Two teenagers were found guilty of the murder of teenage girl Brianna Ghey today, after what the Crown Prosecution Service described as “one of the most distressing cases the Crown Prosecution Service has had to deal with. The planning, the violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief.” I had to stop following the case because it was so upsetting, the manner of her death so horrific.

Brianna was chosen in part because she was trans.

Brianna didn’t go out much because she’d been the victim of anti-trans bullying (according to fellow pupils; her mother didn’t know about it); her anxiety and loneliness meant her killers saw her as “prey” that would be “easier” for them to kill. One of the murderers, Girl Y, told police that Brianna was “not a normal person”; messages between the two killers showed that the other murderer, Boy X, said that “I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl.”

You can read more about the trial in the many newspapers or hear about it from the many broadcasters that, since 2017, have paid many thousands of pounds to transphobes stirring up hatred about girls just like her. Time it right today and you’ll see that the news of her killers’ conviction is just above equalities minister Kemi Badenoch continuing to claim that it’s “harmful” for schools to support trans kids.

Update, 22 Dec

Predictably enough, the newspaper coverage of this has been vile. The Daily Mail, which you’ll remember bullied trans teacher Lucy Meadows to her death and which has spent the last several years demonising trans people, did one of its “this beautiful angel has been taken too soon” front pages while prominently plugging its Brianna Ghey podcast; it still hates trans people, but it’ll pretend otherwise when there are papers to sell and podcasts to promote. It’s back on its bullshit today, giving vocally anti-trans columnist Sarah Vine the masthead to claim it was the internet wot dunnit. Vine has written many anti-trans articles for the paper, including ones demanding schools don’t support trans kids.

Meanwhile The Guardian, many of whose writers are proudly anti-trans, was quick to say on its front page that the police had ruled out transphobia as a motive for the killing. That simply isn’t true, as the transphobic messages produced in evidence by the police demonstrated. The police ruled out transphobia as the *sole* motive, presumably because a straightforward murder charge would be more likely to result in conviction.