What the ABC got wrong when they deadnamed Brianna Ghey
The ABC and AP made several basic mistakes in their coverage of the murder
After a very highly-publicised trial, murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey has finally been granted justice.
On Friday 2nd February, the two teenagers who took her life - who won’t be named in this article - were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of the 16-year-old transgender girl. As the judge who heard the case, Amanda Yip, stated:
“You both took part in a brutal and planned murder, which was sadistic in nature, and a secondary motivation was hostility to Brianna, because of her transgender identity.”
That was how the verdict was handed down, but of course as Britain is Terf Island, and Australia is the colonised continent, the media failed to follow through with the justice and dignity that Brianna still deserves.
Aunty, you’ve done it again
Never missing an opportunity to disrespect a transgender child even in death, the ABC published an article about the sentencing. The article was not only headlined with the faces of her killers rather than Brianna herself, but it also originally included Brianna’s deadname.
A deadname refers to the name a trans person was known by prior to transition. Although it’s common practice for trans people to legally change their name, deadnames are often used by transphobes as a try-hard means to invalidate a trans person’s identity.
Self-identified TERFs and Nazis constantly use deadnaming as a harassment tool against trans people alongside misgendering, and most organisations have policies against the practice.
The social media platform formerly known as Twitter, for instance, used to have a policy against deadnaming that was mysteriously removed last year, and 20 organisations including GLAAD and Media Matters for America, sent an open letter calling for YouTube to ban the practice as well. Being known as their chosen name is connected to lower rates of anxiety, isolation and suicidal ideation, and although name changes are of course every common for cis people, it is still an incredibly difficult process for some trans people.
The article the ABC used was republished from Associated Press, an American not-for-profit use agency based in New York which distributes articles, photographs, and other material to thousands of other media organisations around the world. Deadnaming Brianna in this way is a deeply heinous act of anti-trans sentiment from both the ABC and AP, not just because of the fact that her deadname is in no way relevant to the story of her murder, but because it is also a symptom of the transphobia that led to her killing.
Naturally, this was noticed by trans activists on social media, and it was removed from the article on both AP and the ABC less than a day later.
The ABC, of course, wasn’t the only media institute to humiliate her in this way. British newspapers The Times, the Daily Mail and the Independent decided to be British newspapers and deadname Brianna as well. But both the ABC and AP violated their own guidelines in doing this. The AP’s guidelines clearly state:
“The guidelines is to do this very rarely and only if required to understand the news or if requested by the person. Deadnaming someone can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”
Interestingly, way back in 2016, the ABC published a “10-point guide to not offending trans people”. Point 5 of this article clearly describes what deadnaming is, and “why it should be avoided”. Hmmmm….
Arguably even worse than this, however, are the persistent lies surrounding the causes of Brianna’s death. For those who haven’t been following the case (and we don’t blame you, it was very horrible), the cops in charge chose not to investigate the murder as a hate crime on the ground that the killers’ motive was not transphobia, but rather a simple lust for killing.
Detective Superintendent Mike Evans stated back in December:
“So I still think to this day, Brianna wasn’t killed because she was transgender. And possibly the fact she was transgender made her that little bit more vulnerable and accessible”.
In other words, the police believed that the killers didn’t want to specifically target a trans girl, they just wanted to kill anyone they could, and just happened to choose the trans girl. This is the rationale the ABC used to state at the conclusion of the piece that police “ruled out transphobia as a motivation behind Brianna’s murder”. This is technically true, but deeply misleading.
While it is true that the police initially didn’t initially investigate the killing as a hate crime, and faced extreme scrutiny for it, the judge Amanda Yip later concluded that while sadism was the major factor of the killing, transphobia was absolutely also a factor. One of the killers in particular was quoted as stating graphic, transphobic statements about Brianna, her body, and his “obsession” with her, which won’t be repeated here.
None of this crucial context was mentioned by the ABC. The closest their article came to telling the whole truth of why Brianna died was when they stated she was “vulnerable and accessible”, but even that is erasure of the truth. Brianna’s vulnerability and accessibility was entirely linked to her marginalisation and her history of being a victim of transphobic bullying. One of the killers even befriended the lonely Brianna as a means to gain access to her. Come on ABC! This is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts!
“Missing white woman syndrome”
The ABC’s erasure of transphobic hate turning fatal doesn’t stop at Brianna. In 2023, the year Brianna was killed, Forbes estimated that 320 trans people were killed in total.
The reason why Brianna’s death specifically attracted this level of attention and outrage is also in large part due to what African-American journalist Gwen Ifill termed “missing white woman syndrome”. The media as a whole have gone out of their way to include the misleading statement that the “death was not a hate crime” not just to revise a core part of why Brianna was murdered, but to detract from the countless lesser-known hate crimes against other trans women every year. The majority of these are against trans women of colour and lower class, and many of them also led to murder.
On 4 November 2021, black trans woman Marquiisa Lawrence was fatally shot in Greenville, South Carolina. Her death marked an outpouring of grief from America’s transgender community, but sadly, also marked the 45th recorded murder against a trans person in the US, making 2021 as the deadliest year on record for transgender Americans. Brayla Stone and Ariyanna Mitchell were both 17 when they were killed, and accounts state their trans identity were directly involved in their murder. Last year, Saudi Arabian trans woman Eden Knight was forced back to her country from the United States after her family hired two American fixers to retrieve and forcibly detransition her, incidents which also led to her death.
This, of course, isn’t exclusive to America either. In 2019, 25-year-old Mhelody Polan Bruno was choked to death by a former airforce corporal in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, just a week before she was due to fly back to her native Philippines. In 2022, Briza Garces Florez, a Colombian trans sex worker living in the Netherlands, was stabbed to death in a hotel room in Wassenaar. The Netherlands is widely considered one of the safest countries in the world to be queer, but that doesn’t prevent horrible attacks like this from occurring, or even be so common that they don’t get the immense media attention Brianna’s case did.
I wish this was the first time, even recently, the ABC has been caught dismantling the dignity of a dead transgender child. But the reality is, when cis people are constantly deciding how much dignity we’re owed, there then are no limits to how far they’re willing to plunge. The Brianna Ghey case, while demonstrating that a climate of hate around a marginalised demographic leads to tragic consequences, hasn’t slowed the tsunami of hate down.
What can we do to change things?
In December, prominent “Gender Critical” academic Kathleen Stock condemned a human rights advocate who was stating that transphobia was a factor in Brianna’s death as a “disgusting ghoul”. She is, of course, refused to apologise for this statement even after the judge clearly stated that it was.
And even on the same day as the sentencing, The New York Times published an anti-trans piece from Pamela Paul pushing the famous “detransitioner rhetoric” that Spotlight also used last year. The irony of running a piece suggesting children should be discouraging from transition whilst simultaneously reporting on the sentencing of the murder of a transgender child is completely lost on the New York Times, apparently.
There is no sign of this toxic media coverage stopping, and the best thing we can do in the meantime is uplift the facts. I know this gets said over and over, but when we’re seeing examples of transphobia influencing the mainstream press, platforming trans writers is exactly what we need right now. Even after being called out for numerous mistakes and harmful reporting on trans issues, we’ve yet to see the ABC come close to acknowledge the gross lack of trans representation in their journalism team as a problem.
The coverage of attacks against us continue to be reported by cis journalists with the power to misreport them, and so enable further attacks against us. Kinda beautiful, hey?
American transgender writer Erin Reed did a fantastic takedown of Paul’s piece on her own website. This led her to get over a hundred messages from readers thanking her for changing their minds, as well as a response from Pamela Paul herself. Sometimes when the mainstream refuses to platform us, platform ourselves and spreading via community support gets the job done. This sort of support has a very clear impact, and the more we boost trans voices, the more pressure it places on these mainstream publications to turn the tide towards us.
Saturday 11 February will be the anniversary of Brianna’s murder. Another aspect that was missing from the articles covering the case was a full picture of who Brianna was. Although she was bullied at school and had few friends, tragic realities that were used against her, Brianna was described as selfless and larger-than-life. She had a Tiktok account with tens of thousands of followers in which she shared her personal journey and danced to popular songs. She helped other young trans teenagers safely begin hormone replacement therapy, an increasingly difficult process in England. She had ambitions on studying beauty therapy at college.
Had she not been murdered, she had prospects of growing up into a strong, caring, sensitive activist for the transgender community both on social media and in real life, and her loss is a loss to all of us worldwide. Her legacy can and should continue.
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FURTHER READING:
Finally, the full story of Brianna Ghey’s murder can be told - Manchester Evening News
Interview: Jess O’Thomson on Brianna Ghey and Anti-Trans Media Bias - Assigned News
British newsmaker calls for “dignity in death” for trans people after Brianna Ghey killing - Pink News
Brianna Ghey’s mother remembers murdered daughter’s “fearlessness” and praises “outstanding” trans community - The Independent
Brianna Ghey funeral: hundreds pay tribute to murdered teenager - The Guardian