and thereby alienate those who don’t comply with state-imposed categories. A trans woman may not be able to secure a bed in a homeless shelter, for example,” Winter explained.

Biologically, molecularly, every human being is an extraordinarily complex cellular miracle.

Yet trans people are disproportionately vulnerable to homicide at the hands of their loved ones, including their own parents. The very people who created the miracle of their life, their singular, spectacular presence here in this world. The ones who’d likely counted baby fingers and toes when they were born were the same people to take those unique fingerprints out of the world.

Trans people are also at significant risk of violence and abuse from their intimate partners.

Black trans women are at the highest risk of violence, with some sources citing as high as 78% of all murdered trans women. According to Everytown for Gun Safety’s Transgender Homicide Tracker, a heartbreakingly necessary metric, 64% of transgender victims who die from gun violence are Black women.

Everytown for Gun Safety also reports that 60% of transgender homicide victims between 2017 and 2022 were under 30 years old.

Dear friends and strangers, we get this one brief and beautiful life. Mary Oliver asked us what it is we will do with our one wild and precious life.

Whatever you believe in, whomever you pray to, no one should grow up knowing just how young they could die. And no one of any age should live in fear of dying by homicide or suffering so much that death by suicide is the only escape.

In her essay “Why We Must Honor the Trans Lives We’ve Lost Without Telling the Living They’re Doomed,” Kai Cheng Thom remembered reading Winter’s article about the average trans person dying at 23, that it “confirmed what I had already known for about a decade: I was doomed to a nasty, short, and miserable life.”

The National Library of Medicine puts that number higher, but still cites that transgender people are twice as likely as non-trans people to die from all causes.

All causes.

This is structural. This is systemic abandonment, neglect, abuse, and persecution.

While we don’t have one official statistic about the average lifespan of trans people, themselves with enormous demographic diversity under that umbrella, we do have horrific statistics about violence and homicide.

And those numbers are too high.

Just like the defensive men caviling about the “rape academy”, caterwauling online that “it wasn’t 62 million different men, it was 62 million views,” as if the very existence of the website itself isn’t reprehensible enough, the number is still too high.

Just like 1,000+ users is too many men learning how to live stream themselves drugging and raping their female “loved ones”, even one trans person being murdered or dying by suicide is too many.

The only acceptable number is zero.

And the politicians campaigning against trans rights to court the panicked votes of bigots are further endangering trans people. Don’t vote for them.