This is the third study that I’m blogging about in the week of new studies. The first study was about how belief in gender ideologies was linked to supporting political violence. The second study was about how state laws that ban transgender drugs and surgeries don’t increase suicide rates. Today’s new study is about how the murders of transgender people are primarily caused by “intimate partner violence” and not motivated by hatred of any kind.

Here’s a report from The Post Millennial about the new study published by The Manhattan Institute.

It says:

Transgender Americans are killed at a lower rate than the general population, and when such killings do occur, bias is typically not the main driver, according to a new report.

“Transgender people are less likely to be murdered than the rest of the population, most transgender people are murdered by members of their own race, and intimate partner violence — not hate — is the leading identified motive for most such murders,” researchers Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright found.

The report examined over 300 homicides involving transgender victims going back to 2015.

Only 3.3 percent of the cases reviewed in the report turned out to be confirmed hate crimes. “The leading identified circumstance of the murders was instead intimate partner violence,” the researchers wrote. “Other common circumstances included sex-work encounters, disputes, robbery, and other forms of interpersonal conflict.”

“In other words, the dominant pattern is not hateful white men hunting down black transgender victims because of racism and transphobia. It is violence between people who know each other, sleep with each other, live around each other, or encounter each other in high-risk contexts,” the report added.

Gay activists often jump on the sexual orientation of a victim in order to justify blaming conservatives and Christians. They do this so that they can use police and government power to punish people who disagree with them. In short, just because the victim is a certain sexual minority, it does not logically follow that the killer was attacking them for that reason. This pattern of assuming bias motive just because the victim belongs to a sexual or gender minority is not new. We saw a high-profile version of it with Matthew Shepard.

Although the corporate news media and gay activists blamed Matthew’s killing on anti-gay bias, the truth was completely different. And this was reported in The Advocate, the most famous publication that supports LGBT activism.

It says:

What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong? What if our most fiercely held convictions about the circumstances of that fatal night of October 6, 1998, have obscured other, more critical, aspects of the case? How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that facts are slippery — that thinking of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime? And how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?

None of this is idle speculation; it’s the fruit of years of dogged investigation by journalist Stephen Jimenez, himself gay. In the course of his reporting, Jimenez interviewed over 100 subjects, including friends of Shepard and of his convicted killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, as well as the killers themselves (though by the book’s end you may have more questions than answers about the extent of Henderson’s complicity).  In the process, he amassed enough anecdotal evidence to build a persuasive case that Shepard’s sexuality was, if not incidental, certainly less central than popular consensus has lead us to believe.

And here are the details:

By several accounts, McKinney had been on a meth bender for five days prior to the murder, and spent much of October 6 trying to find more drugs. By the evening he was so wound up that he attacked three other men in addition to Shepard. Even Cal Rerucha, the prosecutor who had pushed for the death sentence for McKinney and Henderson, would later concede on ABC’s 20/20 that “it was a murder that was driven by drugs.”

And:

…Shepard was also a routine drug user, and — according to some of his friends — an experienced dealer. (Although there is no real evidence for supposing that Shepard was using drugs himself on the night of his murder).

And:

A former lover of Shepard’s confirms that Shepard and McKinney had sex while doing drugs in the back of a limo owned by a shady Laramie figure, Doc O’Connor. Another subject, Elaine Baker, tells Jimenez that Shepard and McKinney were friends who had been in sexual threesome with O’Connor. A manager of a gay bar in Denver recalls seeing photos of McKinney and Henderson in the papers and recognizing them as patrons of his bar. He recounts his shock at realizing “these guys who killed that kid came from inside our own community.”

I think it’s good that The Advocate posted this correction. I admire them for being willing to tell the truth about the story. However, the author does not express regret that a false version of the case was used to advance the gay agenda. What if the same willingness to twist the truth is shared by activists who are pushing similar narratives in schools, the media, the workplace, and the culture as a whole?

The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation has become a state-enforced hoax that targets Christianity. The full force of government messaging, media, and public institutions now blames the Christian faith for a uniquely evil crime. A set of unproven accusations has been used to justify hostility toward an entire religious community, resulting in vandalism and church arson. What does the evidence show?

For my American readers who may not follow Canadian news closely, here is the background. From the late 19th century until the 1990s, the Canadian government funded a system of “residential schools” for Indigenous children. Churches—primarily Catholic, with some Protestant involvement—operated many of them under government policy aimed at assimilation. Conditions were often harsh. Disease, especially tuberculosis, killed large numbers of children, as it did in other institutions of the era. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission later documented roughly 3,200 confirmed student deaths, most from illness. In 2021 Canada established the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (observed September 30) to mark that history.

In May 2021 the story exploded. The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected soil anomalies near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Media around the world immediately reported the discovery of a “mass grave” containing the remains of 215 murdered children. Similar announcements followed at other former school sites. The Canadian government lowered flags on federal buildings for months. Dozens of churches were burned or vandalized. Politicians and activists treated the claims as proven genocide carried out by Christian institutions.

Journalist Terry Glavin examined the evidence in the National Post back in May 2024.

He wrote:

“There was much that was dark about residential schools, but no graves have been confirmed at Kamloops to this day… Three years ago this week… the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc chief Rosanne Casimir issued a press release announcing… ‘the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.’… Casimir hadn’t said anything about a mass grave, but the die was cast… This week… Casimir described the same ‘unthinkable loss’… only this time it was that ‘the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of 215 anomalies were detected.’ Anomalies, not ‘the remains of 215 children.’”

Glavin continued:

“In the months following the reported discovery of the Kamloops ‘mass grave’ in 2021, replications of the claim spread from one former residential school site to another… until the ‘missing children’ reportedly discovered in unmarked graves across Canada ended up numbering roughly 1,300. In each case, however, although you’d never have known it from the tabloid-shock headlines, where there were burials at all they turned out to be either graves in known cemeteries, or merely instances of hyperbolic conjecture… Across Canada, there were riots, dozens of churches were burned, statues were toppled, and the Trudeau government decided to keep flags at half-staff on all federal buildings for more than five months.”

Ground-penetrating radar detects disturbances in soil. It does not identify human remains. Years later, the major claimed sites have not produced verified mass graves of secretly murdered children matching the original headlines. Where limited excavations occurred, results did not confirm the sensational narrative.

In September 2023, Sohrab Ahmari summarized the outcome and its moral character in The American Conservative:

“So much for Canada’s mass graves. Two years ago, ground-penetrating radar supposedly discovered mass burial sites near several so-called residential schools… The ‘discovery’ prompted a good old-fashioned racial reckoning. You know, the kind necessitating arson and wanton destruction. In response to the radar findings, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the apparent mass murder (of kids!). Dozens of Canadian churches, including many that served indigenous communities, were burned to the ground by enraged activists—acts Trudeau described as ‘understandable,’ given the enormity of the racist crimes… Now, two years later, we learn that ‘a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains’… The Pine Creek First Nation dug up fourteen sites near a residential school in Manitoba over the summer, and turned up zilch… All have turned up exactly zero human remains… There is no denying that some indigenous children were mistreated in residential schools. But the mass murders and mass burials used to justify attacking churches in general and the Canadian Catholic Church in particular were quite literally a piece of agitprop mythology… Call this what it is: an anti-Catholic blood libel.”

The blood libel was not limited to Catholics. Protestant churches were also targeted. The narrative painted Christian institutions as perpetrators of secret child murder on a massive scale.

The Canadian government amplified that narrative, funded further searches that continued to yield anomalies rather than bodies, and institutionalized the mourning through a permanent national holiday and constant public messaging.

Glavin noted the lasting damage:

“You could say that Panic of 2021 was itself a ‘dark chapter in Canadian history,’ and its lasting damage to Canadians’ sense of their own history is not entirely incalculable… Nearly one in five Canadians believe the horribly high mortality rates in the schools were not due to the known causes of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza, but rather the result of children being deliberately killed.”

That belief is the product of the unproven claims. The 2021 claims that triggered the arsons and the national hysteria rested on radar anomalies that have never been matched by the excavated remains the headlines promised.

The federal government has actively treated skepticism of the most extreme claims as a problem requiring official suppression. Kimberly Murray, the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, recommended in her final report (released October 2024) that Ottawa amend the Criminal Code to create an offence of willfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by “condoning, denying, downplaying, or justifying the Indian Residential School System or by misrepresenting facts relating to it.” She has also called for both civil and criminal sanctions against such “denialism.” In her earlier work she described the existence of unmarked and mass graves as well-documented. (Sources: Globe and Mail on Murray’s report; Budget 2024 allocated $5 million over three years specifically “to combat Residential School denialism.”)

This federal holiday is neither about truth nor reconciliation. It is the federal government weaponizing an unproven accusation that licensed violence against Christians.

Today is day two of my series of posts on new studies. Last time, we looked at a new study that found that support for gender ideologies was associated with support for political violence against dissenters. Today’s study found that there is no evidence for the widespread and alarmist claim that state prohibitions on surgeries, puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones for gender-dysphoric minors increase suicide rates.

The article is from Do No Harm.

Today, Do No Harm released a study finding no evidence for the widespread and alarmist claim that state prohibitions on surgeries, puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones for gender-dysphoric minors increase suicide rates.

[…]Employing three distinct analytical models, Do No Harm found no evidence to support the claim.

“The alarmist claim that protecting children from sex-rejecting procedures increases suicide is false,” said Jay Greene, Director of Research at Do No Harm. “We examined the evidence in a first-of-its-kind study of how teen suicide rates were affected by states adopting policies restricting so-called gender-affirming care for children. No matter how you examine the data, the result is consistently clear: These state policies did not increase teen suicide rates. Medical practice and policy must be grounded in evidence, not emotionally manipulative talking points. That principle is all the more critical when it’s a matter of children’s health and well-being.”

[…]Do No Harm’s study also debunks the flawed research cited by activists, media, and lawmakers to justify the suicide myth and claiming that “gender-affirming care” is “lifesaving.” These studies have profound methodological limitations and depend on unreliable evidence.

I remember Jay P. Greene, because I bought a book by him: “Education Myths”. I try to buy at least two of the best books on every kind of policy. I remember that when I got to education policy, that was one of the books I chose. Anyway, this new study confirms an older study that I reported on before.

This Substack article by Benjamin Ryan talks about that prior study from 2024.

He writes:

The Finnish study’s four coauthors have published some of the strongest scholarship challenging the assertion that providing them to adolescents improves their mental health and is life-saving. All of these Finnish investigators were also coauthors of a paper published in 2024 that found that there was no independent, statistically significant association between taking cross-sex hormones and the rate of suicide deaths among youths attending gender clinics.

The 2024 study was published in a medical journal called BMJ Health. One of the four authors was actually one of the pioneers of gender transitioning treatment. She was all for it, until she got far enough into it that she realized that it wasn’t working out as expected.

Other recent studies have found that transgender treatments and surgeries actually increase the rate of suicide.

First one from Oxford Academic.  The Post Millennnial reported on it:

A study of over 107,000 patients with gender dysphoria over the age of 18 has concluded that those who undergo transgender surgeries, are at greater risk for mental health problems, including depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, and others.

The paper, published in the Oxford Academic Journal of Sexual Medicine, stated in conclusion that bottom and top surgeries are “associated with increased risk of mental health issues.”

And second one is from the journal Cureus and is up at PubMed.

It concluded:

Gender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks, underlining the necessity for comprehensive post-procedure psychiatric support.

The third one is from the journal PLOS One.

It found:

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.

So, I hope that all these studies are helpful for you if you get into a situation where someone is telling you that children will commit suicide unless they get transgender treatments and / or surgeries. The research is pretty clear about this. Sometimes, doctors and hospital workers will lie about the research in order to get health insurance money. Sometimes, airheads will speak in ignorance of the data because they just want to virtue signal. But you have to stick with the evidence even if it’s hard on you. Because that’s how you protect children from predators.