All five people who watched the Emmy Awards Sunday heard Actress Patricia Arquette claim "the life expectancy of trans women of color is just 35 years old."
Which is less than half of all females, whose life expectancy is 74. Shocking, right?
It's also completely wrong, notes Katie Herzog in The Stranger. But Arquette didn't make it up, it's a common statistic reported in media.
A 2015 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report looked at 594 homicide cases across 18 countries in which the victims were LGBTQ and found that 80 percent of trans women victims were under the age of 35. Media then declared that the life expectancy of trans women in the U.S. is 35 years old, which suggests hordes are out there murdering trans women.
Statisticians everywhere groaned.
What media leave out is the normalcy of that age. Most murder victims across all populations are young people. And most journalists who don't understand statistics botch stories about life expectancy when it comes to births compared to other countries also, the same way they repeat that we have 3 billion fewer birds, that homeopathy is real, or that weedkillers cause cancer.
All men only have a life expectancy of 70, four years younger than women. It's not that hordes of women are out there killing men either, it's that more men are murder victims.
