There’s a lot we don’t know about why Nex Benedict, a non-binary teenager in Owasso, Okla., died a day after a fight in a high school bathroom. But there are a few things we do know, and they all add up to tragedy.
We know that 16-year-old Nex, who often went by their pronouns with peers, was bullied at school. According to Sue Benedict, their biological grandmother and guardian, the bullying started in earnest last year. We know that Nex did not report the recent meetings to teachers or school officials. “I didn’t really see the point in it,” they told an officer in a dashcam video released by the Owasso Police Department. “I told my mom though.”
We don’t know for sure why these students bullied Nex, but we do know that they targeted at least one other gender non-conforming student, and we know that Nex didn’t know their tormentors personally. When the officer asked why the students were harassing them, Nex said, “Because of the way we dress.” They added that the girls did not like the way they and their friends were laughing.
We know that Nex responded to the harassment by throwing water on the students, but we also know that the fight in the bathroom didn’t seem to fit. “I was jumped at school. 3 on 1, had to go to the ER,” Nex texted a family member after the fight. The family’s lawyer said the teenager was “assaulted and assaulted in a bathroom by a group of other students”. Nex collapsed at home the next day.
We also know that there is a new law that requires students in Oklahoma to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth, and we know that the law has created a kind of vigilante justice. “This policy and the messaging around it has led to a lot more policing of bathrooms by students,” Nicole McAfee, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, told the Times. “There’s a sense of ‘do you belong here?’
The investigation into Nex Benedict’s death is ongoing. Last week, the Owasso Police Department said preliminary information from the medical examiner, based on an autopsy, showed Nex “did not die as a result of blunt force trauma.” The statement did not give a cause of death.
Calls to the advocacy organization Rainbow Youth Project USA increased after news of Nex’s death hit the media. Eighty-five percent of callers said they had also been bullied. Even Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt seemed to admit that bullying and Nex’s death may be connected: “The death of any child in an Oklahoma school is a tragedy,” he said in a statement, “and bullies must be held accountable. ” No word on whether he, a Republican, recognizes his party’s public stance toward the LGBTQ community as bullying. We still don’t know why Nex Benedict died or if he was bullied in the bathroom that day because of their gender identity, but we absolutely know that right-wing political leaders in Oklahoma have repeatedly humiliated and vilified queer people.
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of schools, is known for his hostility to transgender rights. He threatened a state takeover of the Tulsa school system, in part for “woke ideology.” She believes “radical gender theory” has put Oklahoma girls at risk. It created an emergency rule that prevents transgender students from changing their gender identification in school records. The list goes on and on. “This is a war for the souls of our children,” Mr. Walters said shortly after his election. In the wake of Nex Benedict’s death, his position has not changed.
Mr. Walters’ brand of anti-trans language is common among far-right conservatives. Tucker Carlson called gender transition “satanic.” Donald Trump’s speech includes a promise to cut federal funding to schools that allow “transgender insanity.” Just last Friday, an Oklahoma state senator referred to LGBTQ people as “dirt.”
This kind of discourse has made life extremely dangerous for transgender and genderqueer Americans across the country. Deep in our bones we know it. When political leaders and influential media figures publicly dehumanize and demonize people in a marginalized group, they inspire others to act on their own prejudices. A transgender high school student in Oklahoma told the Washington Post that he carries a bulletproof backpack. “I honestly dread going to school every day,” she said.
We can debate until the cows come home whether hate speech should be protected by the First Amendment. But there can be no debate that hate speech, especially by people in power, can at least implicitly enable acts of hate. Between 2018 and 2022, a period coinciding with increasing political polarization and extreme speech, the number of hate crimes reported in schools almost doubled.
Of all the chilling details that emerged in the news coverage of Nex Benedict’s death, the one that broke my heart in two was a comment from the woman who raised them. “Nex didn’t see himself as male or female,” Sue Benedict told The Independent’s Bevan Hurley. “Nex saw himself in the middle. I was still learning, Nex was teaching me that.”
This grandmother in Oklahoma didn’t judge a child she didn’t understand. She was listening. She was learning. It was tries to understand. Don’t we all owe it to our children to listen? Don’t we owe it to all the young people in our care — our families and our communities — to try to understand the world as they experience it?
But Republican leaders are working overtime to roll back hard-won LGBTQ rights, and the only way they can do that is to cut off any drive toward empathy and compassion in their constituents. Interrupting every urge to just live and let live.
They don’t I want to understand, and they don’t want other people to try to understand either. They don’t want students to read books that acknowledge the full humanity of their queer friends. They don’t want to read books that answer questions about what it means to be gay or bisexual or trans or non-binary or just questionable. They don’t want people to understand the danger that LGBTQ people have put themselves in. Republican politicians don’t want to understand any of this. They decided it was bad.
I once saw a woman close a circle of critical gossip about a political figure who had been caught having an extramarital affair. “That’s none of our business,” she said softly when someone asked her opinion of the scandal. Pressed to explain, she quoted the Gospel of Matthew: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
He said it is God’s job to judge right from wrong. It was none of her business. As long as they didn’t hurt anyone else, people could go on living their lives as they saw fit. If God had a problem with this, they would find out in due time.
It’s hard not to wonder what kind of culture we would have right now if every politician who claims to promote “Christian values” took the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew as true gospel. If only every grandmother in every red state would take the time to listen to children trying to explain – or simply understand – their own identity.
Opinion writer Margaret Renkle is the author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, Graceland, at Last, and Late Migrations.
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