Last Updated on June 9, 2026 by Chicago Policy Review Staff
Mercedes Williamson, a transgender girl, was murdered in Mississippi in 2015. At just seventeen years old, she became the center of a national case when her murder was classified as a hate crime. Six years after the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (HCPA) became law, prosecutors noted at sentencing that it was the first federal hate crime prosecution brought on behalf of a victim targeted because of their gender identity. The second and latest hate crime of this kind came in 2024, when a South Carolina man was found guilty after going to trial for the murder of a transgender woman. In the seventeen years since the HCPA was enacted, the full federal docket of gender identity hate crime prosecutions fits in this single paragraph.
This is a structural problem, a product of deliberate choices made at both the federal and state levels about which communities’ safety the law is willing to name as a public wrong — and nowhere is that choice more visible, or more damning, than in Tennessee.
Hate crime statutes do two things simultaneously. They are enforcement tools that shape what charges can be brought and what penalties courts can impose, like most criminal statutes. However, where they differ from other laws are their unique mechanisms as expressive instruments: public declarations, backed by the authority of the state, that certain forms of bias-motivated violence are categorically worse than otherwise comparable harm. But this expression cuts both ways. When the state refuses to name a group in its hate crime statute, both functions fail. The enforcement pathway closes, and the expressive condemnation — the official recognition that someone’s assault, kidnapping, rape, or murder was a public wrong — is withheld.
Tennessee withholds it from transgender people.
Tennessee’s sentencing enhancement statute covers race, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, and “gender” — not “gender identity.” A 2019 Attorney General opinion concluded that the enhancement may apply to transgender victims under that language. “May.” The opinion is advisory in nature. It is not binding on any court. It is not required by the statute. It is not reliably known by the prosecutors who would need to invoke it. In county after county, a prosecutor facing a bias-motivated attack on a transgender person must choose between pursuing a theory that requires an interpretive argument before a potentially skeptical judge and declining to pursue the enhancement at all. The latter is almost always easier. It is almost always what happens.
What makes Tennessee’s position particularly difficult to excuse is that the state’s own data infrastructure tells the truth about what the statute obscures. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s 2025 hate crime report includes “Anti-Gender Identity” as an explicit, distinct reporting bias category, complete with separate entries for “Transgender” and “Gender Non-Conforming” incidents. Tennessee documents the scope of the problem with exquisite precision. It simply has not seen fit to address it in law.
This is worse than acknowledged omission. It forecloses any argument for reform by creating the appearance of recognition without providing its substance. Advocates cannot point to a clean statutory gap when the state can gesture at its reporting categories as evidence of sensitivity. The problem is visible in the data and invisible in the courtroom, and Tennessee has structured things precisely that way.
Then came the PEACE Act.
In 2025, in response to antisemitic leaflets distributed in a predominantly Jewish Knoxville neighborhood, the Tennessee legislature moved quickly. In a single session, it passed new criminal penalties for intimidation-motivated littering and trespassing. First Amendment scholars called it constitutionally problematic. State Representative Aftyn Behn called it “Orwellian” in nature. The legislature passed it anyway. The speed, the specificity, the willingness to absorb legal controversy in order to put a community’s safety explicitly on the record. All of it was present … for that community.
The same legislature that found the capacity and the will to respond to antisemitic leaflets with targeted statutory action has left transgender Tennesseans to rely on a non-binding Attorney General opinion from seven years ago. The Tennessee State Legislature can no longer claim lack of capacity. It is agreed upon by all reasonable people that Jewish people deserve protection from violence and bias-motivated attacks. Why should it be any different for transgender people? This is a choice about whose safety warrants unambiguous legal protection and whose does not. It deserves to be called that directly.
Virginia, when faced with the same decision, has made a different choice. The contrast is striking: Virginia Code names gender identity explicitly in their criminal codes, the reporting mandate, and a civil remedy that allows victims to pursue damages independent of any criminal conviction. The resulting network creates a web of protections that holds strong when other arms of the state fail. When a prosecutor declines to bring charges, the civil pathway remains. When a criminal case collapses, the incident still enters the data record. The redundancy reflects a legislature that took seriously the question of what protection actually requires in practice, rather than what it requires on paper. It reflects a state that condemns anti-transgender hate crimes alongside all other bias-motivated crime.
The difference matters at every stage of the enforcement chain. Classification begins at the scene. It continues through investigation, charging, plea negotiations, and sentencing — each a decision point where ambiguity creates an opportunity for the case to exit the hate crime pipeline and justice to be left undone. Virginia’s explicit language doesn’t eliminate these pressures, but it removes one layer of uncertainty and provides a basis for training, documentation, and judicial instruction that Tennessee’s interpretive approach cannot. When the statute is ambiguous, the path of least resistance is to decline the enhancement. Over the years and thousands of cases, that attrition compounds into a pattern of legal invisibility for a population that is already among the most vulnerable to violence.
A 2023 Williams Institute study found that transgender people are more than four times as likely as their cisgender counterparts to be victims of violent crime. The Human Rights Campaign has documented at least 335 fatal attacks on transgender and gender non-conforming people over a decade, while noting the count almost certainly understates the reality. In 40% of those cases, no arrest was made. These are the people for whom the law’s expressive function — its declaration that a life lost to bias is a public wrong — carries the most weight, precisely because every other institutional signal so often tells them otherwise.
The reform Tennessee needs is not complicated. Amend the sentencing enhancement to say “gender identity” in addition to “gender.” Extend the same language to the reporting mandate. The argument that “gender” already covers gender identity may be plausible as a matter of statutory construction, but plausibility is not what transgender victims need from the law. They need clarity. At the scene of the crime, in the charging decision, in the courtroom. And the burden of providing that clarity belongs to the legislature, not to the victims and advocates who must navigate the ambiguity it leaves behind alongside their trauma.
Hate crime law exists, at its foundation, because the state has a legitimate interest in naming hierarchy-enforcing violence as a category of harm distinct from individual injury, in saying that an attack on a person because of who they are is also an attack on the community they belong to, and that the state will not look away from it. Tennessee has looked away. Its own data shows it is the problem. Its own recent legislative history shows it knows how to act when it chooses to. The gap between what Tennessee knows how to do and what Tennessee has done is not a drafting error. It is a moral failure, and it should be treated as one.