Nex Benedict died the day after being attacked and beaten in a high school bathroom in Owasso, Okla.
Last week, a family buried their nonbinary child, Nex Benedict, who died after being brutally beaten in the girls’ bathroom at their high school in Oklahoma. According to their mother, 16-year-old Benedict had been bullied relentlessly for a year leading up to the incident, in which a group of peers ganged up on them and a trans student. It’s a horrific case and one that is inseparable from its context amid a climate of seemingly unceasing anti-LGBT demonization in the state and the nation.
In thrall to extremist right-wing leadership, Oklahoma has recently had bomb threats made against schools that hire openly LGBT staff, bans on non-cis students using bathrooms that match their gender identities and proposed legislation to criminalize any mention of gender identity in schools, all in the guise of “making schools safer for kids.”
One such child is dead. Is their school safer for it?
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
As Benedict’s case shows, violent reactions to trans existence by extremists also impact nonbinary people, who constitute a large and growing, portion of the non-cis population. Earlier this month, the Chronicle reported on data from a UC student survey that showed a threefold increase in the number of students who identified as trans or nonbinary from 2019 to 2023: 0.6% to 1.9%. What jumped out at me was that the overwhelming majority of these young people are specifically nonbinary: 4,412 nonbinary students compared to 625 trans men and 407 trans women.
Some may see these numbers as a trend — or even a threat — and they are doing everything they can to make sure that you agree. But looking for an identity beyond the “two genders” isn’t new, and our patriarchal, two-party gender system isn’t the only way to interpret the myriad raw materials that make up our bodies and minds. Many traditional African and Polynesian cultures recognize “third” genders, Navajo people have at least four and the Talmud mentions as many as eight. Late to the game as always, Americans are just working out how best to describe this thing in ourselves that we’ve suppressed for far too long.
While it’s not a new thing to feel dissatisfied about being stuck in a binary gender system, as philosopher Robin Dembroff noted in a 2020 paper, “What is new is the proliferation of widespread and legitimized conversations surrounding this dissatisfaction. Just in the last ten years, web searches for ‘genderqueer’ and ‘nonbinary’ have grown by a magnitude of at least ten times.” Young people today, including the 18-year-olds who answered the UC system survey, can specify their pronouns on their Zoom and social media handles, and they have so much more access to media, from literature to celebrity news to YouTube documentaries, about other ways of existing.
There does seem to be a hunger among younger people for options outside of binary gender, said Evan Urquhart, a journalist and critic who covers anti-trans propaganda on his site, Assigned Media. Being a foster parent to queer youth has given him particular insight into this issue. “(For young nonbinary people), it’s very often not about medically transitioning and going from one side of that binary to the other, but they’re looking for something with a lot more creativity and fluidity and experimentation and, really, joy.”
What Dembroff and Urquhart are describing mirrors much of what I went through just two years ago when everything snapped together. For most of my 36 years on this planet, I couldn’t understand how our gender system seemed so obvious to other people. It wasn’t that I hated being a girl per se: I just didn’t know why I had no choice in something repeatedly reinforced every day of my life. It determined what line I was supposed to get into as an elementary schooler, which clothes I was supposed to wear and whether I should plan to be a “wife” or a “husband” in the future. I was haunted by constant feelings of dissatisfaction and vague non-resolution until I worked out what was going on inside.
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
That said, for a time I was pretty skeptical about the whole enterprise of nonbinary gender; I just thought my experience was universal. “Nobody likes being male or female,” I once told my very patient therapist, whose left eyebrow subtly twitched up before she asked me to elaborate.
I processed this with friends and family and, yes, I Googled “nonbinary” more than a few times. In the years since, I’ve gotten used to this sense of myself, and it’s really not a big deal: I’m a writer, a Vietnamese American, a good home cook and also nonbinary. Like white pants, gender might not be for me, but you can have it if you want it.
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t love talking about my gender all the time, but I do want people like me and Nex Benedict to grow old, so I’m talking about it now.
Is that joy and sense of complete personhood such a danger to society that it must be snuffed out at any cost? So what if young people are searching for more, better ways to be the more honest versions of themselves? Let people be different from you. Better yet, please — let them live.
Reach Soleil Ho (they/them): soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
The bullying and death of an Oklahoma nonbinary student just showed us who really isn’t safe in school
7
23
22.02.2024
Nex Benedict died the day after being attacked and beaten in a high school bathroom in Owasso, Okla.
Last week, a family buried their nonbinary child, Nex Benedict, who died after being brutally beaten in the girls’ bathroom at their high school in Oklahoma. According to their mother, 16-year-old Benedict had been bullied relentlessly for a year leading up to the incident, in which a group of peers ganged up on them and a trans student. It’s a horrific case and one that is inseparable from its context amid a climate of seemingly unceasing anti-LGBT demonization in the state and the nation.
In thrall to extremist right-wing leadership, Oklahoma has recently had bomb threats made against schools that hire openly LGBT staff, bans on non-cis students using bathrooms that match their gender identities and proposed legislation to criminalize any mention of gender identity in schools, all in the guise of “making schools safer for kids.”
One such child is dead. Is their school safer for it?
Advertisement
Article continues below this ad
As Benedict’s case shows, violent reactions to trans existence by extremists also impact nonbinary people, who constitute a large and growing, portion of the non-cis population. Earlier this month, the Chronicle reported on data from a UC student........
© San Francisco Chronicle
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
