CASE CRISIS 2025: A STATEMENT FROM THE TRANS DOE TASK FORCE

As most of you know, the Trans Doe Task Force team is very small, and entirely comprised of Trans people and immediate family members of Trans people and kids. We do work internationally, but we are based in the United States. We have reserved public comment on the actions of the new US Presidential administration so far, as we have primarily been focusing on our own families while waiting to see what unfolds and trying to keep up with active casework. Executive Orders are not automatically laws or immediately actionable, but we have been acutely aware of increasing danger to Trans individuals including ourselves and loved ones. We have also feared for those nonprofit organizations and medical centers who serve the Trans population and receive government funding, as they are being pressured to remove mentions of Transgender people or gender identity from their websites and materials. This is now directly impacting our work, and we need to let you know where things stand, because we know that you care about our cases as much as we do.

We were tragically unsurprised to learn that NCMEC had removed all mention of Transgender kids from their website following these Executive Orders. Last week, NBC reached out to us to give a statement, along with GLAAD, regarding the impact this could have on missing Trans kids’ cases. We have repeatedly reached out to NCMEC over the past many years with offers to assist them in how to handle LGBTQIA+ cases more appropriately and safely, because they routinely deadnamed missing Trans kids as well as used older photos of them looking more like their assigned sex and creating age progression images to more closely align with their assigned sex as well. We have offered them Trans-specific education, case consultation and training, and it is disappointing that they did not take us up on our offers, but we have tried anyway, and the offer is still on the table. A major difference between our organizations is that we do not publicly share missing Trans kids' cases, as outing a missing Trans child or teen could cause them to become even more at risk than they are, and they are already in the category of highest risk for things like hate-based violence or trafficking. So far, other than individual case pages, what we can see is that several documents previously available on the NCMEC website are no longer available, including a report on male victims of child sex trafficking which included information on Trans girls.

We have also become aware of and can confirm that multiple Trans and gender variant missing persons and unidentified persons cases on NamUs have been altered or are presently unavailable. To our knowledge, prior to this year, NamUs had not censored information regarding case description of a Trans or gender variant person, as the descriptions were written by the submitting investigators rather than NamUs employees and were written to the satisfaction of their individual Law Enforcement agencies or departments such as medical examiners’ offices. We have had some positive communications with people at NamUs in past years, and subsequently, NamUs did create an ‘other’ category. But as of right now, it appears that all cases have been moved out of that category for both missing and unidentified persons. It did somewhat catch us off guard that NamUs seems to have done a sweeping website edit, and we are looking into it further.

Both organizations’ databases at the time we began the Trans Doe Task Force had exclusionary binary sex categories, preventing Trans cases from being compared automatically to both categories, and in certain cases excluded them entirely from search results. This is what led us to the creation of our own database, LAMMP (LGBT+ Accountability for Missing and Murdered Persons), as we realized we must take care of our own community. We couldn’t have predicted the current events of today, but we knew we needed to protect and preserve any and all information about any case that didn’t clearly fit their binary categories.

Missing and unidentified persons organizations' support should be available to all, and a minority group of people, especially children, shouldn't be targeted by the government to be stripped of services. Many LGBTQIA+ children have gone missing due to unsafe conditions at home and unsupportive families, especially with the growing anti-Trans paranoia fanned by this administration’s propaganda. NCMEC was already struggling to properly meet the needs of missing LGBTQIA+ kids, and the resulting loss of potential resources and help is going to hurt these cases and reduce the chance of a positive outcome. It will hurt children and families. With NamUs seemingly complying as well and removing important details of unidentified persons cases, less cases will be resolved, and more and more current cases will go cold. This obviously hurts Trans cases, but will also hurt cases overall, as many cisgender individuals do not clearly fit into binary sex categories. For proof of this, review the several cases of cisgender people that we have helped identify in which the unidentified person’s sex estimate was incorrect, and they were put in the wrong category and would never have been matched with a corresponding missing persons report. It is for this reason that we always rule cases in instead of out and keep our umbrella wide, because people fall through the cracks in binary systems all the time, both Trans and not. For more education on this topic, we have many of our academic presentations and publications saved within the history of our ‘Articles’ section of our website.

Our team is working to identify which cases have been affected so we can directly contact the overseeing agency for each case and offer our assistance. We will continue to work within our organization as well as with investigators to appropriately follow through on cases of missing Trans or gender-variant adults and children, even if we do not share everything we are doing. If you are a loved one of someone whose case does not clearly fit the binary sex categories this administration is dictating, or if you are an investigator tasked with a case in which the subject may be Trans, please contact us and we will do what we can to assist. Investigators can also request private access to our LAMMP database by emailing us.

We do not have a large annual budget, unlike some of these organizations which are funded into the multi-millions, and we appreciate your support deeply. The Trans Doe Task Force does not receive any government funding, and as such, we will not be subjected to requests for compliance with dangerous and bigoted exclusionary orders. We also will not comply in advance, nor remove ourselves from visibility online despite increasing hostility and danger. WE STILL WILL NOT BE ERASED.

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Our social media post from yesterday (February 14 2025)

We have been seeing online speculation and concern about the Trans cases on NCMEC and NamUs being changed or unavailable, and yes we are very aware of the situation. We can confirm that multiple missing and unidentified Trans cases do appear to be altered or down. We are working to identify which cases in our LAMMP database have been affected so that we can reach out to the overseeing departments directly for each case. If you are an investigator on a Trans case and you would like to reach us, please email us. We will be releasing a more thorough statement from our Board of Directors very soon. In the meantime, here is an article from last week that we were asked to comment on: DOJ ordered review of 'gender ideology' compliance at child safety authority