Nex Benedict: Why this story is important

As usual, the best coverage of the USA comes from abroad, but that should change

For a week and a day after the death of Nex Benedict, the only coverage was local news stations. Then PghLesbianCorrespondents, a Pittsburgh-based blog, first highlighted the death of Benedict, and since then the story has been blowing up. From a Daily Kos post late the next day to my own post hours after that (though midnight passed, making the date two days after the PLC story), more and more outlets have been picking up pieces of the story. Early yesterday (due to being a number of time zones ahead) the UK’s US-edition website of The Independent added a story that is particularly important because unlike previous coverage it includes an interview with Benedicts biological grandmother and adoptive mom. Because of this we now have more clarity and certainty about important aspects of Benedict’s life. Then later yesterday Erin in the Morning added another. Also late yesterday other news outlets have been publishing their own coverage, from NBC News to The Daily Beast. And of course major QT (say it out loud) outlets like Them.us and Pink News have chimed in. There’s even a Wikipedia page as of late last night or very early this morning. It seems unlikely that MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times or any other major mainstream media outlet will give the story a miss. (Indeed, I’m sure that even though I didn’t find them at the time of starting this story that some I just named will have coverage up before I publish.)

But why is that? There are, sadly, many murders of trans and non-binary people around the world and in the United States. Most of these are murders of AMAB trans people of color. Most of these do not go viral. Most don’t even get national coverage at all. Benedict’s story is different. I believe attention will continue to grow and will ultimately make a long-term impact on the politics of trans children. (Please note that I am vomiting so much I have just replaced seven keyboards in a row trying to move on from the phrase “the politics of trans children.”)

In the fall of 1998 Rita Hester was murdered. A Black, trans woman in Boston, Hester’s death was shockingly violent, leaving blood all over her apartment. News of the murder spread quickly in trans communities at the time, and in Portland I organized two protests, one calling for action to catch the perp and the other styled as a celebratory vigil. Ten came to the first. Three came to the second, all trans (my partner was busy that night).

I did have reason to hope for better. Seven and a half weeks before Hester’s murder a cis gay man was savagely beaten in the area of Laramie, Wyoming. His arms were stretched apart and then tied to a split rail fence. Unconscious but alive, the man spent almost a full day crucified and exposed to weather that dipped under freezing at night and didn’t rise too much above during the day. Finally a biker, first taking him to be a scarecrow, recognized his humanity and called for police. Although he was taken to a local hospital and later transferred to an advanced trauma care centre in Colorado, the injuries to his brain beneath his shattered skull were too severe to repair. He died six days later.

Coverage of the murder began locally but became national even before he took his last breath. Fruitless vigils for his survival and health were held thousands of miles away from the fence where he was left to die. When they were unsuccessful, hundreds of memorials were held across the US and around the world, many of them with thousands of people attending, crying, speaking out, demanding accountability and demanding change. Between 5,000 and 30,000 attended the memorial in Portland, the same city where three came to Hester’s vigil. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people attended at least one vigil or rally somewhere in the world. Given we’re all good leftists here, it is fairly likely that you attended one. And if you’re old enough, you do remember his name.

It didn’t seem insane, then, to expect a more vigorous response, a larger community response, to the murder of Hester, but there were reasons that the murders were treated differently. Many will note first that being trans is different than being gay, and while for years there had existed national and global discussions of gay issues, few people had the same level of familiarity with trans people and the ways in which we were marginalized. The level of funding and organization on behalf of gay men’s political issues was also incomparably more than the same on behalf of trans issues. Community organizations, often created in the 1980s in response to the need for friendship, support, and peer care for people living with HIV disease, had also forged connections at the local level between caring people who were either LGBQ themselves or at least loved someone LGBQ while communicating nationally to help political efforts as necessary (such as efforts to pass the Ryan White CARE Act). In short, there was infrastructure here capable of mobilizing people and producing action. Last but far from least, in a country that prefers simple political messages and does not like people of color, Hester was Black and Shepard white.

Journalists were themselves more comfortable writing about gay men’s issues, having been educated over the previous 15 years of coverage on issues such as HIV/AIDS activism, debates over open service in the military as a hot button issue in the 1992 presidential campaign, the enactment of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, controversy over Republican bigotry and hostility (such as Pat Buchannan’s speech at the 1992 GOP presidential nominating convention), major anti-gay state initiatives such as Oregon’s Measure 8 and Measure 13 and Colorado’s Amendment 1, the Romer v Evans case following from Amendment 1 that in 1996 reached the US Supreme Court and created the first pro-queer court precedent in US history, and the beginnings of the marriage equality movement. In fact as Shepard lay dying, Hawaii was preparing to vote on a state constitutional amendment to overturn a decision by that state’s Supreme Court that would otherwise grant equal marriage rights regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Journalists were ready to cover hate crimes against gay men in a way that they were not ready to cover hate crimes against trans women, much less Black trans women.

Finally, consider that much of anti-gay hostility and hatred was motivated and justified by Christian churches and teachings. What queer positive churches existed seemed back on their heels compared with the aggressive posture of conservative Christians. While hate crimes had never been the most prominent of gay issues in the national consciousness, the concept of gay bashing and gay panic defences to charges of murder they were far from unknown. This, combined with the literal cruciform pose in which Shepard was abandoned allowed for his story to become an easily used, simply communicated metaphor criticizing hateful Christians. Indeed it sprang so readily to mind that political cartoonists produced many examples of Shepard-as-Christ around the world.

In short, Shepard murder came at a time when the national and international infrastructure existed to support worldwide communication with local organizing groups, the media had sufficient background information to tell the story, and the story had resonance with contemporary issues receiving major attention.

None of this was true for Hester. Instead she languished largely unheralded. Though trans activists like me sought to communicate the importance of her life and death, not only is she poorly remembered today despite the inspiration she provided to the creators of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, but her murder is not yet solved after 25 years.

But fast forward those 25 years and we find a different level of infrastructure ready to respond to trans concerns. Gay men’s or lesbians’ or LGB groups from the late 1990s were generally inactive on trans issues and sometimes even hostile. Since Obergefell v. Hodges, however, many of those same organizations have become more and more active in fighting cissexism. Trans people can now leverage a level of support that equals or exceeds that of gay men in 1998. On top of this, anti-bullying organizations have become more common, larger, and more organized. And while I don’t expect them to be perfect, they have often enough made an effort to understand how gendered bullying targets trans and non-binary students. It’s reasonable to assume that some contribution to publicizing and organizing around Benedict’s death will come from anti-bullying non-profits and activists. Add the increased communicative possibilities of the internet, and trans activists are at a clear advantage today.

Journalists, too, have developed more experience over the past 25 years (though admittedly most of that has only come in the last 7 or 8) talking and writing about trans lives and issues. From military service to employment discrimination to hate crimes to celebrities to the emergence of local trans politicians to (forgive me but I have to say it) Caitlyn fucking Jenner’s visibility and run for California governor, even major outlets have faced issues that they did not feel that they could ignore. As those stories gained ground, the GOP backlash targeting trans health care, non-discrimination rights, ID, sports participation, bathroom use and more became hot button issues. Indeed our very existence is considered a political issue up for debate with various figures from Matt Walsh to prominent Christian church officials to (relevantly) Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt attempting to define us out of existence, to make existing as trans in public a crime, or simply to rid the land of us from the river to the sea. While I do not trust journalism farther than I can throw a reasonably small black hole, their skills at covering and willingness to cover trans issues have advanced massively in comparison to only 4 years ago.

Importantly, the right has had no stronger anti-trans focus than it has had on trans children in public schools. Outraged (or seemingly so) at the existence of AMAB trans girls, the right has insisted that far from being an accommodation necessary for trans safety, the use of gender-appropriate bathrooms is a threat to cis peers. On this justification trans-hostile laws have been passed, trans-hostile policies have been enacted, and trans-hostile politicians and parents have directed vitriol toward and inspired threats against the children they hate and fear. Our children will be safer with more less understanding, fewer accommodations for kids who are different, and more gender policing is the constant refrain. Republicans would have you also believe that red states are advancing child safety while blue states wish only to harm the most vulnerable. Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, has been openly hostile to trans students. “There’s dangerous consequences when common sense is vacated,” (not least to grammar) Walters said about respecting trans children’s knowledge of themselves in one Education Department video last year. In another notorious act he named Chaya Raichik to the Education Department’s Library Media Advisory Committee “to rid schools of liberal, woke values.” One might reasonably question the wisdom of the appointment given that Raichik had inspired a week of daily bomb threats for one school district in Oklahoma itself.¹

Finally, it is possible for the public easily to see how this rhetoric is connected to the murder of a non-binary child in a public school restroom. The attack on and subsequent death of Benedict is not quite a metaphor in the same way that Shepard’s murder was for anti-gay Christian hatred, but more of a synecdoche: a single part of a larger problem that symbolically stands in for the whole. But while it may not have the mythopoetic features of Shepard’s crucifixion, the emotional power of Benedict’s story of a straight A student targeted, bullied, beaten, and ultimately dying has a huge capacity for resonance with people who may not be sympathetic to all trans people or all trans issues, but see the danger of state laws and policies singling out trans and non-binary children and are open enough to concluding that anti-trans politicians have gone too far.

For all of these reasons Benedict’s death is very different from that of Hester, and much closer to that of Shepard’s in its perceived newsworthiness and in its potential power to motivate and organize large numbers.

It’s important to note that we still don’t have a cause of death. While it seems impossibly unlikely that Benedict dropped dead of some unrelated cause the day after being horrifically beaten, if an autopsy does come back finding an unrelated cause of death, that will dampen the power of activists to hold Walters, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, and other officials accountable for dangerous rhetoric and bad decisions. Likewise we don’t yet know the motive for the assault on Benedict. Did one of the three girls involved think Benedict stole something? Did Benedict actually steal something? We don’t know. And while there are other circumstances surrounding the assault that make us think the attack on Benedict was motivated at least in part by their gender, this too is as yet unresolved, and if the assault was initiated entirely for other reasons that, too, will make it harder to draw a connection between the actions of adults targeting trans children using political tactics and how those actions might seem to encourage, bless, or at least indirectly model young bullies’ targeting of trans peers using the tactics available to them. Largely missed in the reporting is another fact, that Benedict was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. While I don’t see that as a limiting factor, in a racist nation it is always possible that that could complicate the story.

I have watched and read quite a lot of coverage over the past 4 days, and without relying on any one source I believe that the crucial questions of cause of death and motive are likely (especially in the case of the first) to be answered in ways that make Benedict’s story more powerful and more sympathetic, not less. We won’t know until we know, of course, but so far this has every appearance of an event that can reach the emotions and change the opinions and behaviours of (mostly) decent, (mostly) empathetic people vaguely antagonistic towards trans rights but who see themselves as valuing children. And of course this already deeply affects trans people and their allies. From far-left to centre-mild right there are a lot of people. We may also see an upwelling of support from indigenous nations, given Benedict’s Cherokee and Choctaw heritage. They do have a history of being more sympathetic to trans people and lives, and also to supporting causes that are not their own. The Choctaw famously raised funds for Irish communities to combat hunger during the Potato Famine. In sum, we have every reason to be optimistic that people will show a much greater and more lasting response to Benedict’s death than to Hester’s murder.

Nothing, absolutely nothing makes up for the loss of Nex Benedict to their friends, their family, their school, and their community. I do not here argue that it does. I also would not dream of saying that Matthew Shepard’s murder was worth it. But we are on the verge of seeing something momentous in scale and life changing in impact.

I predict we will see that organizing. I think that three months from now we will already be able to look back and marvel at the scale of the response to the danger that trans and non-binary children continue to face. And I hope that we do, for the sake of all the Benedicts still in schools and all the Benedicts who come after.

"Got into a fight"

Nex Benedict, News, Deadnaming the Dead and Bathroom Panics

1. While Walters loves Raichik who declared herself a stochastic terrorist and has posted pictures proudly taking credit for threats she inspired, he has called teachers unions “terrorist organizations” (which in their case he believes to be a bad thing).