Brianna Ghey was a fearless child. In saying so, her parents do not necessarily mean that she was not afraid, but that she was brave enough to pursue the life she wanted anyway. Her mother described a naturally outgoing teenager who loved attention but had lately spent much of her time in her bedroom making TikTok videos that sometimes attracted abusive comments. In court, she was described as anxious.
If that sounds confusing and contradictory, then 16-year-olds are. By turns defiant and vulnerable, noisy and insecure, they are half-hatched butterflies still in the messy process of unfolding. In Brianna’s case, that process involved coming out as trans. Throughout a bleak trial that saw two 15-year-olds convicted of savagely stabbing her to death in a suburban Cheshire park, this one aspect of her life has been impossible to forget.
The jury were told that they didn’t need to know why Girl X and Boy Y – who were not named because of their ages – had targeted Brianna, in order to find them guilty. But it’s the why that is haunting. For very many LGBT people, Brianna’s brutal death seemingly confirms their worst fears about a culture war whipping up hostility against trans people. Those who lit candles and held vigils embracing Brianna as the victim of a transphobic hate crime see her death a reminder (as Manchester Pride said) that “our beautiful community should never be harmed or doubted but protected and loved”. At such a moment it feels hideously crass for the equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, to be trumpeting a crackdown on so-called social transitioning in schools, under which teachers will be encouraged to push back against children’s requests to change pronouns.
Yet Cheshire police insist they don’t believe Brianna was killed for being trans. Girl X had identified four potential victims against whom she or Boy Y had grudges, none of them trans, and detectives believe that if it hadn’t been Brianna, it might well have been one of the others. Motivated by “a thirst for killing”, the police argue, they simply chose the most available victim.
That this killing was complex does not, however, render Brianna’s identity irrelevant. Boy Y referred to her dehumanisingly as “it” in texts to Girl X, as they egged each other on to make their murderous fantasies come true; he wanted to see, he wrote, if Brianna would “scream like a man or a girl”. Did her trans identity make her, in his eyes, a more acceptable target? Girl X, meanwhile, claimed in court she found Brianna interesting and attractive, and wasn’t anti-trans. But in texts she mentioned being “obsessed” with Brianna for reasons she couldn’t explain, prompting Y to respond: “I don’t think you’re necessarily in love but you’re more curious and intrigued by its unnatural nature.” Disgust and fascination can be a dangerous combination.
Meanwhile Brianna’s own underlying anxiety, detectives said, may have made her more trusting of Girl X’s overtures. A child who feels different, fearful of rejection, might be eager for friends.
Brianna’s trans identity certainly feels like an inescapable part of this awful tragedy, and yet to make it the whole is to miss something else about this brutal killing of a child by children, one of whom rejected a proposed date for murder because it was a “school night”.
The ghost hanging over it all is that of James Bulger, the toddler kidnapped and killed by two boys so young that one sucked his thumb in the dock. Unlike poor James’s killers, Girl X and Boy Y seemingly came from happy enough backgrounds. But both were diagnosed with autism, severe enough in the boy’s case that he communicated in court by text. (To say so is not to excuse them or stigmatise other autistic people, any more than the difficult home lives of James Bulger’s killers excused them, but to understand the full picture.)
Girl X started self-harming at 12, and was still only 14 when she downloaded a browser allowing her to access illegal underground sites hosting videos featuring torture, murder and suicide, which were deemed likely to have desensitised her to violence, and towards which she guided Boy Y. The court heard she may have been led towards ever more extreme material by algorithms designed to keep feeding us more of what we crave.
When a child dies in circumstances public and tragic, there is always a danger of them becoming public property, their memory co-opted by strangers in ways not chosen by the bereaved. Neither side of an already bitter culture war over trans rights should be exploiting Brianna’s death for their own political ends, and all of us must recognise the dangers of stoking hate, regardless of whether that turns out to have been the motive in this case or not.
The Ghey family has set an admirable example by establishing a charity in their daughter’s name to help other children dealing with difficult emotions, and by appealing for empathy, including towards the parents of Girl X and Boy Y, whose children face life sentences. Three families lie in ruins, and many parents of teenagers will feel in different ways for them all. We don’t seek another culture war: what we need is politicians who are capable of unpicking this complex tangle of teenage mental health problems, unfettered access to disturbing material online, and questions about which children are most vulnerable in a fast-changing digital world that we still understand only poorly. The jury may not have needed to understand exactly what drove her murderers. But as a society, we can’t afford not to.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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