Content warning: This story contains mention of transphobia and suicide. Resources are listed at the end of the story.
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.”
