Obsession with util and numbers causes anti-queer erasure---it’s an independent link to their impact calculus. Law confirms its self-reproducing antiblackness and anti-queerness through miscalculation and willful ignorance of queer death.

Cold Calculations Can one recognize what is made to exist beyond recognition—the remains of a missing queer or the identity of an unnamed trans woman whose body is never claimed? How do we measure the pain of burying generations of those we love and those we never knew? Rashawn Brazell’s brutal end asks these questions through its calculus of trauma. This kind of loss instructs a precarious organization, a kind of trace of that which was never there, a death that places into jeopardy the category of life itself. My aim here is not an investigation that simply confirms that which those living this proximity to death already know but to build out a vocabulary for a war of position that might collectively overwhelm the world in which it persists. The numbers, degrees, locations, kinds, types, and frequency of attacks— the statistical evidence that is meant to prove that a violation really occurred, are the legitimizing measures that dictate the ways we are obliged to understand harm. Data are translated into policy that calls for yet another study—the loop of bureaucratic knowledge ensures we know little. Indeed, statistics as an epistemological project may be another way the enormity of anti-trans/queer violence is disappeared. The trouble with thinking only or primarily statistically about violence is both a theoretical and a material trap. Although statistical evidence is assumed to account for rates of occurrence and severity, statistics seem to have a way of ensuring that Rashawn Brazell’s head is never found. Horrifically, because his head has yet to be recovered, the “actual” cause of death still cannot be officially determined. Not yet dead according to the parameters of the law but experienced as nothing other by his mother and community, Rashawn Brazell’s murder has for this reason, among others, never made it into “hate violence” statistics, which confirms the law’s anti-Black and anti-queer functionality.25 Further, the fbi, through the Criminal Justice Information Services (cjis) division, collects the only national data of targeted violence. Their database contains categories for religious, racial, and disability “bias,” and antihomosexual (male and female), anti-bisexual, and anti-heterosexual incidents (for 2017, thirty-two “anti-homosexual” and 106 “anti-transgender” incidents were reported).26 This report is optional for local jurisdictions, and 2017 recorded only 119 incidents based on “gender identity,” consisting of infractions ranging from vandalism to murder, and only sixty-nine “victims” who experienced “multi-bias” incidents. It would seem misguided at best to suggest that the number 119 can really tell us anything about the work of anti-trans violence. Reported attacks on “out” trans/queer people like these data can, of course, only work as a swinging signifier for the incalculable referent of the actualized terror. This is not simply a numerical issue; it is a larger question of the friction between measures and effect. Not unlike the structuring lack produced by any representation that offers us, the viewer, the promise of the real, statistics can leave us with only a fragmented copy of what it might index.27 Reports on anti-trans/queer violence, such as those from the cjis, reproduce in tandem the impossibility of statistical completeness along with the actual loss of those that fall outside of accounting. The excesses of the official record also constitute it—the subaltern remains of that which can never enter into representation reminds us of the arresting horror of the ever-disappearing archive. Or, put another way, the quantitative limits of what gets recorded as anti-trans/queer violence cannot begin to apprehend the numbers of bodies that are collected off cold pavement and highway underpasses, nameless flesh whose stories of cruelty never find their way into an official account beyond a few scant notes in a police report of a body of a “man in a dress” discovered.28 Even when a murderer is not successful and there is a survivor who could enter the act into the official record, incidents are not often reported to the fbi or local police.29 Abolitionists remind us that the police are still among the largest perpetrators of racist anti-trans/queer harm, from sexual assaults and street harassment to imprisonment and murder.30 With the police or some other tentacle of the prison industrial complex, namely the fbi, as the only collection, processing, and reporting agency for such data, people’s resistance should come as no surprise. This apprehension lives within the collective consciousness that the legal system is organizationally indifferent, at best, toward survivors. Those with proximity to the system know by way of living the second order violation of becoming evidence for a district attorney whose singular aim is convictions.31