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?