02/23/2024
Written by a Spokane trans person:
( trigger warning: harsh language)
I’ve been asked a few times over the years why, even though I‘ve been out for 4 years, I still use the girls/women’s restroom as a trans man.
What happened to Nex Benedict, a 16 year old Indigenous high school student in Oklahoma recently, is why. It is entirely a safety thing. I dress and present femininely. I don’t “pass” (not that that’s the most important thing to me). I have “feminine” features. I would prefer being misgendered than being harassed, or worse. I’ve already BEEN harassed.
Nex and their friend, who is also trans, was brutally beaten in a vicious and hateful attack in the school bathroom by 3 of their peers, all older girls. Nex enjoyed The Walking Dead, Minecraft, and loved to cook. Next was described as “unfailingly kind” and “always tried to see the best in people.” Nex was a member of the Cherokee Nation and also had a cat named Zeus whom they loved and cared for in the most devoted way. Nex died just one day after the attack, succumbing to the injuries due to head trauma and brain damage. School staff refused to call an ambulance or the police. Nex was also bullied for months on end following a mandatory law put in place by Governor Kevin Stitt requiring schools to enforce to students that they must use the bathroom aligning with their s*x at birth.
Every day I am scared. I am scared for myself, my best friend and other friends who are trans, my partner, and all trans people I know, love, and have met. Especially trans youth.
Trans people are being targeted, brutalized, stripped of their human rights, beaten, bullied, assaulted, traumatized, kidnapped, murdered, hunted, and mentally exhausted and burnt out. We are DYING at the hands of the wave of transphobia in the US and everywhere. It’s not an exaggeration, it’s reality. And every single time a cis people chooses not to speak up against it, it’s like signing the death certificate of the next trans person to be brutally killed. Compliance and willful ignorance and silence is contributing to these hate crimes and these deaths.
I don’t have much else to say right now to be honest. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m grieving. I’m mourning yet another young, promising life and future lost. It could’ve been me. It could’ve been my best friend. It could’ve been someone I know from my hometown. It could’ve happened in my current town. It could’ve happened at a high school here. Or maybe the mall. Or downtown. Or at someone’s home.
I’m hurt. I’m feeling so scared, and betrayed. I’m so full of rage and pain at these headlines and these endless attacks on my community that I don’t even know what words to use to properly describe it. I feel so much and yet nothing else but malice and pure boiling rage for the people who relentlessly and willingly perpetrate lies for any vulnerable and brainwashed person to see, hear, and believe. And they do it with pleasure.
I’m at work right now and all I want to do is curl up and bawl my eyes out.
Rest in peace Nex. I’m so sorry. F**k this entire world for how it failed you. F**k every single conservative AND liberal in government office that continues to stay silent and allow the legislative hate and discrimination to surpass them, sometimes even facilitating it themselves. F**k every single person who stays silent when they don’t have to. F**k every set of parents teaching their young and impressionable children to hate. To bully. To believe ignorant nonsense. To teach them it’s okay to beat down and exclude those different from them and their family. F**k every single person who bathes in their hate in the name of their supposed Lord. F**k every single organization, community, group, whatever that causes this harm, that feeds more into deceitful transphobic fear mongering. F**k you.
