Shame on the ghouls exploiting the Brianna Ghey tragedy

In February this year, two teenagers lured 16-year-old Brianna Ghey to a park near Warrington, Cheshire, under the guise of taking drugs together. Ghey was then stabbed 28 times. In the immediate aftermath of this horrific murder, many jumped to the conclusion that it must have been a hate crime, given that Ghey identified as transgender.

Cheshire Police disagreed. Transphobia was ruled out as a motive within 48 hours. Nevertheless, vigils and protests were held in Ghey’s name, including one organised in London outside the Department for Education, which the Transgender Action Block had decided was responsible for Ghey’s death. Apparently, the department had ‘deliberately created [a] trans-hostile environment’. On social media, it was also widely claimed that transphobia must have been the cause.

Following the trial of the two suspects and their conviction yesterday for Ghey’s murder, we now know that the police were right to rule out transphobia as a motive. We learnt that the two depraved 16-year-old culprits, known only as Boy Y and Girl X, were not motivated by transphobia.

A great deal of the evidence shown in court came from the killers’ WhatsApp messages, where they outlined their murder plans in gruesome detail. There are certainly points in the killers’ conversations where they made grim comments relating to Ghey’s trans identity. At one point, Boy Y said he wanted to know ‘if it will scream like a man or a girl’, and that he wants ‘to see… what size dick it had’. Boy Y often refers to Ghey as ‘it’. But it is hardly unsurprising that a cold-hearted killer would want to dehumanise his victim.

Girl X, meanwhile, by her own admission was ‘obsessed’ with Ghey – and sometimes full of admiration. She would complain that Ghey was prettier than her. She even talked about taking one of Ghey’s ‘pretty’ eyes as a trophy after the murder.

Ultimately, Girl X and Boy Y were deeply disturbed individuals. They were obsessed with emulating past serial killers. They were described by Cheshire Police detective chief superintendent Mike Evans as having a ‘real thirst for death and murder’. This was clearly their motive.

The sad truth is that had Brianna Ghey not been the victim that day, it would have been someone else. The trial has made it clear that Boy Y and Girl X were determined to kill someone. In fact, they had a whole ‘kill list’, which included the names of four other children. They had even explicitly discussed trying to hang one of the boys on the list, who seemed to be their preferred target. ‘If we can’t get [him] tomorrow we can kill Brianna’, the girl said over text.

Yet none of this evidence from the court has stopped trans activists from claiming transphobia as a motive. Worse still, they have sought to blame Ghey’s murder on gender-critical feminists – on women whose only crime has been to stand up for their sex-based rights against the march of gender ideology. Trans activists seem to think that supporting women’s rights is tantamount to incitement to violence.

When the guilty verdict came in, broadcaster and trans activist India Willoughby quickly took to X to accuse Harry Potter author JK Rowling and other gender-critical voices of ‘helping [to] kill’ Ghey. Former Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley similarly tweeted that ‘transphobia kills’. Labour MP Dawn Butler took aim at the Conservative government, accusing it of having ‘created so much hate towards the trans community’.

Most absurd of all, Jolyon Maugham, the fox-beating lawyer who runs the Good Law Project, was so eager to blame ‘transphobia’ for Ghey’s murder that he did not even bother to wait for the guilty verdict. Police officers had to warn the supposedly top-flight lawyer that his baseless assertions about the killers’ motive could potentially prejudice the trial and be in contempt of court.

The truth is clear. Transphobia did not kill Brianna Ghey. Two deeply disturbed individuals did. Trans activists’ claims to the contrary are not only wrong – they are ghoulish and grotesque. These people are exploiting the gruesome murder of a teenager to get one over on their enemies on Twitter. They ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Lauren Smith is an editorial assistant at spiked.

Picture by: YouTube.