When 16-year-old Nex Benedict died last February after an altercation at Oklahoma’s Owasso High School, it felt to local LGBTQ+ residents like former Oklahoma State Representative Mauree Turner as if they needed the attention of national media to get anyone in the state to care. “It’s just a haze because the things I remember the most about that time are that we didn't talk about it,” Turner tells Teen Vogue over the phone in February. “We had to get the nation to talk about it before Oklahoma talked about it.”
Benedict was a trans teen in a state where the government is stacked with officials with anti-trans records, including state school superintendent Ryan Walters. In an interview amid the media melee incited by Benedict’s death, Walters told the New York Times, “There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us.” The Times reported that Walters said he "did not believe that nonbinary or transgender people exist.”
Benedict’s death came at the beginning of a long year of hostility against trans people. Anti-trans rhetoric took center stage in the presidential election with Republicans spending some $215 million on anti-trans ads and Democrats doing little to push back.
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Turner, who became the nation’s first openly nonbinary state legislator when they were elected in 2020, declined to run for reelection and stepped down at the end of 2024. They were worn down by the aftermath of Benedict’s death and the anti-trans harassment to which they’d long been subjected. They held a moment of silence on the Oklahoma house floor to honor Benedict and watched other elected officials chat through it, “the room still just buzzing,” they recall. They felt it was impossible to stay without losing a part of themselves. “The longer I stayed in that building, the more gross I felt.”
The lesson of Nex Benedict’s death was supposed to be confirmation that anti-trans policies and rhetoric have a body count. Is anyone listening?
On February 7, 2024, Benedict was “jumped,” as he put it to a police officer on body cam footage from the hospital, in the school bathroom by three girls he barely knew. Benedict told the cop that the girls had started bothering them and their friend “because of the way we dress” and the way they were laughing. Benedict threw water on the girls from a water bottle before they “came at [him],” they told the officer:
From there, Benedict was sent home with their grandmother, who was instructed by the school to take them to the hospital. Benedict was released from the hospital the same day and died the next day, on February 8.
It took 10 days for national news to cover the incident. On February 14, Sue Kerr, the writer behind the blog Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents, started piecing together the scant details – a 16-year-old dies after high school bathroom beating; some language online using they/them pronouns – and covered it “In Memoriam” on the 16th. By the 18th, Kerr’s writing had become the catalyst for national publications to start following the story.
On the 21st, I wrote what we knew: That Benedict's exact gender identity was unknown, but that the teen fell under the LGBTQIA2S umbrella; that Benedict is of Choctaw ancestry; that their grandmother had spoken to one outlet about his death, and told them Benedict had been bullied over his gender identity; and that anti-trans legislation in Oklahoma had, according to local advocates, created an environment where deaths like his were inevitable. (Benedict was not a registered member of the Choctaw Nation, but Sarah Adams of the Oklahoma-based Native group Cousins rebukes that, saying, “We're Choctaw and Nex is ours.”)
By that point in the year, Oklahoma had already introduced more anti-LGBTQ+ bills than any other state in the nation. Local officials were not shy about sharing their views. Asked about lawmakers’ “obsession” with LGBTQ+ Oklahomans at a public forum, State Senator Tom Woods (R) said, “I represent a constituency that doesn’t want that filth in Oklahoma.”
On February 22, protesters gathered outside the State Board of Education, one holding a sign reading, “How many more students need to be beaten before Walters is held accountable?” Within a week of Benedict’s death becoming national news, students at Owasso High School walked out of class to “protest what they describe as a pervasive culture of bullying with little accountability, which they believe led to a student’s death at their school,” as reported by NBC News’s Jo Yurcaba.
Yurcaba’s reporting also shed light on who Benedict was as a person. The teen — who was initially reported to be nonbinary — used both he and they pronouns. Small trickles of information about his personality and passions crept out: One teacher described them as “fiery,” and a friend recounted his gifted art skills.
In March 2024, the Oklahoma medical examiner released an autopsy report summary ruling Benedict’s death a suicide. Benedict’s family released a statement in response saying the information shared in the autopsy was selective, leaving out the fact that Benedict was covered in contusions and scratches from the bathroom fight the prior day. The full autopsy report, released at the end of March, reflected that reality.
Benedict’s death resonated with LGBTQ+ and Native people across the country. Celebrities like Lily Gladstone and Devery Jacobs posted tributes to him (with Jacobs reposting Teen Vogue’s reporting). “This wave of anti-trans hate comes at the cost of innocent lives and these Oklahoman educators and lawmakers have failed Nex Benedict,” Jacobs wrote.
The month following his death, celebrated academic Judith Butler told me, “I remember being bullied in that bathroom. I remember being pushed up against the wall in that bathroom, and I thought, These girls are much bigger than me and I don't stand a chance here. There was something about that Nex Benedict thing, it really got to me.”
Sarah Adams and Kendra Wilson Clements, the Choctaw, Two Spirit cofounders of Cousins, which provides support to queer and trans Indigenous youth in Oklahoma, watched the cratering of attention as winter turned to spring, then summer. “Over this past year, there [was] this big reaction, and then it fizzled,” Adams tells Teen Vogue. “I was talking to my [Two Spirit, nonbinary] kid yesterday about what has happened over the past year, and what that feels like, what it looks like, and they said something like, 'It's weird that the world kept turning. It's weird that things just kept going after that.' People just tend to forget.”
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Under an openly hostile Trump administration, it is hard to overstate the fears of trans people across the country, let alone in states like Oklahoma. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in, Oklahoma had the distinction of being the first state in the country to ban the use of nonbinary gender markers on birth certificates. Within a week of Trump’s inauguration, the State Department stopped issuing US passports with “X” gender markers, leaving some who had already submitted their paperwork without their birth certificates, passports, and other important documents.
Following Trump’s executive order banning federal funding for health-care providers that prescribe gender-affirming care to those under 19, institutions including New York Presbyterian Hospital, Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC, and Children’s Hospital LA have either removed references to the care or canceled appointments for starting it. These moves are happening even before Trump’s policies take effect despite the fact that gender-affirming care is considered medically necessary by “mainstream legitimate medical authority in the United States,” as covered by Katelyn Burns. (On February 4, the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal filed a federal lawsuit against the executive order on behalf of a group of trans youth and families.)
The state of Oklahoma was again at the head of the anti-trans curve, banning transition-related health care for minors — defined as surgeries, which are extremely uncommon for youth, and hormone replacement therapy — in 2023.
Another Trump executive order targets social transition in schools, demanding legal action against schools and teachers who use a student’s chosen pronouns, provide LGBTQ+-affirming counseling, and use the bathroom aligned with their gender. Them’s Samantha Riedel highlights that the executive order “ties anti-racism and trans identity…closely together” by also requiring “patriotic education,” and arguing that educating about white privilege or unconscious bias “promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity,” according to the order. Trans youth have been banned from using the appropriate bathrooms in Oklahoma schools like Nex's since 2022.
This attack isn’t restricted to legislation. Much like the Critical Race Theory campaigns of a few years ago, or Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” push, LGBTQ+ people are being actively erased from government websites. To the consternation of medical experts, data about queer and trans folks had been removed from sites operated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) before being partially and haphazardly returned online.
In the same sweep, the CDC removed “crucial health data” that “tribal nations rely on to protect their citizens’ health,” according to Native News Online. According to 2023 data from the Trevor Project, Indigenous LGBTQ+ youth who responded to their survey have significantly higher suicidality rates than their non-Indigenous peers.
Adams and Clements of Cousins connected the loss of Benedict with the broader situation of missing Native people across America: Oklahoma has the third-highest number of missing Indigenous people in the country. Just days before the anniversary of Benedict’s death, the remains of 25-year-old Aubrey Dameron, a trans woman, Oklahoman, and a member of the Cherokee Nation, who was missing for nearly six years, were discovered.
“There's crossover here for us [with Benedict’s death and] Missing and Murdered Indigenous People [MMIP]. We know very keenly what it's like to have our relatives go missing and/or be murdered,” Adams explains when asked what the media missed about Benedict’s Native identity. “Kendra and I are today planning a celebration of life for Aubrey. We're doing that as we're mourning the loss of Nex,” Adams tells Teen Vogue.
As reported by Marisa Kabas of the Handbasket, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was instructed by the Trump Department of Justice that they would lose their funding if they did not remove LGBTQIA+-affirming language from their materials, and also required them to deadname trans youth in their reporting.
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The State Department has removed everything but “LGB” from its LGBTQIA+ acronyms on its resource pages. In late January, as the Trump White House rebuilt the site wholesale, mentions of Benedict were scrubbed from the White House website, as well as mentions of Matthew Shepard, who was murdered in 1998 at age 21 in a homophobic attack.
Last week, analyzing the ramifications of the Trump administration’s full-bore policy onslaught, Judith Butler wrote for the Guardian:
Oklahoma conservatives hardly needed the encouragement, but they have continued their outspoken campaign against young people. In late January, Walters, the state superintendent, announced a proposal to force Oklahoma students to provide proof of citizenship.
I asked Turner if they think of Benedict regularly now that they’re out of office. They said yes, every time they look at their child, “I think about how so many systems failed Nex.”
“I often think about how easy it was for some people to change or to falter when they thought it would be different if it was a homicide versus a suicide or self-inflicted,” they say through tears. “What difference does it make? We are saying that the rhetoric is just as damaging as the bullet or the blow. That is the point of a transgenocide, the loss of life, and it doesn't matter how it happens.”
Benedict is only one of so many trans youths we’ve lost in the last 12 months. Ashton Clatterbuck, 22, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who was studying journalism and political science, died by suicide on February 27, 2024. And, according to a legal filing by the Washington State attorney general last week against Trump’s gender-affirming care executive order, one Washington girl, “a bright and gentle soul,” died by suicide the month Trump took office.
One of Clatterbuck’s final conversations with his parents was about Benedict. Clatterbuck had hoped to write a column about him. “Ash understood that the institutionalization of anti-transgender/anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry in our laws and public policies translates directly into acts of violence against trans individuals. Too often that violence is deadly, whether inflicted by others or self-inflicted,” Malinda and Mark Clatterbuck, Ashton's parents, wrote for a local paper. “Ash didn’t live long enough to write that column. He died in his room last week. As his parents, we write these inadequate words to say what Ash was hoping to express in his column but will never have a chance to write. It’s a simple question: Why can’t we start loving and supporting trans youth, instead of hating and attacking them?”
Driven by the grief, fear, and community fracturing caused by the political environment before and after Benedict's death, Oklahomans like Turner, Adams, Clements, and Freedom Oklahoma executive director Nicole McAfee are thinking about how to keep their community alive. One aspect of that resistance involves pressuring institutions like hospitals to reject Trump's executive orders – which are not law – rather than comply in advance, as recommended by the ACLU, something “we know well in Oklahoma,” says McAfee. “Even if these things aren't law yet, even if they don't have enforcement mechanisms, that there's so much fear that there’s providers and states who are already ending access to care for young people because they don't want to be a target. It really sucks.”
Protests have broken out in cities across the U.S. calling for the hospitals that have canceled youth gender-affirming care appointments to reverse course. In some places, it's working already: After Wisconsin Watch's Phoebe Petrovic covered a Milwaukee hospital canceling a trans youth's appointment, their parent was called by the hospital to reschedule the appointment. But that's only one piece of the puzzle. “If the rhetoric from folks targeting trans youth is not going to change, and the policy is not going to change, how can we change our approach to make sure we are giving youth more space?” McAfee puts it to Teen Vogue.
McAfee describes “the anti-trans hate machine,” as Imara Jones of Translash called it, as akin to a hydra, losing one head only to sprout two in its place. “There are a number of people vying to be in that spotlight and get the media attention from being the most anti-trans voice,” McAfee says. (Rep. Nancy Mace comes to mind.) “We exist in this timeline where for every Ryan Walters and [Oklahoma governor] Kevin Stitt and Donald Trump, there seems to be a long line of other folks just as willing to step into that space.”
The Oklahomans who spoke to Teen Vogue hope to move away from electoralism and toward mutual aid. McAfee says “some national orgs” stopped paying attention to what was happening in Oklahoma after the news cycle for Benedict died down, instead treating the presidential election “as the thing to save young people, to save all of us.” McAfee continues, “There [has] to be a real reckoning about where we're spending movement resources, how we are actually investing in safety, and how we are investing those resources in the folks most harmed, rather than in a single candidate or campaign as a solution.”
With people like Walters and Trump in elected office, says Adams, “It absolutely creates this feeling of, well, we have to [take care of our kids] in our community. They're not going to do it in the schools. They're not going to do it within our legislation. But then our government has never taken care of us anyway. It is always up to the community to fill the gap and create space for safety.”
Cousins hosts “pizza and ping-pong” for their “incredibly cool, dynamic Indigiqueer babies,” ranging in age from 10 to 17. Adams points out one thing that can really save young queer and trans lives is having even one person who uses their correct pronouns or who is otherwise affirming, which can lower the risk of self-harm.
“Not everybody has the bandwidth to pull together an organization for queer youth. I get that,” says Adams. “What you do have is a kitchen table and some snacks and a space that you can open up and play some games together…. This idea that we have to wait for politicians, we have to wait for the right person to be the president or governor, or wait until this certain person is elected to office is bullsh*t. We don't have time for that. You do what you can do in the space that you have with the resources you have.”
Part of that is by letting the youth lead the way. “Our kids, they are medicine bundles,” Clements says. “It's my job as an older person to empower them and to uplift them and to knock out all of the f*cking obstacles in their way because I can and I know how to do that. That's my responsibility to them so that they can live and lead and be another way, a better way, an easier way, than what we've experienced here.”
McAfee and Freedom Oklahoma host a pen pal program for youth in Oklahoma and in El Paso, Texas, another state on the front lines of anti-trans legislation. Over the last year, they hosted local community events to bring folks together across state lines. In addition to a yearly zine the organization makes for trans people in Oklahoma, in 2024, they made a zine of “Love Letters to Nex.”
Some of the messages (a couple are in children’s scrawl):
“We are less without you.”
“We love you Nex.”
“Chi hullo li” — which translates from Choctaw to, “I love you.”
“You were always loved and still are.”
“I wish you were here to see all the love your name has inspired. You deserved to see all the good that will come next. Protect Trans Kids!”
“I’ll never forget your name. I will miss you always.”
If you're in crisis or experiencing suicidal ideations, help is available. You can reach the suicide and crisis lifeline at 988. To reach an LGBTQ+-trained crisis counselor, dial 988 and press 3. You can also text with an LGBTQ+-trained counselor by sending the word PRIDE to 988, or you can chat online here. You can also reach out to the Trevor Project's crisis services here, by calling 1-866-488-7386, or by texting “START” to 678678.
