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In 2020, Peitzmeier et al.1 published a systematic review and meta-analysis of the prevalence and correlates of intimate partner violence (IPV) against transgender people. Their article garnered wide public engagement, and Altmetric currently scores it as in the top 5% of all research outputs. It was groundbreaking in its methodological approach, presenting data that were "publicly available for the first time from more than 40% of included studies and leverag[ing] data from almost 50 000 transgender respondents."1(pe11)
Among the various central findings, the authors report that transgender individuals are more than twice as likely as cisgender individuals to experience physical and sexual IPV in their lifetimes. For school-based samples (middle school, high school, and college), they found that transgender students and youths were up to 3.9 times more likely to experience IPV than were their cisgender peers.
I provide some context for why these findings have been so widely cited and shared, and for how the article remains relevant to explaining some of the sources oftoday's continued attacks on transgender people and transgender rights.
THIS MOMENT IN TRANSGENDER HISTORY
Although we would not have used the same terms, and the individuals themselves would not have understood gender the way we do today (because gender itself is always culturally and historically situated), we can definitively say that transgender people have always existed.2-6 So why, then, are transgender people only recently increasingly the focus of politicians' campaigns, parents' self-help Facebook groups, pop cultures' commentary, gun-toting extremists' protests, and legislator's public agendas?
The answer lies, in part, in what some describe as the backlash theory of politics, or
a particular form of political contestation with a retrograde objective as well as extraordinary goals or tactics that has reached the threshold level of entering mainstream public discourse.7(p740)
We are seeing that as more transgender people-particularly youths- announce their presence to the world, attempt to claim positions of political power, and are represented in popular culture (e.g., on TV shows, in fashion), those who are fearful of gender fluidity or ignorant about gender itself make arguments for a return to "simpler"' or "more Christian" times. Embedded in these arguments is the belief that transgender people are harmful, lying, deceitful, predatory (e.g., not Christian) others and that transness itself is a...
