Hate crimes against transgender people in London have increased by a quarter since last year, with 135 offences recorded up until October 2015, compared with 108 in 2014, according to figures just published by the Metropolitan Police.
The cultural visibility of transgender people is perhaps greater than ever before, with a growing number of trans celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner, Janet Mock and Laverne Cox becoming household names, as well as characters in popular shows such as Transparent and films like Tangerine, and fashion industry faces like Hari Nef and Andreja Pejic. However this visibility does not appear to have translated into a wider acceptance in London, as the growing hate crime figures show.
The true figure could be even higher than those published by the Met according to London-based LGBT charity Galop. “The figures that are being reported in London in a year, we have clients that experience that themselves in a year,” Melanie Stray from Galop told the BBC, adding that she thinks some offences have become such an everyday occurrence for people in the trans community that they, “couldn’t report all of it because they’d spend their lives speaking to the police”.
That said, Commander Mark Chishty from the Metropolitan Police appealed for victims of trans hate crimes to contact the police in every instance, telling the BBC, “However mundane you think it is, it’s very serious to us. It’s important that we tackle this so we start curbing this type of behaviour within society — it’s not tolerable, it’s not part of our values and we want to deal with it”. The Met recently formed a “hate crime senior partnership group” between police and community representatives that works alongside special LGBT Liaison Officers.