Accountability for Brianna Ghey

Maybe even for you

Brianna Ghey is a teenage trans influencer in the UK with a surprisingly large social media presence for her age. In that sense, she’s not all that dissimilar from Dylan Mulvaney, 20-something TikTok sensation and face of one (1) Bud Light can. They both have chosen a form of low-key activism, living life in public and thereby demystifying trans lives without actually taking a hard turn to activism. Neither is about criticizing so much as connecting, though each has received more than her fair share of online hatred and threats.

In other ways, however, Mulvaney and Ghey are vastly different. Ghey is younger, for one. And for another she is dead after two other UK teens who wished to experience what it was like to kill someone chose Ghey as their victim, lured her to a park by pretending to be her friend online, then stabbed her 28 times in a planned but frenzied assault. Part of the choice to single out Ghey for murder was, certainly, her fame. But the judge overseeing the trial of the teen murderers also found that animosity towards trans people formed part of the rationale for targeting Ghey. In partial accountability for this crime, the two killers have been sentenced in a UK court today.

The tragedy Ghey and her family and friends have suffered invites a comparison not so much with Mulvaney but to a pair of women that you’ve either never heard of or forgotten: Roxanne Ellis and Michelle Abdill. Ellis and Abdill met in Colorado and fell in love before moving to southern Oregon when Colorado proved too hostile to lesbians like them. In Medford they worked as property managers. One day Ellis went to show an apartment. She later called Abdill to help with a jump start. Neither Abdill nor Ellis ever returned.

They were killed by a man named Robert Acremont, who later said that he didn’t choose to target Abdill and Ellis because they were lesbians, but that did make killing them easier, “because I don’t like them.” “Them” being queer women.

Abdul and Ellis were killed in 1995, after they had lived several years in the area, made connections, and fought repeated anti-queer Oregon Citizens’ Alliance ballot measures, working especially hard in 1992 and 1993. They have been remembered by many, including me, and their work was carried on by a queer community centre in Ashland, Oregon named after them. But these days I suspect I’m one of less than a thousand who remembers their names and the fear Acremont sent through Oregon’s queers 29 years ago. For his crime, Acremont was sentenced to death, though he died of natural causes after 22 years in prison.

The murder of Ghey has likewise caused huge waves of fear and has likewise been covered sympathetically by media using it to illustrate the dangers of politicized hatred toward marginalized people fighting for safety and respect. And of course it’s not as if the stories of Ghey, Abdul, and Ellis are alone in that respect.

You know who I’m going to name next, right? Of course you do. Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock. They were killed in a firebombing upstate from Ashland and Medford, in the state capital, actually. They too were killed in the midst of the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance campaign to stigmatize and disempower queer people. They too were targeted only partly because of their sexual orientation. One or two of the skinheads who murdered them lived in the same buildings, the others were frequent guests, and they resented Cohens over her noise and behaviour complaints. But part of it was definitely that Cohens was Black and that Cohens & Mock were both queer. And, like the other stories I’ve told, the media covered their murders mostly sympathetically, with an eye towards examining the larger social conflict using these two murders as a lens. As for the killers, three of the four were sentenced to 35, 30, and 25 years in prison respectively. There were questions at the time: Is that accountability?

There are other comparable stories as well. Let’s look at one not from Oregon. Again, the story is the obvious one which I’m sure you all remember from 1998: the murder of Rita Hester. She was young (though still twice the age of 16-year old Brianna Ghey) and Black and trans and friendly as all get-out. She had friends all over the Boston area. She was by all accounts a remarkable woman.

And then she was stabbed twenty times.

And then the police publicly deadnamed her, which research may show¹ makes the murders of trans people more difficult to solve, and shelved the case.

The murderous overkill might remind you of the 28 stab wounds inflicted on Ghey. But the comparison I wish to make here is to another 1998 murder that happened just a few weeks prior: that of Matthew Shepard.

Shepard was killed no less brutally than Hester. However Shepard was a white gay man. The media immediately leapt on Shepard’s case the way that they covered that of Cohens and Mock, or Abdill and Ellis a few years earlier. This time, however, the scale of the coverage was massive, and public reaction dramatically increased. Vigils and protests erupted around the United States.

Unlike others killed that I’ve mentioned, rather than being unknown to those who did not seek out information about his death, the coverage of Shepard was so overwhelming it was impossible not to hear his name — on TV, on the bus, in the barbershop, in the workplace. Shepard was killed and police immediately pursued his murderers, arresting them within scant days, then protests rose up everywhere over the next weeks and months. In Portland the largest drew between 5 and 30 thousand.

Certainly the stories are different. Hester’s murderer has never been caught. But does that mean that we have had no accountability for her death? None at all?

Consider this: Legislating against the marginalized and violence against the marginalized are correlated. It’s not particularly a surprise that murders of trans people in raw numbers were highest from 2010 to 2021 in Texas, Florida, and California. Those are the three states with the highest populations, so woe would expect raw numbers (i.e. numbers not adjusted for population) to be highest there. But California had over 39 million residents in 2020, while Texas had 29 and Florida about 21.5 while murders were highest in Texas, then Florida, and with California in third. With roughly double Florida’s population, California had fewer documented murders of trans people, 21 to Florida’s 25 (yielding rates of 0.53 and 1.16, respectively, per million total population). Estimates of trans populations share similar weaknesses throughout the USA, so while those numbers may not be as accurate as we like, they can be useful, though imperfect for making comparisons. Dividing murders by trans population estimate rather than total population, Louisiana shows the most risk among the states (though by this measure the risk in Washington, D.C. is even higher) with Mississippi and Missouri right behind. Without dismissing reasonable criticisms of California, it is trivial to show that the governments of Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri all show more governmental hostility to trans lives than California’s.

The United Kingdom also displays its fair share of hostility to trans lives. While the constitutional and legislative environments are different in London and Sacramento, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the longtime Tory (and DUP) rule has been more hostile to trans persons, particularly since 2017, than Democratic rule in California.

While little of this information is perfectly certain, we have many and strong reasons to believe that political hostility and interpersonal violence are strongly linked. This was the rationale for my gathering in the cold of 1998 with as many as 30,000 others after the muder of Matthew Shepard, and it was the rationale for my gathering in the cold of 1998 with as many as 9 others after the murder of Rita Hester. I said, as the spotty few of us spoke to each other at the corner of Alberta and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, that I couldn’t imagine the nation rising together to protest my own murder the way that they had Shepard’s. Is this, too, a measure of accountability denied? What if, in the 25 years since her death, Massachusetts as a state and Boston as a city have moved away from the practices which erased Rita Hester’s life and very possibly allowed her killer to escape. It may not be what we would wish, but is that the same as zero accountability?

Ghey’s murder has received far more and far more positive attention than that of Hester 25 years ago. Even so, there are no widespread protests tens of thousands strong demanding the government responsible for protecting children like Ghey cease its opposition to the medical care and humane measures that Ghey needed for her health and safety.

Trans people continue to be murdered in the USA, particularly Black trans women (at approximately 70% of murders identified) and with Latinx trans women representing the next largest group by gender and race (at 16%). Taya Ashton, killed in 2021 and whose murderer was sentenced just last week, was a US citizen killed in a US state, yet the Black woman gets less coverage within these borders than the white and foreign Brianna Ghey.

It is not as if Taya was much older than Ghey, though legally the 20 year old was an adult. Another relevant comparison is that Taya was more than a year younger than Matthew Shepard was on the day of his own murder. We are losing the young and the vulnerable, the people who resist the conservative sentence of life without change. These people who live out loud can and should be symbols to all of us not only of courage to resist, but also of hope for change.

Yet we cannot seem to mourn the trans persons murdered by hatred the way that we do and did others like Shepard. Some of this is our society’s racism, of course. I still remember the name of James Byrd, another person murdered in 1998. The details of what avowed white supremacists did to Byrd are if anything more horrific than what was done to Shepard or Hester. But as with Hester, Portland held no 30,000 strong vigil for the Black Byrd killed by three white men.

I often wonder, with the links being so clear, why can’t we respond to murders like that of Byrd and Hester and even Ghey with the same energy and numbers we used to demand better of our leaders on behalf of Shepard. While it is not yet researched and tested, much less proven, I think I have found an answer in accountability.

We are afraid of being held accountable. At a level we are frequently unwilling to admit to ourselves, we who live in this racist nation know that we are racist ourselves. Perhaps we are confident we are not harbouring hatred comparable to Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer, and John King (think Travis and Gregory McMichael and William Bryan if you remember the killing of Ahmaud Arbery better than that of James Byrd). Perhaps we are sure that we’re less hateful than Donald Trump or Greg Abbott. But we know that there is something unhealthy inside us, and we fear being judged based on the worst of our thoughts, the worst of our feelings. We know that we are not innocent.

It takes a certain moral clarity to create a protest movement on the scale of the response to George Floyd’s killing, or Shepard’s. It took a hugely long time to move from the founding of the Hirschfeld Institute² or even the Mattachine Society to a nationwide mourning for the death of Matthew Shepard. And as for the protests in response to Derek Chauvin’s murderous suffocation of Floyd, well, they were framed as protests against police racism, against law enforcement’s excessive violence. While the fear of being judged for their own racism might hold back many from participating in some Black Lives Matter events, people who don’t work in law enforcement could attend the Floyd protests secure that they themselves were not threatened with accountability. For three hundred million people, the moral clarity necessary to denounce Chauvin’s actions faced no occultation so long as the language of accountability was focussed on law enforcement.

As for the Shepard protests, while straight people did attend in numbers I’m sure were comparable to white persons attending the George Floyd protests, easily half of the people in Pioneer Courthouse Square for Portland’s largest vigil were themselves queer, with a large number of them longtime activists. As massive as this wave of protest was, it was still held back from being a truly universal outcry by the uncertainty many still had and too many still have about whether a movement for accountability in response to heterosexism might actually target themselves.

I believe that today we know as a society that we treat trans people poorly. We respond with stigma and bullying and bomb threats and, ultimately, bills where we should respond with support and friendship and resources and very, very different bills. We understand that deadnaming is wrong and that misgendering is harmful.

But also we don’t know how to show support. We’re not always comfortable being friends. We fear resources for trans people means taxes for us. And even if we wanted to change the law, we’re just not sure what bills we might offer.

In short, we are a people that has moved far enough to want to do the right thing, but not far enough to pass beyond the reach of our fears of accountability.

This. Must. Change.

For every one of those 48 stab wounds shared between Rita Hester and Brianna Ghey, there are a million public statements justifying their stigmatization, eroding their personhood, denying their sanity, contesting their humanity.

This. Must. Change.

We fear accountability for our cissexism for good reasons. We’ve all used fireman instead of firefighter. We’ve all dropped the wrong pronoun. We’ve all slipped and used someone’s deadname. Our fear is strong that accountability might come for us next. We fear accountability for our racism, too, and for analogous reasons.

This. Must. Change.

The world needs Taya Ashton and Brianna Ghey and James Byrd and Rita Hester and we’re so, so too late for them and for us. But if we can overcome our fears of accountability, we can make the changes we need.

There are different ways of overcoming this fear. Conservatives convince themselves of their own moral perfection; cleansed of moral flaws, they need fear no accountability. Indeed they are shocked when it comes from them even when their behaviour is as bad as or worse than anything they criticize. “I am good,” they cry. “Accountability must not target the good.” While this does end the fear of accountability, still it blocks change because it denies the existence of the problems we might wish to change.

Thankfully there is another path through this fear. People were not made for the sabbath, but the sabbath for people, or so the saying goes. In Judaism this aphorism is used to help guide interpretations of law. We do no work on Saturday? Maybe. But what about the surgeon in a one-doctor town? Does she turn down the chance to save a life to preserve the restful and reflective character of the holy day? Of course not. Nor does the midwife refuse to assist with labor until after havdalah. Lives are at stake, and we do what is right and just for them.

Likewise, accountability must serve the people who have been hurt, who have been wronged; we should not ask them — really us — to suffer more in order to preserve some pure notion of accountability. Mercy may be the suspension of a just punishment, but that does not mean that mercy is necessarily counter to justice, cannot serve justice.

Accountability cannot only be measured in years in prison. Accountability should not only look like punishment for the killers, the rapists, the irredeemable consumed by hatred. Accountability must be better than that. We need an accountability that redeems the redeemable. It can and must be not only proportionate, but friendly and supportive where it is both possible and effective to be so. We must learn to love each other and ourselves so much that we welcome accountability. If we love others, we welcome it as an opportunity to make others happier and healthier. If we love ourselves, we should believe in our own capacity for positive change and welcome accountability as an opportunity to be yet better, to be friendlier, to be more lovable, and ultimately to be more deservedly and securely loved.

The nature of a new accountability without fear that frees us to be the people we wish to be, and to act in ways that today’s fear demands we avoid but today’s justice demands we act, that is beyond the scope of this already very long essay. But it is something we must all explore, together. I have said before and I will say again, the only radical idea that anyone has ever had is accountability for the powerful to the powerless. With accountability such quotidian things as new state laws, office policies, school dress codes and even family customs can all contribute to rapid and radical change. Without accountability, even the most upside down notions of social revolution are just reform.

But as long as we treat accountability as something to be feared, we will never implement it. We owe so many people so much better than that. We owe ourselves better than that.

Whether its Ghey with her white, youthful face or Ashton with her relatable story of being killed by someone who was supposed to love her, whether in the horror of the long road of rough rock or a long fence of sharpened barbs, whether it happens on the Transgender Day of Remembrance that Hester’s life helped inspire or during Black History Month’s reflection on lashings and lynchings, I will not judge your why, your where, your when. I simply ask that you hold my hand and take one step away from your fears, one step towards a universal, just, loving, and vital new accountability.

1. The WGBH story asserts that research does show this, but the link provided is to a research paper that does not include this information. (The paper is relevant to the topic and the first author has written repeatedly on topics related to violance against trans persons, so my best guess is they confused two papers by the same author. Unfortunately I did not feel like reading every paper ever written by the guy to track down the source of this mistake.) Given that we don’t have a solid source, we should be aware of a couple things with this claim. The first is that it’s plausible on its face: if people know me as Crip Dyke and the police ask for information on Lenny Kravitz after I am murdered, they are quite obviously less likely to elicit the relevant info they need. Secondly, deadnaming is not limited to people with deep animosity to trans persons, but resisting deadnaming is definitely much more common among people dedicated to the proposition that trans rights are human rights. In other words, there may very well be a correlation without causation here in that cops who deadname during an investigation are more likely to be cops who don’t care about trans lives. Cops who avoid deadnaming are more likely to be cops who do care about trans lives. This can easily translate into a correlation with the level of effort and attention an investigator is willing to give to the case. With at least one obvious and plausible causation mechanism, and at least one obvious and plausible mechanism for correlation without causation, it seems likely that the correlation intrinsic to the WGBH assertion is true, but without access to the study it’s much more difficult to say why this is true, which makes the WGBH assertion of causation (that deadnaming causes investigations to be harder to close) plausible but not sound. My guess is that deadnaming does make it harder to gain information from the public, but it’s difficult to be sure that this has a significant causative effect on closure rate.

2. Please forgive the Hirschfeld Institute site its poor translations. In particular “hermaphrodite” is used where the proper translation is best rendered “transsexual” or “transgender” and “transvestite” where we would use “cross dresser” and/or “drag performer” depending on context. This is an official site originally written in German. It’s very possible that it was even translated largely by Google or a similar service.