Warning: this article contains reference to hate crimes and suicide. A list of organisations which offer assistance is available at the end of this piece.
Imagine a demographic that is so routinely harassed, abused, threatened and assaulted, that many of them are afraid to leave the house unless it’s absolutely necessary. Then imagine the police response to the way that group is treated is so utterly entrenched in failure, that many police force areas go years at a time without a single conviction for this ongoing and well-documented criminal mistreatment.
Now stop imagining, because this is the reality for transgender people in the UK.
Crown Prosecution Service transphobic hate crime data
In response to a Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI) request, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) provided the dataset from its Case Management System (CMS) showing successful prosecutions of transphobic hate crimes in England and Wales, broken down by force area, for each of the last five years.
The request to the CPS was:
“For the last 5 years that a complete dataset exists, please provide the following information:
- Number of successfully prosecuted transphobic hate crimes, split out by the police force area / constabulary that charged the person.
- Number of successfully prosecuted homophobic hate crimes, split out by police force area/ constabulary that charged the person”.
The reason for approaching the CPS was that several forces had said that they do not hold such data. (Note that CPS data may differ from official Home Office crime figures because of different boundaries between time periods).
Negligible levels of prosecution
Of the 44 force areas listed, the worst performing —Cambridgeshire, City of London, Dyfed-Powys, Humberside, and Warwickshire— each only achieved one single successful prosecution for a transphobic hate crime over the last five years.
There were 59 separate instances of force areas recording a full calendar year period during which there were zero successful prosecutions of transphobic hate crime.
Out of a total of 220 force areas by year, 200 of them recorded five or fewer successful prosecutions. These are not small areas, either: in the whole of West Yorkshire, the CPS managed to prosecute only four transphobic hate crimes for the period 2024-2025.
Looking at the same data by year, 2020-2021 had the fewest prosecutions, with just 63, and 2024-25 had the most with 132. Note that these numbers are the total numbers of prosecutions for England and Wales that have been flagged as transphobic hate crimes on the CPS CMS.
These statistics paint a picture which sadly corroborates the experience of every trans person we know in real life. And, of the dozens of trans people we asked online, only one has ever had a hate crime against them successfully prosecuted after they were assaulted in a hospital. Every other trans person asked had found it somewhere between incredibly difficult and impossible to get any sort of police action at all against people who commit hate crimes against them. This was true even for multiple serial crimes by the same person.
Refuting the case for ‘false’ reporting
The figures also completely invalidate claims by self-defined ‘gender-critical’ people that the police are biased in favour of trans people. They also suggest that those who profess to be ‘scared to say anything’ for fear of being reported for a transphobic hate crime may be speaking disingenuously. Such arguments are often known by the acronym DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender). The data shows such claims to be utterly without foundation.
Transphobes clearly cannot be ‘harassed’ by ‘false’ reports of transphobic hate crimes when no meaningful level of prosecution of actual transphobic hate crimes takes place.
On the contrary, there is a pattern, across England and Wales, of near-complete and sometimes complete failure to prosecute any transphobic offences whatsoever.
Statistics exclude social media hate crime
Significantly, the figures do not include any reported transphobic hate crimes from social media.
While no police force has openly stated that there is any restriction on accepting reports of online hate crimes, to the best of our knowledge there has never been a case of anyone being charged for online transphobic hate crime. Yet transgender people are routinely and deliberately misgendered, deadnamed, doxxed, abused, or in some cases encouraged to die by suicide.
On 29 May 2023, we reported numerous Twitter (later X) posts by an individual spamming threads about the murder of Brianna Ghey with, “It saves him from having to kill himself later”. This would not only have been visible and incredibly distressing to her family and others who knew her, but also to the wider transgender community. That individual was reported using the online hate crime form, but the police have never contacted us to follow it up.
And in 2025, a prominent anti-trans ‘activist’ was inciting people to sexually assault trans women in public lavatories; followed by incitements to track down where trans women work and to ‘out’ them to their employers. When we reported this via the online hate crime form, the reply simply stated: “this item is already being addressed as such we are not taking further reports of these posts”. Although the police did speak to this anti-trans ‘activist’ about these serious threats, no further action was taken.
A typical experience of aggressive hate crimes
Perhaps unsurprisingly, our own experiences with West Yorkshire Police could only be described as dismal. At the start of the year, we reported around a dozen instances of some of the most vile transphobic hate graffiti, which was serially being posted outside a local school. Sometimes it was redone so aggressively often that we would paint over it one evening, and the police would find it had been redone by the time they came to check the following morning.
Also, due to a change after 2022, serial offences are now consolidated into a single ‘incident of crime’, meaning that all these instances of transphobic graffiti are only counted once.
We were advised by West Yorkshire Police that they “were moving towards an arrest”, but at the time of writing in December 2025, there has been no progress.
So far in 2025, we have reported over 20 transphobic hate crimes including abuse, assaults, and threats. One of these was made in full view of a police officer, so a formal complaint has been made to West Yorkshire Police.
Contacting force areas directly
A further FOI request was submitted to West Yorkshire Police and a number of other force areas, to see how the CPS data and the experiences of trans people in reporting hate crime mesh with the number and outcomes of hate crimes reported to the police. As prosecutions may not have happened in the same year as the offence was reported, there are timing differences between the police and CPS datasets.
West Yorkshire Police gave us detailed data indicating that the main reason for people not being charged was failure to identify a suspect. This is probably unsurprising to anyone who has to live with this sort of behaviour, which tends to have a ‘hit-and-run’ quality to it.
While the total reported number of offences was in the 200-350 range, the number of people actually charged in each year, for all of West Yorkshire, was in single figures. Roughly half of those charged were prosecuted. Prosecutions as a proportion of reported offences across the five-year period average out to 1.6%.
Giving up on the police and prosecution systems
Other force areas that we looked at showed a similar pattern:
- South Yorkshire police recorded an average prosecution rate of 2%.
- North Yorkshire recorded the highest prosecution rate in this data set of 6%, though there were still no prosecutions in 2023.
- Durham had an average prosecution rate of 2.6%.
It is likely that the absolute number of reports is significantly understated as many transgender people have unsurprisingly given up on the police; or worse, have come to regard the police as more likely to pose a risk than to be helpful.
It is impossible to look at this situation without reaching the conclusion that the chances of the hate crime that we report leading to a prosecution, is somewhere between exceptionally low and zero.
At what point do we call this functional decriminalisation of transphobic hate crime?
We invited West Yorkshire Police to comment on specific issues raised in this article, but, at the date of publication, no response has yet been received.
Support and assistance
If you have been affected by the references to transphobic hate crime in this article, the following organisations can offer support and assistance:
Yorkshire Trans Support Network
GIRES a hub for gender identity help groups
Support Line gender identity
Touchstone link to Switchboard’s LGBTQIA+ Support Line
Mind UK links for LGBTQIA+ mental health
Suicide
StayAlive Prevent-Suicide link to Mindline Trans+
Suicide Prevention UK standing with the trans community
Support Line suicide
LGBT Hero suicide helplines and resources
Friends of Bylines Network
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