cw: frank discussion of violence against gender nonconforming people.
This was originally published on Medium for a broader audience so differs in tone from my usual Substack scribblings.
Three Girls
The year was 1999 & the world was on the cusp of the much hyped new millennium where everything could change & everything felt possible. Throughout grade school, we’d been taught that the world was getting safer, saner, & progressing linearly towards an automated future free of the prejudices of the past. At the time, I was 9 years old & believed I could catch AIDS from a toilet seat & that babies were made by kissing, courtesy of my mother who had an adversarial relationship with reality. Public school education in the Florida Panhandle was marginally better.
I wore oversized t-shirts & jeans in school even if they swallowed my frame. I didn’t make friends easily, preferring the company of books & daydreams of a future far away from my little hometown where escalating deadly attacks on the abortion clinic down the road from my house were commonplace. I didn’t know I lived in a backwards place, just that I got called “weird” or worse a lot.
There was this group of three girls in my class that everyone wanted to be friends with — they had that effortless cool. Boy bands were getting popular & you had to pick your favorite one from the groups — choose wisely because the wrong choice would get you labeled a freak. I think they all preferred the blonde one, or the other blonde one & one of them looked sorta like Britney Spears. I was still listening to dad rock & the Spice Girls … a lot. Between my “outdated” music taste, questionable fashion choices, & inability to understand social cues or hierarchies I was not gonna be invited by the popular girls to chill any time soon. Despite not understanding why, I accepted it & kept to myself.
Then one day, the three of them invited me to hang with them at P.E. This was an unexpected first, so of course I leapt at the opportunity. One of my favorite spots to slink off to on the playground to be left alone was this little wooden tent-like structure on the outskirts of the playground in a sand pit. It was far enough out of sight that you could escape into a new world beyond the monkey bars & other equipment — your own sanctuary to just be. It had two openings on either side with only enough room for two or maybe three kids at a time inside.
The girls led the way to the structure saying they invented a new game they wanted to play with me. As we got closer to the mini log-cabin, I could hardly contain my excitement at playing with the popular girls who had previously either ignored me or made fun of me. Maybe things were changing.
They told me I had to get inside the cabin & they would join me. I went inside & waited. But no one else came in. As I went to peek my head out to see what was going on, I was pushed back in by one of them. Another one blocked the other side to trap me in. They proceeded to push sand through the crevices while laughing cruelly.
Before I knew it, sand was clogging my ears, eyes, nose, & mouth. I curled up in a ball trying to prevent more sand from getting in my face. It was so disorienting, I couldn’t see how to get out & my once sanctuary had become a prison. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, just heard the laughter & if I tried to get out I was pushed back in. The sand kept pouring through. I was choking on the granules while choking back tears. It felt like it went on for hours but probably only lasted a few minutes. Eventually, they got bored & left me inside, looking filthy & feeling stupid.
The sandbox incident was mild compared to later bullying, when my “weirdness” began being clocked as “queerness”. It was mild compared to the violence many of my friends endured. But it remained seared in my memory — the feeling of being lured into my safe spot then trapped & humiliated. The cruel games & social customs enforced by my peers were inscrutable to me, & as much as I longed to have friendships with the girls in my classes, there was always this disconnect from them. The ostracizing continued throughout middle school, but I was clueless as to why until one day the brother of a friend made a crude comment to me in high school after I mentioned I had a boyfriend: “Oh, we all thought you preferred the fish taco.”
There it was: other kids had picked up on my Queerness before I was even really conscious of it. There was the Queerness of my attractions as well as the Queerness of my presence: I didn’t walk right, speak right, sit right, have the right interests or hobbies, & was repeatedly told I was “not like other girls” in derogatory ways.
An awful thing about public school is the way in which kids can acutely detect & punish divergence, often before one even really understands what they diverge from or how. There’s a Queerness in neurodivergence too — you’re “too much” or not emotive enough or are too fixated on something or too spacey or too loud or too quiet. Any attempts to be “just right” are also mocked.
But bullies aren’t born as much as raised to be that way. The first influences in a child’s life are their parents & all the prejudices carried by them. Hate doesn’t come naturally; it’s taught. It’s then reinforced through social practices that determine the value a child has in the social hierarchy. Bigotry is some real primitive monkey shit.
Three Other Girls
On February 7th 2024, a nonbinary 16-year-old with Choctaw heritage named Nex Benedict was pummeled by a group of three girls in the school’s bathroom. Nex had been being bullied by these girls for months. There aren’t many details about how the altercation started, but in the articles you see about it, the term “fight” is used frequently. “Fight” implies some sort of back & forth between two or more people, a beating is what you call it when a group of people are all attacking one person. Nex was brutally beaten by these girls resulting in traumatic head injuries, yet no one at the school alerted medical services. Upon returning home with a headache & a two-week suspension for “fighting” Nex’s grandmother took them to the hospital where they were treated & discharged. The following day, Nex collapsed in their home, was transported by ambulance to a hospital, & was pronounced dead by the evening.
In 1998, Matthew Shepard, another young Queer person was brutally murdered in Colorado. People at the time debated whether his Gay identity played a part in the crime — an insipid thing to do when it’s so glaringly obvious to those of us who have seen how violent people get over our identities. His murder became a watershed moment in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights at a time that was very fraught with misinformation & government malfeasance over the AIDS crisis.
Times are still fraught as fuck.
Queer people are facing increasingly higher rates of violence in the last 5 years with BIPOC bearing the brunt of it representing 85% of reported deaths. This barbarity is not a random occurrence: it’s a direct result of the increase in pants-shittingly hateful rhetoric & the ease in which it’s virulently promoted.
According to the HRC in their 2023 report,
Such rhetoric has, unfortunately, begun to translate to real world violence: 2022 saw the highest number of anti-LGB and anti-trans and gender non-conforming hate crimes reported by the FBI to date, with the number of hate crimes based on gender identity increasing by over 32% from 2021 to 2022.
Almost 500 gender identity-motivated hate crimes were recorded in 2022, accounting for 4% of all hate crimes recorded in that year; anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes overall accounted for more than one in five (20.8%) hate crimes. And this number is an undercount, given that FBI data reporting does not capture all hate crimes, as not all jurisdictions track anti-trans hate crimes, nor do all jurisdictions report hate crimes to FBI databases.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, it’s basically illegal to be gender nonconforming in some states now & it’s only getting worse the what-about-the-children facade finally slipping off completely. There are 448 anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed in the U.S. according to the latest ACLU data. Guess what? These bills don’t just stop at preventing minors from accessing medical services or books, they’re focused on preventing access to ID changes, HRT, free speech & expression for ADULTS.
They’re also coming for your birth control, IVF treatments, & abortion access, cis girlies. Because it’s never about the children. That’s why kids keep dying entirely preventable deaths.
Not that Queer folks are surprised by any of this — we’ve been telling y’all that they were coming for a huge range of adult medical services & that even cisgender heterosexuals are going to be affected. We know that a major way to make the majority care about the erosion of civil rights is by focusing on what they stand to lose because frankly, they don’t give a shit about us.
We’re tired of being right & not being listened to or labeled hysterical. We’re tired of seeing people we love die because some shit-for-brains ideologue uses their massive platform to incite their worms-for-brains followers to violently attack innocent people.
If you are someone who believed that these right wing stochastic terrorists only had the best interests of the children in mind, let this be a huge wakeup call.
A child is dead because enough people believed some of the oldest lies in the playbook about Queer people. A child is dead because people care more about banning books & medicine & supportive teachers than making sure kids get healthcare, learn literacy, & live past the age of 16. A child is dead because adults think it’s a totally normal, good thing to obsess about the configuration of people’s genitourinary tissue.
A child is dead because three other girls trusted the adults who taught them to hate someone because they were different instead of seeing the beauty in divergence.
“WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING!?”
My news feed is peppered with the names of the dead. There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t read about a Queer person being murdered, beaten, or discriminated against in the supposedly freest country in the world. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t see another bill introduced to intentionally inflict harm on my community.
I can’t stop thinking about Nex. I can’t stop thinking about who they could have grown up to be, all of the experiences they’ll never have, how NO ONE at the school did anything to protect them & several did everything to make their participation in school atrocious before it was fatal.
“I said ‘you’ve got to be strong and look the other way, because these people don’t know who you are’,” Ms Benedict told The Independent in a phone interview.
“I didn’t know how bad it had gotten.”
Nex shouldn’t have had to be strong. They were only 16.
A lot of people are saying elected officials & various high profile bigots with the charisma of a soggy jockstrap like Chaya Raichik have blood on their hands. But the blood was in that bathroom. It was washed away like the violence never happened. People like Chaya won’t stop at banning books or medication — they want to ban certain human beings from existing.
Make no mistake, these monsters would prefer that we are exterminated & our blood rinsed away by outsourced hands because they’re too cowardly to do it themselves. They don’t care how many children have to die for their agendas to be completed. It’s an error in judgement to think that they can be shamed into caring about the death of a child caused by their rhetoric. These people have no shame. They are living ghouls who thrive on causing violence & strife.
Instead, if you’ve found yourself correctly horrified by this young child’s death but don’t consider yourself part of the LGBTQ+ community, I’m saying step up. I’m not asking. If you don’t want this country to continue the free fall into fascism, it is up to a larger majority of people to do something about it, NOT the already marginalized minority, many of whom are struggling to just survive because we’re all still living under the repercussions of preexisting prejudices. We also never stopped doing the work to protect the rights of people different from us.
I will direct your attention to these names. Read their stories. Say their names. Recognize that within each of these victims of violence was a tiny universe of hope, struggle, striving, defeat, success, resilience. They deserved to live.
Step up for marginalized communities by providing tangible support, protecting ALL kids by demanding safer schools & access to healthcare, joining your local resource centers for info on how to be a better ally, & educating yourself on the very real threat socioeconomically disadvantaged people face simply because of their identity. Provide housing if you’re able to, even if it’s just a room, because a lot of us can’t go back home.
Literally just go talk to BIPOC LGBTQ+ people for how you can meaningfullyhelp. It’s not a mystery what needs to be done on multiple fronts to make things better for people who have it the worst. Whether you favor a radical approach or phoning Congress members, no one is gatekeeping how to support communities at risk of increased violence — you just have to put in a modicum of effort to find what strategy works best for you.
DO BETTER.
Unprovoked violence is something we have to be vigilant about at all times because not knowing you can be in danger due to laws or prejudices in a given area means life or death. Sometimes, what should be the safest place is just a place that hasn’t yet become early gravesite.
Nex Benedict didn’t have to die. They deserved a world where they could be themselves without fear of violence & live their dreams just like anyone else who graduated high school. They deserved protection. They deserved to fall in love & have their heart broken & break some hearts & make mistakes & be bored & self-actualize & grow old & see a future where it’s not even fathomable that a kid would hurt another kid because they’re different.
Their name was Nex Benedict & they deserved better.