Undo these chains, my friend
I'll show you the rage I've hidden
Slipknot — “The Devil In I”
On February 8, the world lost a child: a teenager, a straight-A student, and by every account we’ve found, an absolutely wonderful human being. This was Nex Benedict, a non-binary sophomore at Owasso High School West Campus in Owasso, Oklahoma, just outside of Tulsa. There is nothing that makes the death of a child more or less tragic: every one is precious. But some things make a death more or less news, and Nex’s death is happening against the backdrop of frightening and dangerous legal and political situations for trans, non-binary and all LGBTQ+ people in Oklahoma and in the Owasso School District. We all have a stake in learning what happened and why, as best as we are able.
Who Was Nex Benedict?
You and I can't decide, which of us was taken for granted
Make amends, some of us are destined to be outlived
Nex was a 16-year-old who loved their cat, Zeus, more than anything, but also enjoyed other animals, headbanging music, and stylish vests. They lived with their grandmother, and taught her as much as they were learning:
[Nex’s grandmother] told The Independent that Nex was always understanding if she used an incorrect pronoun, or called Nex by their birth name.
“Nex did not see themselves as male or female,” Ms. Benedict said. “Nex saw themselves right down the middle. I was still learning about it, Nex was teaching me that.”
“When you’re old school, you don’t always understand it,” her husband Walter told The Independent.
“But it would be very boring if we were all the same. It’s on the inside that matters the most.”
It’s hard to imagine anything more loving than being willing to grow and change for a person you value. But there was something. In the days after Nex’s death their birth name was everywhere. Their grandmother took responsibility:
Since Nex’s death, Ms Benedict said she had barely slept and been “walking in a blur”.
When it came time to place an obituary, Ms Benedict said she had provided Nex’s birth name by accident. This has led to some media coverage of Nex’s death using their birth name, or dead name.
“When you are going through something like this and you lose a child, you’re not thinking right. We’re getting a headstone done and Nex will be on there,” she said.
In the immediate aftermath, some of the reporting — that Nex was non-binary, that Nex felt most respected by “they” and “them” instead of “she” and “her,” and even that Nex had fully left their birth name behind — came without attribution or confirmation. But it’s certain now: this Slipknot fan and feline friend lived outside of the gender binary, their family called them “they” and “them,” and their birth name was a deadname.
Another error: Nex was Choctaw, not Cherokee as FreedomOklahoma originally reported and I repeated.
Nex Benedict was loving and loved, a teacher and a student, a wanderer and a guide. Nex Benedict will be passionately missed for entire lives to come.
The What
Step inside
See The Devil In I!
Too many times, we've let it come to this
Fifteen days ago Nex Benedict was assaulted in a bathroom at their school. They were in the girls’ bathroom, as required by state law for any student, trans or not, non-binary or not, who was assigned female at birth, as Nex was. They were in the bathroom with their best friend, who was also assaulted, and who has also been identified as trans. Three older students were responsible for the assault.
The violence lasted two minutes or less, during which Nex is said to have fallen, striking their head on the floor. Local news originally reported that the older students repeatedly struck Nex’s head against the floor, according to a friend of Nex’s mother, but that quote has been removed for reasons unknown to us. The current statement from Owasso Public Schools says students in the bathroom and a staff member who entered stopped the violence and ordered the students to the office. Per the removed quote, Nex was not thinking or moving well enough to walk to the office unassisted, and was helped by their friend. The school district says all students walked on their own. (The police have said footage from inside the school will eventually be released.)
Nex’s mother told The Independent that Nex was suspended for two weeks, and reports indicate all students involved were punished. Owasso Public Schools said, “Any notion that the district has ignored disciplinary action toward those involved is simply untrue,” but didn’t give specifics, citing federal privacy laws.
The students were checked by a nurse, who decided an ambulance was not necessary, but who did recommend further medical assessment for Nex.
The next step has been confused in reports, but Nex’s grandmother Sue Benedict was called, picked Nex up from the school, and took them to Bailey Medical Center where they were examined and ultimately discharged the same evening. Sue Benedict is also Nex’s mother by adoption. As a result, different reports say Nex’s grandmother or mother was contacted by the school, that their grandmother or mother took them to the hospital and contacted the police while there. Both are correct.
After Sue contacted them, police dispatched a school resource officer to take a statement from Nex at the medical center. That night Nex went home, experienced ongoing pain and other symptoms, but with the help of music fell asleep. On the next day, Thursday, February 8, Nex had a medical emergency at home and collapsed. Sue called an ambulance, which transported Nex to a specialized pediatric emergency room, where they were soon pronounced dead.
What We Don’t Know
You and I, wrong or right, traded a lie for the leverage
In between lens in light, you're not what you seem
There is so much we know tentatively or not at all that is important here. It can be agonizing not to leap to reasonable (and tempting) conclusions, conclusions about responsibility and blame. But the consequences of getting things wrong are too high.
So let’s be clear about what we do not yet know:
The schools and police both described what happened as a fight. Media reports have uncritically reused the word, but we don’t know if it was two-sided in the way that “fight” implies.
We don’t know what started the violence.
We know almost nothing about the three older students at all, including whether any were hurt.
We know Nex poured water on at least one, but not when.
We know Nex claimed that three bullied Nex and their friends, but not when, how often, or how severely.
We don’t know if these three older girls were involved in the long-term bullying Sue Benedict says started “in earnest” at the beginning of the 2023 school year.
And while we know the longer campaign of bullying was related to Nex’s gender, we do not know that this particular event was born out of cis-sexism, which includes beliefs that people who violate gender boundaries are unnatural or wrong or sinful or deserve punishment (or all of these).
Although it is horribly difficult to consider, it’s also possible the same child who was bullied by others could have been in the wrong in some way on February 7, could have been an instigator. Though this would seem out of character for someone described as “unfailingly kind, and always search[ing] for the best in people,” teens are still teens.
The point is just that we don’t know all the facts until we know them. That’s all.
The final relevant unknown is the exact cause of Nex’s death. The Owasso Police Department released a statement late on February 21, saying that preliminary indications were that Nex’s death was not caused by “trauma,” and that more comments would be forthcoming when other toxicology results and other data comes back.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean Nex’s death was not caused by trauma, just that the autopsy didn’t establish it. As Radley Balko pointed out recently, autopsy reports are their own special thing with their own special language, and it’s not immediately clear if a stroke or heart attack or pulmonary embolism directly traceable to a clot caused by bleeding from traumatic injury would be listed as a traumatic cause of death. (For your consideration, the Minneapolis medical examiner listed George Floyd’s cause of death as “cardiopulmonary arrest.”)
Oh, and as journalist Erin Reed reports, the police seem to be in the early stages of walking back that “it wasn’t trauma” thing. So there’s that.
Nex Benedict was assaulted, but we can’t yet be certain that there was a hate crime, that there was a murder, or that we can blame three girls or even one for their death. We’ll find out, to be sure.
For now we have to mourn without all the answers.
The Politics
Your station is abandoned, fooled you 'cause I know what you've done
Sensation deprivation, you should've burned when you turned on everyone
Our mourning, however, is not without deep, meaningful, well justified anger.
Oklahoma is not neutral ground. Oklahoma’s schools are certainly no more a bastion of acceptance than any other schools, and may be less.
As mentioned, Republican Governor Kevin Stitt signed a law banning use of gender-congruent bathrooms by trans children seeking acceptance or safety. State Secretary of Public Instruction Ryan Walters — this guy — has called the teachers’ union a “terrorist organization” with whom he will not negotiate. He shared a LibsOfTikTok post that attacked a Tulsa school librarian, after which followed days of bomb threats. (He spoke out against the bomb threats only after he himself was threatened for not doing anything about them, issuing a statement not in defense of the specific librarian or school, but generally against threats to schools, elected officials, and others.)
Though LOTT founder Chaya Raichik has expressed pride over inspiring threats and called herself a stochastic terrorist in her Twitter bio, Walters named her to a state library advisory council in order to “make schools safer.”
Although Raichik does not live in Oklahoma, she has caused more damage in the state than just the bomb threats she helped inspire. In fact, she was part of a causal chain that led to a teacher that Benedict valued and admired leaving the district. A Project Veritas undercover operative taped Tyler Wrynn saying, of parents who reject queer or trans children, that if those parents can’t love you for who they are, “fuck them.” Project Veritas gave the video to LOTT, which shared it publicly. There were threats, and Wrynn resigned. Nex was upset about this, according to Sue Benedict.
Trans advocates have long highlighted the risks of targeting trans children and adults with denials of medical care, legal recognition, the chance to play sports on teams with friends and peers, and very specifically the risks of being denied accessible and safe bathrooms. Elected Republicans generally have acted contrary to those warnings. When the bathroom bill was enacted, the AP reported on one Oklahoma legislator’s words:
“It’s about safety, it’s about protection, it’s about common sense,” said Republican Rep. Danny Williams, the House author of the bill. “The goal of this bill is to protect our children.”
Oklahoma lawmakers have repeatedly spread the lie that being trans constitutes a threat to fellow students. GLSEN’s 2021 National School Climate Survey included state-by-state “snapshots” for 42 states and Puerto Rico. Surprise, Oklahoma didn’t do so well.
Politics, politicians and policies matter, and when they’re all scapegoating trans people and encouraging those who would bully them, bad things happen. This is true regardless of what exactly transpired in that Owasso High School bathroom February 7.
What Now?
Step inside
See The Devil In I!
Too many times,
we've let it come to this
Step inside
See The Devil In I!
You'll realize I'm not your Devil
I'm not your Devil anymore
Two weeks ago reporting on the life and death of Nex Benedict was local, and used their deadname and disrespectful pronouns. Approximately a week later, in coverage of Benedict’s funeral, Nex’s chosen pronouns started to appear, as well as the name “Nex.” In an accompanying video spot the local station took the time to interview someone who knew them instead of only reporting on press releases and public comments by police or the schools, or on the obituary which Sue admitted accidentally used the wrong name and pronouns.
We’ve watched a lot of local coverage of this, hours and hours. Much of it has been excruciating, but just in the last few days, it’s gotten dramatically better.
It may feel infinitesimal, considering how just this week, some of the coverage of that police statement about “it wasn’t trauma” seems to insinuate Nex’s death was entirely unrelated to the February 7 assault. But even though it falls drastically short of what’s needed, it is change. We witness this, acknowledge this, and celebrate even this tiny improvement as proof that change is possible.
Nothing will ever substitute for having Nex Benedict alive on this earth. But there is an opportunity here, to change the narrative that targets children based on gender and creates a new narrative that focuses attention on behavior. It’s a chance to do what we all gathered together to do after Matthew Shepard’s murder.
And no, we didn’t suddenly live in Liberated Glittergay World on January 1, 1999, just because we’d spent the fall coming together in Shepard’s name. But the narrative changed.
In the narrative of Kevin Stitt and Ryan Walters and Chaya Raichik and so many others, Nex Benedict was the devil. We must have the courage to invite as many as are willing to come to understand that we are not in fact devils. Not me. Not you. Not Nex. Not Sue. Not Walter. Not Nex’s still living friend, terrified I’m sure at having to go back to the same school again and again and again.
This can be a moment of inflection, a pivot, a crossing of borders. It will take all of our collective bravery and all of our collective support, but we can respond to violence by making ourselves more vulnerable, not less. We can do what must be done and what the Stitts and Raichiks and Walterses will not do: choose to foster prosociality, in the words of the academics. To choose justice, in the words of Thoreau. To choose love, in the words of Gandhi. To choose creative altruism, in the words of Dr. King.
We do not have to let our teens come to trauma, our vulnerable come to violence. We do not have to let it come to this, not again, not after so many failures already. We can choose to do the work, to overcome the pain of this moment. We can choose to reach out, to connect, to heal. We can choose to be inspired by Nex Benedict who walked beyond the boundaries of gender that so many treat as limits and find instead nepantla, a terra incognita, a new and gentle space within which to comfort one another.
And one day, one day that seems impossibly far away but that I promise you exists, on one day there will be no more devils.
NOTE: Owasso schools and some students have received threats since Benedict’s story went national. In response their family, including Sue Benedict and her husband Walter, have asked through their lawyer that all those who support trans and non-binary children and all those who feel sadness, loss and anger in the wake of Nex’s death to choose better than this:
The family graciously accepts and appreciates the outpouring of support, thoughts and prayers from across the nation for the loss of their child. In the coming weeks and months they request that their privacy be respected and that they be allowed to grieve and deal with their new reality---a life without Nex. The Benedicts know all too well the devastating effects of bullying and school violence, and pray for meaningful change wherein bullying is taken seriously and no family has to deal with another preventable tragedy.
Lastly, the family asks that any threats, or acts, of violence, against students, employees and personnel, or any other persons associated with the Owasso Public Schools, cease immediately.
The italicized lyrics in this piece are drawn from “The Devil In I,” a 2014 song by the metal band Slipknot, whom Nex enjoyed. The song tells the story of a frightening person who is hated by others, but opens themselves up despite feeling rage. The hateful others enter in and find the protagonist was not the devil they feared. Though it doesn’t mentioning bullying by that name, the literal demonization that is the central motif of the song works well to describe bullying and also the behavior of anti-trans lawmakers who consistently single out children who are trans or whom they assume are trans because of their stereotypes. If you wish to connect to Nex, try listening to this song from a headbanging band they enjoyed and which has a relevant story to tell in the aftermath of our loss.
[Independent / AP]
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My name is on this, but for any who appreciated it, Evan and Dok deserve praise too: I'm pretty new to journalism and this "documenting sources" and "writing less than 14,000 words" and stuff is a bit of a reach for my present talents. It wouldn't be the story that it is without them.
Shit like this and past experiences are why I'm anxietal of using public restrooms. Online I've had women say they would scream that I'm trans while assaulting themselves and trying to blame me. It's stuff like this that is why I advocate adult trans folks to be armed when they are allowed to be, with schools being an obvious exception. It's another reminder overall that we are not wanted in America by one political party, and if they win the next election, they have said that they are targeting us as a priority. Remember that this November. Elections have consequences even if YOU don't feel them