Washington, DC—Last Friday, comedian Lil Duval appeared on “The Breakfast Club,” a radio program on New York’s Power 105.1. In the course of the interview, Duval remarked that if he began dating a woman and she later shared with him that she was transgender, he would murder her. In his words, “This might sound messed up, but I don’t care, she dying.” Though he later defended his comments as simply being a “joke,” it is no laughing matter.
In response to Duval’s interview, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, Director of External Relations at the National Center for Transgender Equality, offers the following statement:
“Lil Duval’s comments are completely unacceptable. Violence against transgender women is not a joke; it is a terrifying reality. Of all the anti-LGBTQ hate violence murders committed in the United States in 2015, two-thirds of them were murders of transgender people, and most of the victims were transgender women of color. And as we found in the U.S. Transgender Survey, over half of transgender Americans have experienced violence from romantic and sexual partners. Transgender people face an epidemic of violence in our communities, and Lil Duval’s flippant “joke” about his hypothetical actions demonstrates just how dire the problem is.”
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