Trans Activists Can’t Admit the Facts About Sam Nordquist’s Murder

This article reports details of a heinous crime.

No motive has been released by the police in the alleged torture and murder of Sam Nordquist, a trans-identifying woman killed in New York in early February. There is, however, sufficient evidence to confirm the alleged murder was not a hate crime.

Despite this, media reports insist on forcing that narrative, as LGBT activists demand it and Democrat leaders validate it. The facts of the case are deeply disturbing, and the obsession with manufacturing an anti-trans hate crime story is making it worse.

Police say Sam Nordquist was tortured to death from December 2024 to Feb. 2, 2025, when she died from abuse. An indictment accuses seven people of being involved in her kidnapping, torture, and death. Nordquist had traveled from Minnesota to New York to visit her online girlfriend in September, then decided to stay. What happened between then and her death is still unknown, although police say she knew everyone involved, including two children forced to participate in the crime.

The details of her torture and death are each too difficult to imagine, let alone as a series of relentless horrors. According to police, Nordquist was starved, beaten, treated like a dog, forced to eat feces and urine, tied up, and had bleach poured on her. Her body was then abandoned in a field.

Nordquist was referred to as a man in all news reports, with many indicating she was transgender. She was immediately elevated as a victim of anti-LGBT hate and violence. OutFront Minnesota said, “We know this arrives at a time our trans communities are facing a relentless assault of harmful policy and rhetoric across our nation,” according to a post on Instagram. “We know that this landscape escalates and amplifies the individual risk of violence.”

Referring to this case and the murder of another trans-identifying person, Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib argued, “Every year, trans people are murdered simply for being who they are, and Black trans people are disproportionately targeted.”

The first openly trans-identifying member of the Minnesota state legislature, Rep. Leigh Finke, stated, “You deserved a whole life, full of love and joy and peace, and you instead received the cruelest violence imaginable.” Finke added, “All of our love, to Sam, to his loved ones. We will never stop fighting for our freedom. Trans liberation now.”

New York Civil Liberties Union organizer Shay Herbert claimed, “This tragedy comes at a time of nationwide attacks against trans people, led by a federal administration hellbent on erasing their existence.” She then asserted “transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, and the vast majority of victims are people of color.”

A Change.org petition to pressure police into escalating charges, specifically hate crime charges, gained more than 17,000 signatures. The organizer argued that “the police’s failure” to investigate hate crime charges was “shameful and disrespectful to Sam, his family and friends, and the trans community as a whole.”

Despite this mass assumption of anti-trans bias, the police and district attorney immediately stated the murder was not motivated by hatred of Sam’s identity. The district attorney said, “At this time we have no indication that Sam’s murder was a hate crime. To help alleviate the understandable concern [that] his [sic] murder could be a hate crime, we are disclosing that Sam and his assailants were known to each other, identified as LGBTQ+, and at least one of the defendants lived with Sam in the time period leading up to the instant offense.”

“A hate crime would make this charge about Sam’s gender and about Sam’s race, and it’s so much bigger,” Kelly Wolford, an assistant DA, insisted. “To limit this to a hate crime would be an injustice to Sam.”

That Nordquist’s torturers and killers allegedly identified as LGBT and knew the victim personally are important facts. An article on the popular LGBT website them leaves out this piece of information entirely. LGBT activists are so desperate to make this about anti-queer hatred that LGBTQ Nation, the largest LGBT news source online, attempted to connect this crime with the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard.

The article said, “Like Nordquist, Shepard was allegedly killed by someone he was attracted to, both of their bodies were discarded in rural fields after the attacks that killed them, and neither one’s assailants were charged with hate crimes. Also, both were murdered during times of intense anti-LGBTQ+ political hostility.” To put a finer point on their argument, “Nordquist’s murder has occurred at a time of queer activism against the transphobic policies of President Donald Trump, who has issued numerous executive orders seeking to eradicate the existence of trans people.”

Of course, we now know that Shepard’s murder was also committed by gay men he had a sexual relationship with and the murder was over drugs, according to research by Stephen Jimenez. The far-reaching false narrative about Shephard was largely fabricated to pressure legislatures to pass laws that punish Americans for disapproving of queer sexual behavior.

Even these facts no longer seem to matter. GLAAD, a prominent LGBT advocacy organization, insisted, “Anti-LGBTQ hate can be perpetuated by anyone, regardless of their relationship to the victim or their own gender identity or sexual orientation. Multiple studies have shown, for example, that transgender and gender non-conforming people are at increased risk of experiencing intimate partner violence.”

These LGBT activists are so insanely obsessed with anti-LGBT hate that they’ve created a new category where an LGBT person can commit “anti-LGBTQ hate” against his own partner. Ironically, they reveal an important truth in this fanatical need for victimhood: The most dangerous threats to LGBT people are usually other LGBT people.

When researching fatal violence against men identifying as women, for example, inevitably the biggest cause is domestic violence. It is the risks associated with online relationships in the LGBT community that really need attention.

In 2023 Kierstyn Williamson was allegedly killed by a romantic partner when she went to meet him in person. In 2020, a 25-year-old gay man was brutally tortured and murdered by an anonymous sex partner he met on Grindr. In 2024 a 14-year-old boy was lured into a park and brutally assaulted, murdered, and then dismembered, allegedly by a man he met on the same gay sex app. LGBT advocates refuse to address this pattern, instead positioning all violence against LGBT people as caused by non-LGBT hate and bigotry.

What is worse, queer and corporate outlets portray the torture Nordquist reportedly endured as extreme sexual fetishism, but every category of horror is a common, celebrated sexual fetish in the LGBT community. Consider that multiple categorically similar incidents, including ingesting bodily waste, are captured in the American Library Association-awarded and celebrated LGBT title This Book Is Gay — a book LGBT activists routinely defend as appropriate for minors in schools.

Even when the facts clearly show no anti-LGBT hate crime has occurred, LGBT activists insist that it has anyway. They twist the story, forcing any possible explanation to fit that singular category so they can politically exploit the incident for political purposes. So eager are they to demonize efforts to protect children from sterilization, girls from men in their restrooms, and women from losing to men in sports — and, of course, to attack Trump — they don’t even care what truly happened.

LGBT culture is sick. It has been sick for a very long time. What happened to Sam Nordquist appears to be just another case of sadistic, sexual abuse committed by other LGBT people who are never held accountable for their behavior in their own “community.” Unless LGBT advocates are honest with themselves, this will keep happening. Anti-LGBT “hate” won’t be to blame.

Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of “Surviving Gender: My Journey Through Gender Dysphoria,” and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.