An Oklahoma high school student was beaten by peers and subsequently died earlier this month.
Now, many online are saying that their death is emblematic of transphobic rhetoric promulgated by the state’s Secretary of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, who oversees the state’s Department of Education.
Chaya Raichik, who runs the controversial @LibsOfTikTok X account, is also being blamed.
Raichik was appointed to the State Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee in January by Walters.
On Feb. 7, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older, female peers at Owasso High School, where Benedict was a sophomore. A teacher broke up the altercation, but school authorities did not call an ambulance for Benedict. They did, however, go to the hospital that day and were later released.
Benedict died after a second trip to the hospital the next day. They were non-binary.
Many are positing that Benedict’s death was the result of a hate crime motivated, they say in part, by the anti-trans rhetoric Walters peddled as the head of the state’s top official in charge of education.
I was in Lawton for boot camp in 2001 and that brief amount of time was entirely too long.
I lived in Florida for a good portion of my life and if you can believe it, they’re worse. Just terrible people that think they can be assholes without consequence. Seems like the South is just full of people who will look you in the eye to tell you what great “Christians” they are while simultaneously being the worst people they can be. And they’re loud as fuck about it.
I’m gay and I can’t even be “out” because I would lose my job and likely my apartment and maybe worse. I don’t know of a State within traveling distance that isn’t full of homophobes that are just itching to kill the LGBTQ, especially my trans brothers and sisters.
All I can do is point out the hypocrisy and that isn’t even worth mentioning in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe one day “live and let live” will mean something again, but it won’t come from the American South.