Data Methodology
Google Trends Data is a timely and revealing mirror of the world. “Black Trans Lives Matter” seeks to highlight, through Search data, the disproportionate violence and discrimination experienced by the transgender community, and celebrate the activists working to advance transgender equality.
Notably, the data indicates America is trying to understand the root causes of alarming violence and murder rates of transgender people this year, particularly Black transgender women. As a result, “black trans lives matter” was searched 10x more in 2020 compared to the previous year in the U.S.
The film features a mixture of terms that were searched at an all-time high in 2020 and commonly searched terms related to the Black trans community this year, each validated on August 17, 2020 by Google News Lab. Additionally—using Google’s proprietary internal tools—each query was required to meet a minimum threshold of search volume in the last 90 days to qualify for the film.
Countless tragic deaths have occurred in the Black trans community. The names of the Black trans individuals featured in the film were identified in Search data and are not intended to be a complete list.
Google recognizes the Associated Press’ June 2020 changes to its usage rules requiring the capitalization of the word “Black” when used in the context of race and culture. However, queries included in this film are presented in lower case as an exact representation of the Google Trends Search data.
The film features the following Search queries1:
- U.S. search interest for “transphobia” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “trans homeless” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “trans healthcare” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “black trans people killed” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “trans rights” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “trans women are women” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “trans activists” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “black trans lives matter” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “raquel willis” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “miss major griffin gracy” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “laverne cox” exceeded the minimum threshold to meet Google’s scale in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “shea diamond” reached an all-time high in 2020
- U.S. search interest for “andrea jenkins” reached an all-time high in 2020
1Spanish translation of data is based on U.S., English language insights.