On February 7, 2024, 16-year-old non-binary student Nex Benedict was beaten in a bathroom at Owasso High School in Owasso, OK by three other students. According to text messages sent to a family member by Nex, the beating came after they responded to the girls’ bullying of them and their friends by pouring water on them.
Nex also texted, "If I'm dizzy or nauseous in the morning I might have a concussion.”
The school did not contact police, nor call an ambulance for Nex. They issued a statement outlining their timeline of the fight:
[From Fox23] On Feb. 7, Benedict was in a fight in a restroom at the Owasso High School west campus. OPS said the fight lasted "less than 2 minutes" and was "broken up by other students" and "a staff member".
The statement said all students involved "walked" to the assistant principal and nurse's office and that they recommended to "one parent that their student visit a medical facility".
The district also said parents and guardians of students involved were "notified and informed of the option to file a police report".
Owasso Police noted that Nex “did go to the hospital around 3:30 p.m. on the day of the fight and a school resource officer was called.”
Nex died in the hospital on February 8, 2024.
No arrests have been made in their death.
# # #
I was a teen in the 1980s, that wonderful era of casual homophobia everywhere you looked, and Reagan/Bush brushing off AIDS victims like no big deal. The “Moral Majority” wagged their tongues about how gay people were burning in Hell for the crime of their sexual orientation. (Oh, the embarrassed faces when tales of same-sex horseplay came out of the “PTL” scandal!) Classmates suspected of being gay were viciously bullied. Our school had an irrigation canal — one of several that criss-cross metro Phoenix — and it was rumored certain kids were dragged forcibly and thrown in. (Not so much a rumor with one kid; I saw the jocks grab him and alerted our school security. Thank God the kid could swim.) Anyone who’s read Stephen King’s “It” knows the bashing scene wasn’t imaginary for far too many men in the late ‘80s, with assault and/or corrective rape a recurring nightmare for many lesbian and bisexual women. And Brandon Teena’s murder preceded Matthew Shepard’s by five years, horrifying and yet rare at the time in that Brandon’s murderers were arrested and brought to justice.
To see the ‘80s revisited on Generation Z makes me want to climb up on a soapbox and start screaming profane jeremiads.
I lost two people to AIDS, and I’m grateful that they are the only ones I lost. Friends in the community, who were open where I was closeted, lost many more. All that promise — all that wonderful, vibrant, enchanting humanity — gone. And for years, private citizens and public servants either shrugged or announced it was “God’s will” that LGBTQ+ people should die. AIDS may have been the instrument of death, but hatred held the scythe. Today, human hatred is picking back up the scythe in the form of psychological and physical violence, and honing it with the whetstone of legislative attacks.
In 2022, Oklahoma GOP lawmakers passed a bill that required public school students to use bathrooms that matched the gender assigned to them on their birth certificates.
Oklahoma introduced 40 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2023, and Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an executive order that not only defined an individual’s gender as their “biological sex” assigned at birth, but also targeted gender-affirming care for trans youths.
In 2024, Oklahoma will consider over 50 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, with an emphasis on anti-trans legislation.
What the hell, Oklahoma?
What the fuck is the matter with these transphobic & homophobic people?
And they’re going after kids — what the actual fuck?!
I don’t know how high on the scale of cruelty this gets, but in my mind, it’s beyond intolerable. It’s unforgivable. It’s irredeemable. And the Oklahoma Republican-led legislature seems intent on hammering its cruel point through every LGBTQ+ citizen in the state, with special attention given to trans children.
# # #
There’s a novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater — that has a paragraph widely quoted, and also widely thought to have been delivered as part of a graduation speech.
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Vonnegut’s novel is about the meaning of life — how to cope with it, really — and his protagonist, Eliot Rosewater, makes a call for us to reach out to others, not because they’re near or dear to us, but because they, too, are human.
LGBTQ+ groups have held vigils in honor of Nex, to protest their death and the bullying of so many queer people and children in Oklahoma and across the nation. And there was this reaction by several of Nex’s classmates:
Dozens of students at an Oklahoma high school walked out in a peaceful demonstration on Monday to show support for the LGBTQ+ community after the death of a non-binary teenager following a fight in a school bathroom in which they said they were a target of bullying.
Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old student who identified as non-binary and used they/them pronouns, died on 8 February after a “physical altercation” with classmates in the bathroom of Owasso high school, according to local law enforcement.
Body camera footage later released by police showed Benedict describing the altercation with three girls who were picking on them and some friends.
At least 40 students at Owasso high school walked out to protest what they described as a pervasive culture of bullying with little accountability, NBC reported. “I just want to get the word out and show these kids that we’re here,” Cassidy Brown, a Owasso graduate and organizer of the demonstration, told KTUL. “There is a community here in this city that does exist, and we see them, and they are loved.”
And I think the reason this resonates with me is that I can imagine what the kids are going to go through after today. The bullies are going to find new targets. The teachers are going to either start giving them the silent treatment or side-eye, or else lecture them calmly about how they can’t let their emotions blind them to what’s right according to the King James Bible. Their parents . . . God, their parents. I hope their parents will show some compassion, and not reveal what depths of bigotry and hate can exist inside a person.
Of those 40 kids or so who left the school grounds today, how many didn’t leave because they felt it wouldn’t change anything? Maybe they knew what I know from my own adolescence — that bullies will label you as a future target the moment they even sense you have sympathy for one of their victims. Maybe they didn’t care — a queer got jumped in the bathroom, and died; big deal. Nobody cares. Right?
Or, and just as likely, they knew it was against the rules to leave school during school hours, and feared the consequences of breaking them. Simple as that.
I’m grateful for the LGBTQ+ groups that have organized the vigils and demonstrations for Nex. They show the kids that there are adults who give a damn about them, who can help them, provide resources for them — but they can’t provide bodyguards for them to fend off the bullies throwing punches, physical and verbal.
Nex should have been protected. Nex was human. Nex deserved to be loved, cared for, watched over, nurtured. Nex deserved kindness.
And so I want to take these children by the shoulders, and whisper to them the wise words of Mr. Vonnegut:
There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”