There’s a lot we don’t know about why Nex Benedict, a nonbinary teen from Owasso, Oklahoma, died a day after a fight in a high school bathroom. But there are some things we do know and they all add up to tragedy.
We know that 16-year-old Nex, who often used the pronoun “they” around his peers, was bullied at school. According to Sue Benedict, his biological grandmother and guardian, the bullying began in earnest last year. We know that Nex did not report the recent encounters to teachers or school officials. “I didn’t really see the point,” they told a police officer in body camera video released by the Owasso Police Department. “I told my mom, though.”
We don’t know definitively why these students were bullying Nex, but we know that they targeted at least one other gender-nonconforming student, and we know that Nex didn’t know his tormentors personally. When the police officer asked why the students were harassing them, Nex said, “Because of the way we dress.” They added that the girls didn’t like the way they and their friends laughed.
We know that Nex responded to the bullying by throwing water on the students, but we also know that the bathroom fight didn’t seem to be even. “I was assaulted at school. 3 on 1, had to go to the ER,” Nex texted a family member after the fight. The family’s lawyer stated that the teenager was “attacked 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 requiring students in Oklahoma to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth, and we know that the law has spawned a kind of vigilante justice. “That policy and the messaging around it has led to students being much more vigilant about bathrooms,” Nicole McAfee, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, told The Times. “There’s a sense of, ‘Do you belong here?’”
The investigation into the death of Nex Benedict is ongoing. Last week, the Owasso Police Department said preliminary information from the medical examiner, which was based on an autopsy, indicated that Nex “did not die as a result of trauma.” The statement did not provide the 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, too, had been victims of harassment. Even Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt seemed to acknowledge that the bullying and Nex’s death may have been linked: “The death of any child in an Oklahoma school is a tragedy,” he said in a statement, “and bullies must be To be accountable. “It is not known whether he, a Republican, recognizes his own party’s public attitude towards the LGBTQ community as bullying. We still do not know why Nex Benedict died or if they were harassed in the bathroom that day because of their gender identity , but we absolutely know that right-wing political leaders in Oklahoma have repeatedly demeaned and vilified queer people.
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of schools, is known for his hostility toward transgender rights. He threatened a state takeover of the Tulsa school system, in part because of his “woke ideology.” He believes “radical gender theory” has endangered Oklahoma girls. He created an emergency rule that prevents transgender students from changing their gender designation on school records. The list goes on and on. “This is a war for the souls of our children,” Walters said shortly after his election. After Nex Benedict’s death, his position has not changed.
Walters’ brand of anti-trans language is common among far-right conservatives. Tucker Carlson has called gender transition “satanic.” Donald Trump’s campaign speech includes a promise to cut federal funding to schools that allow “transgender madness.” Last Friday, an Oklahoma state senator referred to LGBTQ people as “filth.”
This type of discourse has made life extremely dangerous for trans and gender-expansive Americans across the country. Deep in our bones we know it. When political leaders and influential media figures publicly dehumanize and demonize people from a marginalized group, they inspire others to act on their own prejudices. A trans high school student in Oklahoma told the Washington Post that he carries a bulletproof backpack. “Honestly, I’m afraid to go to school every day,” he said.
We can debate until the cows come home whether the First Amendment should protect hate speech. But there can be no debate about the fact that hate speech, especially from people in power, can at least tacitly enable acts of hate. Between 2018 and 2022, a period that coincides with increasing political polarization and extreme speech, the number of hate crimes reported in schools almost doubled.
Of all the heartbreaking details that have 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 mentioned them. “Nex didn’t see himself as a man or a woman,” Sue Benedict told The Independent’s Bevan Hurley. “Nex saw himself right in the middle. He was still learning about it, Nex was teaching me that.”
This grandmother from Oklahoma wasn’t condemning a child she didn’t understand. She was listening. She was learning. She was trying grasp. Don’t we all owe it to our children to listen? Don’t we owe it to all the young people in our care (in our families and in 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 to do so is to disrupt any push toward empathy and compassion in their constituents. Interrupting any impulse to simply live and let live.
they do not want 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 them to read books that answer questions about what it means to be gay, bisexual, trans, non-binary or just ask questions. They don’t want people to understand the danger they have put LGBTQ people in. Republican politicians don’t want to understand any of this. They have decided that it is bad.
I once witnessed a woman shut down a round of critical gossip about a political figure who had been caught in an extramarital affair. “That’s not our job,” she said softly when someone asked her opinion on the scandal. Pressed to explain, she cited the Gospel of Matthew: “Judge not, lest you be judged.”
She was saying that it is God’s job to judge good and evil. It wasn’t her job. As long as they didn’t hurt anyone else, people could continue living their own lives as they saw fit. If God had a problem with that, they would find out in due time.
It’s hard not to wonder what kind of culture we would have now if every politician who claims to be promoting “Christian values” took the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew as an actual 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.
Margaret Renkl, Opinion contributor, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year”, “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations”.
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