User:Mswitala26/Sexual assault of LGBT persons

General Obstacles
Despite facing a higher rates of sexual assault than than heterosexual and cisgender people, members of the LGBTQ+ community do not report sexual assault as much. Many are afraid of mistreatment due to their sexual or gender orientation, with 85% of victim advocates stating that LGBTQ+ victims they have worked with have been denied services due to their identities. Many also fear being outed (having their sexual or gender identity known publicly) in the process of reporting assault.

Transgender People
Transgender people and other gender minorities (non-binary people, etc.) are over four times more likely to experience sexual violence with one in two transgender people experiencing some form of sexual abuse or assault in their lives (about 47% of transgender people ) than their cisgender counterparts. This number only increases for gender minorities of colour, that do sex work, are homeless, and have disabilities. About 57% of these victims, however, have reported feeling uncomfortable reporting their assaults to the authorities, and 58% reported mistreatment by law enforcement, including but not limited to misgendering and verbal, physical, and further sexual assault.

According to scholars Adam M. Messinger, Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz, sexual assault and intimate partner violence (IPV) against transgender people is distinct because of two societal norms: cisnormativity and transphobia. They expand upon this in their book, Transgender Intimate Partner Violence, where cisnormativity is defined as "the expectation that all people are cisgender, along with the privileging of cisgender experience and the pathologizing of transgender experience," and transphobia as "a strong dislike of or fear of transgender people." They argue that