1. United States
2. Mich.
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to advocate for the immediate restoration of gender identity questions to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). A March 3, 2025 Department of Justice memorandum removed these questions following President Trump's executive order titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." This change eliminates our ability to track and document violence against transgender people. The NCVS is our nation's primary source of information on criminal victimization, capturing crimes through direct surveys rather than relying solely on police reports. This distinction matters because nearly 50% of violent crimes are never reported to law enforcement. Without gender identity questions, transgender respondents cannot be identified within the dataset, making it impossible to estimate victimization rates or track trends over time. The data we risk losing is significant. Using pooled 2022-2023 data, transgender individuals experienced violent victimization at a rate of 93.7 incidents per 1,000 people, compared with 21.1 incidents per 1,000 among cisgender heterosexual individuals. Earlier 2017-2018 data showed similar patterns with 86.2 victimizations per 1,000 transgender people versus 21.7 per 1,000 cisgender people. LGBT people overall experience approximately five times the rate of violent victimization compared with cisgender heterosexual individuals. The suggestion that gender identity may still appear in the hate crime motivation section creates severe methodological limitations. Victims may not recognize bias motivation, incidents with multiple motivating factors may not be accurately captured, and critically, without transgender identification in the full survey sample, researchers lose the denominator needed to calculate victimization rates. This change affects public accountability and our ability to protect vulnerable constituents. When governments stop counting a group of people, violence becomes harder to measure, document, and prevent. I urge you to support legislation or appropriations language requiring the restoration of gender identity questions to the NCVS.