The murder of Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien in North Adams, Massachusetts, earlier this month has taken on larger significance than local police would have thought possible. Steele-Knudslien was murdered by her husband Mark in their home. Mark later turned himself in and was arrested for the crime. While no motive was made known to the public, it appeared at first blush Christa was a victim of domestic violence. Then the Human Rights Campaign got involved.

Christa was transgender. The HRC emphasized this fact in the case when it tweeted that Christa was “the first reported murder of a trans person in 2018.” The case has not even gone to trial yet, but the HRC and the larger LGBT community is already convinced this was a hate crime simply because Christa was transgender.

LGBT activists and organizations would have us believe that any crimes perpetrated against members of their community are hate crimes, motivated solely by the fact that victims are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The violence that is supposedly committed against transsexuals in particular is of record proportions, if you are to believe a study the HRC published last year.

According to the study, 2017 was the deadliest year on record for transsexuals, with trans women four times more likely to be murdered than those who correctly identify as women based on their biology. How many transgender people were killed in 2017? Twenty-eight.

Murder is a terrible crime, and even one murder is a tragedy, but 28 people out of a self-identified population of 1.4 million hardly suggests genocide. Furthermore, the HRC would have us believe that every one of these murders took place simply because the victims were transgender, rather than robbery or acts of domestic violence. By the way, that 1.4 million number, reported in 2016, doubled from the prior year, and has risen since as more people become wrapped up in the wave of gender dysphoria.

The HRC and other LGBT organizations have a vested interest in driving this hate crime narrative. It keeps them at the center of their community making lesbians, gays, and transgender people look to them for social and political guidance, it keeps their coffers flush with donations, and it gives them political muscle.

Pushing this narrative, however, ignores a significant problem in the LGBT community, particularly in the case of Christa Steele-Knudslien, and that is domestic violence. Two studies reported in the homosexual-oriented publication The Advocate in 2014 found that domestic violence is rampant in the LGBT “community.”

The National Violence Against Women survey found that 21.5% of men and 35.4% of women living with a same-sex partner experienced physical violence from their partner, compared with 7.1% and 20.4% for men and women, respectively, with a history of only opposite-sex cohabitation. Another report from the CDC stated that “the lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner was 43.8% for lesbians, 61.1% for bisexual women, and 35% for heterosexual women, while it was 26% for gay men, 37.3% for bisexual men, and 29% for heterosexual men.”

If the HRC is truly concerned about the wellbeing of members of the LGBT community, it would want to explore the issue of same-sex domestic violence rather than push the hate crime narrative. Unfortunately, LGBT organizations have come to believe that creating an “us versus them” mentality has done more for their cause of gaining social acceptance. Meanwhile, disproportionate numbers of people within this community are suffering in silence literally at the hands of their own partners.

The miscategorization of these murders and acts of violence is a travesty of justice that insults and harms the victims and throws our justice system and our society off balance. Perhaps the most famous instance of this was the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998. Shepard was beaten and killed by two men who, according to the official narrative, identified him as homosexual and decided to kill him based on that fact.

Shepard became the poster child for the homosexual-rights movement, and Wyoming, where the murder took place, became the image of a redneck land filled with backwards-thinking homophobes. Unfortunately, for leftist and LGBT activists, the truth was not so convenient.

Investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez did extensive research into Shepard’s murder and, after 13 years of work and interviewing more than 100 people connected to the case, he found that Shepard was likely murdered over a drug deal gone wrong.

Shepard knew his two killers, one with whom he carried on an infrequent homosexual relationship. They bought and sold drugs from each other, and several people Jimenez spoke to knew with certainty that Shepard was a drug addict and dealer. This inconvenient fact angered the LGBT community, which railed against Jimenez’s work and vilified him in the press.

LGBT and leftist groups don’t like it when facts get in the way of their narrative that America is filled with angry white men of privilege who lash out at anything different. They had a field day when Barack Obama was president and gladly went along with such false narratives as “hands up, don’t shoot” and other manufactured stories of police violence against minorities and hate crimes against homosexuals. The FBI’s 2017 hate crimes statistics were certainly not welcome news to this bunch.

It should be noted that the label “hate crime” is a subjective one that can be artificially inserted to fit the circumstances whenever it suits leftists and members of the media who want to push their worldview into the public consciousness. The 2017 report found that while the overall level of hate crimes remains relatively constant, there has been a shift in the targets of these attacks.

From 2007 to 2017, the percentage of hate crime perpetrators who were white dropped from 63% to 46.3%, while the level of anti-white crime increased to 20.5%, the highest recorded level since 2006. But you won’t hear about that on the news, because it doesn’t fit the narrative. Instead, you’ll hear about phony “hate crimes” that, in reality, were brought about by other problems.