Fatal anti-trans violence dipped from 41 deaths in 2022 to 32 last year.

That is, according to reports by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender-Expansive Community.” Comparing 2023′s report to 2022′s, trans homicides depleting 22% is drastic for the community, who saw nearly 60 murders in 2021.

What could have caused this continuing decline?

The answer is unclear, and there haven’t been any studies looking deeper behind the numbers. It’s also especially challenging to decipher when circumstances of the 2022 and last year’s homicides remained similar—at least as broken down by HRC. But trans organizers and advocates say community care might play a role.

In the last few years, newer organizations like THORN, QueerCare and Black Liberation Collective have bloomed, as well as people who increasingly organized labor within the community as means of showing up for each other directly and personally.

Crowdsourcing for a trans person’s gender-affirming surgeries on GoFundMe, for example, or arranging bail funds for those arrested during protests for Palestine, and even the free distribution of self-defense kits for marginalized people. Mutual aid continues to showcase just how far community care can go to meet trans people’s needs.

Mutual aid for the LGBTQ community at large has been successful in addressing a multitude of issues for decades, too. During the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s, community members supported those who were positive and formed community networks of care that remain vital today. Just recently, queer men’s activism helped eradicate monkeypox through their collective organization and mobilization of getting vaccinated through dance parties, vaccine drives and education via social media. Both instances had a disproportionate effect on gay men of color.

And that’s not all. A mutual aid organization, QueerCare on the other hand, funnels money directly to trans people in San Francisco or New York City to help them recover from gender-affirming surgeries. And in Seattle, Queer The Land is taking housing by the horns to provide a place of living for the city’s queer and trans community of color.

While the decline in fatal anti-trans violence is a glimmer of hope, advocates point out that it’s still crucial to remember that the battle for trans survival is far from over, especially as Black trans women today are the most vulnerable community, enduring violence, discrimination and injustices to their rights. This brings the community to a crucial question: how can the community build upon this momentum in this moment where anti-trans legislation is at an all-time high to further protect the lives of the trans community when legislators are seeking to erase them from the public?

“Victims of transphobic violence are more than a number and must be honored,” said THORN, a Chicago-based self-defense project for Black and brown trans people in a 2020 Instagram roundup of Black trans mutual aid fundraisers. “It is also absolutely integral that we support, uplift, and protect trans folks that are alive today, everyday.”

But mutual aid, the “bread and butter of all social movements,” as defined by author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next) and professor at Seattle University School of Law, Dean Spade is not new. On Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness’s podcast Getting Curious from 2022, Spade said that mutual aid is not like charity.

“In charity models, you’ve got people who are paid and maybe got high degrees, and they’re deciding for the poor what they need and how they should get it,” he explained on the podcast, whereas mutual aid is “usually volunteer-based projects and organizations.”

According to Spade, trans people have always been surviving through mutual aid, be it sharing meds or obtaining hormone replacement therapy the “sideways way,” he told Kelly Hayes in a 2022 interview with Truthout. “The actual networks of survival are there […] That kind of stuff is life saving for trans people.”

The ongoing mutual aid for trans people might have played a part in the drop of trans homicides last year, but community members are demanding more from people to protect their trans kin.

According to both year’s reports, demographics of the report stayed the same across categories, from the percentage of people of color, how many were Black, number of murders via gun, as well as how many reports misrepresented and misgendered the victim.

And although there was a 10% increase of the homicide being committed by a loved one or someone the victim knew—be it family or friend—people from the community are giving credit to the on-the-ground work of community care.

But Eric A. Stanley, an associate professor in the department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, warns people to not misconstrue that the decrease of trans homicides “symbolizes anything material in the real world.”

There could be various reasons why data of trans murders might or might not be included, but the sheer fact that murders continue to happen “should remind us that even one person lost constitutes an emergency,” says Stanley, author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable,

Fatal violence aside, much is already on the line for the trans community. Last year’s new record of 600 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed on the floor during the 2023 legislation session mainly targeted trans youth, and nearly one in three LGBTQ youth reported poor mental health as a direct result of this, according to The Trevor Project’s report.

Regarding trans homicide reports, Stanley recommends shifting the onus towards why things like the forced deaths of unhoused trans people, those held captive in ICE detention centers or in psychiatric wards don’t make the reports.

“The world continues to want us dead, and mass collective action is the only thing that might give us a chance at freedom,” they said.

Nisha “Nish” Newton, a nonbinary member of Black Liberation Collective, is one of many people working with mutual aid. The group is a collective of Black trans youth based in Idaho whose values “are rooted in ancestral wisdom, youth-led innovation, abolition, and healing-centered liberation.” According to Newton, HRC’s 2023 data on trans homicide sparks hope and a sense of relief, but it doesn’t present a whole picture.

Newton says that the decline of trans homicides last year might be a result of “the vile conditions we’re forced to live in [that] made us seek deeper community connections, and now these support systems inherently make us more protected. The rates might’ve decreased because we’re clinging tightly to each other and weaving networks that are beginning to interrupt the root causes of violence.”

Simultaneously, they are critical of why anti-trans fatal violence is a pervasive issue in the U.S.

“Time will reveal why the decline in data has occurred, and we must fight for trans aliveness in the meantime like our lives depend on it—because they do.”

All three victims of homicides in Washington, D.C.—two of which were less than two weeks apart—were Black trans women.

Jasmine “Star” Mack was the first reported trans death last year. In October, Skylar Harrison was killed, and Anee Roberson’s death followed shortly after.

The decrease of trans murders in 2023 makes D.C. an outlier for having multiple deaths in the district. And yet, given that they were all Black trans women, the case in D.C. reflects a larger issue within what community members call an “epidemic” of violence against trans people: homicides are staggeringly high for black trans women.

Black trans women take the brunt of the fatal violence that target the LGBTQ community at large. Out of all murders from last year, more than six in ten, specifically 61.8%, were Black transgender women, according to HRC.

In a 2021 VICE News video on Black trans women’s mental health, Philadelphia-based activist Kendall Stephens hung flyers of her dead trans friend all over the city in hopes to find the killer.

“There are so many unsolved mysteries in the trans community when we’re murdered and attacked,” she said. “And that plays on your mental health, too, because you know that if something happens to you, there’s going to be no justice […] I would love to dream again.”

Coalitions like Black Liberation Collective are doing the work to minimize and harm within Black trans communities.

According to Newton, even though trans homicides had gone down last year, needs continue to outgrow the resources available for Black trans folks, “especially because the avid support for mutual aid in 2020 came and went like a high school’s spirit week.”

They explain that Black Liberation Collective started by establishing a crisis-response system for community care, though it quickly became clear that the emergencies were more of the norm than the exception. A key example of their work today is their month-to-month model that supports Black trans people for an entire year, providing a more sustainable support. They have also organized community-based projects, like Juneteenth events.

“A decrease in homicide rates does not inherently mean that we now have an increase in our quality of life or that we’re now indexed to more aliveness,” they said. “We only want to experience and witness less and less violence against our communities, and it’s challenging to feel optimistic—even when the 2023 report finally shows a decrease in trans homicides—because we know that this nation’s culture is still not inclusive, affirming, or safe for trans people.”

Above all, mutual aid is crucial now more than ever for Newton.

“We’re all we got; we’re all we need.”