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This past week, a Pennsylvania man was arrested for the murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old boy. The man allegedly lured the boy to his death through Grindr, a gay hookup app. The boy’s last Snapchat image was posted at 2:30 in the morning, on a dark road, with the comment that he was just out for a late-night walk. Nobody ever heard from him again.
Several grim and (one would think) obvious lessons should immediately present themselves to all concerned adults here. However, it appears that the adults are determined not to learn them, because this particular boy believed he was a girl. Consequently, all their energy has been spent on making sure nobody “misgenders” him in death, using him as a mascot of “anti-trans” violence, and taking the opportunity to lobby for new “hate-crime” legislation.
Chad Felix Greene covers the case with righteous fury at The Federalist, writing as a gay journalist who is regularly disgusted by the self-serving fictions of LGBTQ+ media. Greene provided similarly honest coverage of the Dagny (“Nex”) Benedict case, another death of a vulnerable teen which was exploited and spun as something it wasn’t. Benedict, who identified as “non-binary,” had died the day after a clash with several girls in her school bathroom. As soon as the story came out, absent further evidence or autopsy results, she became an overnight icon. Her “trans name” became an instant trending hashtag, with candlelight vigils around the country demanding “justice.” It would later emerge that her death was a suicide, with no evidence that the bathroom clash had even been triggered by her “non-binary” presentation. Greene documents further tragic details about her broken family background, including sexual abuse at the hands of her own father. It was clear that this young girl had suffered terribly in her short life. But turning her into an avatar for shallow social activism wasn’t going to address any of that suffering, nor was it going to help anyone else like her.
One name is consistently invoked in the spin around cases like this: Matthew Shepard, the young gay man whose 1998 murder in small-town Wyoming became the hate crime by which all other hate crimes are measured. His body was discovered barely alive, pistol-whipped and tied to a fence—as if crucified, one rumor ran. During the investigation, a major paper published an illustration of him bound to a crossbeam, arms spread out. At a rally of politicians and celebrities, Ellen DeGeneres’s lover Anne Heche dramatically asked, “Mr. Trent Lott, Mr. Newt Gingrich, Mr. Jerry Falwell, how many Christs must bear the crosses until we learn that we are all children of God?”
The case would go on to inspire the expansion of hate crime legislation in Matthew’s name, signed by Barack Obama in 2009. In 2018, his remains were interred in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, “where he rests in safety alongside Helen Keller and other saints of God,” in the words of the Cathedral’s website. Through the years, his death has inspired films, plays, poems. It has become, in a word, mythic.
But there was a problem: The myth wasn’t true. And the truth was far murkier than people wanted to think about.
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