By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Nex Benedict was kind of a weird kid. I know because the moment that I first learned who Nex was I also knew that we would have been friends. Like Nex, at 16 I was a pissed off metal head with a weird sense of humor and a bad temper who ferociously defended the few outsiders I could count as friends. I was also an androgynous trans kid at a conservative high school who was no stranger to getting my ass kicked simply because I stubbornly refused to bow down to someone else’s conventions and thus much like so many other trans people in this country today, I find myself looking at the details of Nex Bennedict’s tragic death and saying, “That could have been me.”

For those of you who don’t know, Nex was a 16-year-old non-binary student at a suburban Oklahoma high school who was murdered for being a Queer kid in the wrong bathroom in a state that has gone out of its way to make that distinction downright dangerous. Nex, who used he/him pronouns, had been brutally bullied for the past year over his and his friends gender identities before the incident even occurred and after standing up for his friends one last time in the girl’s bathroom, he was violently assaulted by three older girls who pinned him down and beat him until he blacked out. The school nurse suggested that Nex undergo further medical examination for obvious head injuries, but the school simply sent him home with a two-week suspension for defending himself instead.

Nex’s grandmother and adoptive mother, Sue Bennedict, was reasonably incensed by the school’s total nonchalance towards an obvious hate crime and took her battered child to a nearby hospital where she also summoned the local police who informed Sue that if Nex filed charges against his attackers he could be expected to be charged as well just for fighting back. They declined and Nex was released. The next day, Nex Benedict collapsed in his home before being rushed back to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

The local police department claims that the autopsy results indicate injuries sustained during the beating did not directly lead to Nex’s death, but the exact cause of death remains strangely undetermined a month after the incident occurred and everyone who knows anything about Oklahoma’s toxic police culture is calling for an independent investigation. While the Federal Government’s Education Department has announced their own investigation, I’m not exactly relieved. Oklahoma has been violating the rights of Queer kids for years and the Federal Government has done exactly jack shit about it.

Oklahoma is one of dozens of states across the Bible Belt that has essentially declared open war on kids who refuse to comply with the gender identity on their birth certificates. This war has included laws barring minors from access to gender affirming care proven over the decades to have fewer side effects than antidepressants. This war has included investigating the few parents actually willing to take their children at their word by affirming their gender identity as child abusers. And this war includes barring kids like Nex Bennedict from access to safe bathrooms.

Oklahoma is one of 11 states that currently bans students from using bathrooms that don’t align with their biological sex and Nex’s death is precisely the kind of violence that these policies make inevitable. However, the officials behind these policies remain shamelessly unapologetic for the bloodshed. Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent that helped push through his state’s bathroom apartheid bill with support from Governor Keven Stiff has been quoted pontificating over Nex Bennedict’s dead body that “There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us.” before vowing to “continue to fight for parents and never back down to the woke mob.”

And that’s about the size of the problem right there. Shitheads like Walters and the lobbyists of the so-called “Parent’s Rights Movement” don’t give one fuck about the rights of the kids they pretend to protect. They only care about the right for certain parents to police everyone’s kids like cattle so they can segregate the normies from the weird kids who might taint them with the perversion of free expression.

Laws like these are aimed at erasing Queer youth by making their existence too unbearable to sustain outside of the closet without a noose around their necks. But once again there is an even bigger issue at play here that I feel is getting lost in the usual partisan shuffle of the culture wars, a question that no one else but me seems to be asking. Why the hell would anyone afford a bunch of poorly trained and virtually unsupervised adult public servants the right to police their children’s basic right to use a goddamn toilet?

Seriously! Let’s stop mincing words right here and put it all on the table. We are talking about segregating children based solely on the contents of their genitalia and carefully policing when, where, and how they shit, piss, and bleed, and somehow, I’m the fucking pervert? This is way bigger than gender. This is about the basic right to bodily autonomy. Why should any child have to use a facility where they feel unsafe? Why should any human being be reduced to the humiliating position of having to beg an authority figure for the “privilege” of being able to relieve themselves?

READ MORE