On August 27, 2021, a jury in Washington State found a 27-year-old man named David Bogdanov guilty of murdering transgender teen Nikki Kuhnhausen, whose body was found in December, 2019.
Six months earlier, Bogdanov and Kuhnhausen exchanged messages on Snapchat, and then met. When Bogdanov found out that Kuhnhausen was actually a male, he strangled her to death.
This event led Washington State to pass a new law. Here is an excerpt from a news story that explains it:
"Kuhnhausen's murder sparked outrage and led to the passage of the Nikki Kuhnhausen Act in Washington, which outlaws a legal strategy known as the LGBTQ 'panic defense'. It blocks a defendant from using a defense that they were disturbed to discover their victim’s LGBTQ identity and should not be held fully accountable for the harm they caused to their victim. Washington is one of just over a dozen states that ban the use of this defense."
It strikes me as strange, and possibly unconstitutional, that a state should be able to outlaw a legal strategy used in criminal courts by defendants seeking a lighter sentence. I'm not suggesting that murder under these circumstances is justified, but there is another side to this issue.
The likelihood is that Kuhnhausen was a prostitute, and Bogdanov was paying for her services. Over Snapchat, she probably represented herself to him as a real woman, which she wasn't. She may have offered to give Bogdanov a blowjob or handjob and "nothing more". Then, when they got together, Bogdanov may have pressured her into removing her clothes, at which time he discovered her male genitals. Another possibility is that he saw male features in her face, and realized that she was a man.
Whether we like it or not, in our society, heterosexual men feel humiliated and angered at the idea of being thought to be gay. To have sexual relations with a woman who turns out to be a man is an insult to their manhood, and it is a serious humiliation should their family or friends find out. This is a primal thing with men, going right to the core of their self-image. It is one of the reasons why I, a gay man, have been extraordinarily careful all my life not to proposition anyone whom I wasn't completely sure was also gay (or at least receptive).
Once again, I'm not saying that the position that Kuhnhausen put Bogdanov in justified his murdering her. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Kuhnhausen invited danger to herself when she lied to him, whether she was asking for money or not. If using the so-called "LGBTQ defense" might get other murderers like Bogdanov a 30-year sentence instead of a life sentence, I think they should be able to use it.
But that wasn't actually the defense that Bogdanov used. He claimed that he rejected her when he found out she was a man, and that she became violent. His defense was an obvious lie, but that is the right of criminal defendants: to mount the best defenses that they can, whether true or not.
During their Snapchat communication, if Kuhnhausen had said to Bogdanov, "I used to be a boy", the whole thing would have been over, and there wouldn't have been a murder. By lying, Kuhnhausen trapped Bogdanov into a situation that was very uncomfortable for him. It doesn't work for us to now say that he should have been more enlightened.
(However, it came out in the trial that Bogdanov was virulently anti-gay; and since Kuhnhausen was actually a man who was attracted to other men, that made Kuhnhausen gay in Bogdanov's mind.)
I just found out that Bogdanov is a Russian immigrant. The sexual
insecurity of heterosexual men in Russia is even more acute than it is
in American men.
Apparently, Kuhnhausen spent an evening with Bogdanov without telling him that she was a man, meaning that he murdered her the second time they met. Spending an evening with her may have given Bogdanov an opportunity to develop feelings for her, which would have increased his humiliation by an order of magnitude. If Bogdanov accepted a blowjob from Kuhnhausen that first evening, that would have put Bogdanov in a worse psychological position. As for Kuhnhausen, she had probably swallowed the transgender bullshit that feeling like a woman made her a real woman, so she may have felt that she didn't have any obligation to tell prospective sex partners that she was a male – talk about living dangerously!
I have looked at pictures of Nikki Kuhnhausen on the internet. She was fortunate in that she didn't look much like a boy; i.e., her face was not very masculine. In her pictures she looked heavily made up and glamorous, usually with her lips in a pout. Her appearance confirms my feelings that trans people are shallow. Passing as the sex they want to be is the only thing that really matters to them. So trans women try to look as glamorous as possible, and trans men try to look as masculine and macho as possible. Their superficiality is one of the things that makes it hard for me to take them seriously. Their single-minded focus on looking like the sex they want to be doesn't seem to serve a useful purpose beyond making them feel good.
The fact that trans people have managed to limit the rights of criminal defendants is a measure of how outsized their influence has become in our society, a phenomenon which I simply don't understand. They have very capably sold themselves to the public – and liberals especially – as the most pitiful of pitiful minorities who deserve anything and everything that they ask for. But I find them to be dishonest and devious.
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