By MAR RENO
On Feb. 7, Nex Benedict, an Indigenous trans teenager, was knocked to the floor by three classmates in the bathroom at Owasso High School (Oklahoma). The next day, Nex died. Local news media initially refused to include information that Nex was transgender; it misgendered and misnamed them and omitted the key information that Nex was beaten unconscious in a bullying incident. Almost a month later, police are denying that Nex died of physical trauma and are pointing to the existence of a toxicology report, implying the teen died by suicide.
On Feb. 26, around 40 students at the Owasso High School staged a walkout in solidarity with Nex, and in a resounding protest against the school’s failure to address the rampant bullying that has led to another unnecessary death of a young person. Many students reported that anti-gay and racist bullying is an everyday occurrence at the school, and described how the administration pointedly ignores these incidents.
The protesting teens show that even if the police were accurate in stating that Nex did not die of trauma from the attack, they were nonetheless murdered by the rising tide of explicit, anti-trans mania in the U.S. To be clear, anti-LGBT sentiment is not new in this country. For the last century violence and economic marginalization against LGBT people have been permitted and often committed by the police. This strand of police violence relies on the pervasive racism within law enforcement agencies, as it is trans women of color who suffer the highest levels of discrimination, violence, and criminalization by police. Additionally, because of the layers of political and economic marginalization faced by those who are both Black and trans, life is not survivable. In 2022, 54% of all trans murders in the U.S. were Black women, and one study of 34,000 people showed that one in five Black trans youth had attempted suicide that year. [X][X]
It should be no surprise that in spite of this, Black and POC trans people have historically been the heroes and vanguard of the LGBT rights movement for decades: Marsha P. Johnson, Silvia Rivera, Storme DeLarverie, Cecilia Gentilli, to name a few.
It was only in 2009, as a response to pressure from decades of militant LGBT activism, that the FBI began to track hate crimes against transgender people, and the numbers have increased every year since. Between 2013 and 2019, anti-trans hate crimes increased by 589%. In 2022, there was another 32.9% jump from the previous year. [X] This feeding frenzy is directed by anti-gay politicians, who are in turn funded by ultra-rich capitalists with fascistic tendencies, such as the pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcast Group and Elon Musk, whose ownership of the X (Twitter) platform has led to an explosion in anti-LGBT media.
One such media source at play in the killing of Nex Benedict is Libs of Tik Tok, a hate channel led by a real estate developer based in New York City. In 2022, the channel doxxed and harassed a teacher at the very same Owasso High School, forcing him to resign over a posted video in support of LGBT students at the school. The message from the incident is clear: If you even support trans youth, your life will be permanently damaged.
These well-funded pundits are backed up by policies pushed by the Republican Party, who are themselves lobbied by some of the nation’s largest corporations: AT&T, UPS, Pfizer, and many more. [X] In 2021, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills were introduced into state and national legislatures. In 2023, there were more than 550 of these bills (80 of them signed into law). [X] Most of these bills fall into a few categories. One category, the so-called “bathroom bills,” criminalizes teens and adults for going into bathrooms that don’t align with their biologically assigned sex at birth. This exact situation killed Nex Benedict.
Most of the other bills are related to school policies and teachers’ working conditions. One kind of bill forces teachers under threat of criminal prosecution to report if they know that a student is trans; another bans trans teens from participation in sports, and another bans library books and censors curriculum. [X] Similar censorship exists for teachers who may teach about racism in the classroom, or those who may teach about the genocide in Palestine. This legislative assault creates the legal basis for police and “vigilantes” (such as the three girls who attacked Nex in the bathroom) to enforce an anti-gay regime in all spheres of society, to push queer people “back into the closet,” to again divide a huge sector of the working class away from their working-class siblings.
Just as with racial segregation, police have always played a key role in marginalizing LGBT people. Historically, they directly enforced heterosexual gender norms through tickets, beatings, arrests and jailings, sexual assaults, and defamation (see “Stonewall: a Revolutionary Legacy”). Today, they act as both the perpetrator and magic eraser of anti-LGBT violence. A 2021 study from the Journal of Hate Crimes out of Los Angeles showed that nearly all trans participants had experienced a hate crime at some point, and that half of them did not report the crime because they believed the police would not take it seriously or out of fear they would be victimized by police again. [X]
Today’s LGBT advocates are primarily organized through two main avenues, non-profit organizations (NPOs) and ad-hoc formations that respond to specific instances of anti-LGBT violence. One of the largest (financially) LGBT non-profits is Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which in 2021 spent most of its money on social media and lobbying activities [X]. The organization was recently protested by LGBT+ activists, ACT UP New York, and Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) for its financial ties to weapons manufacturer Northropp Grumman [X], whose profits are surging as a direct result of sales to the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. Not only are the organization’s finances tainted with the blood of war, but they have proven completely ineffective at resisting the massive assault on LGBT rights at the legislative level. This is because NPOs were never intended to protect or improve the material conditions for LGBT people in the U.S. In fact, they were designed to weaken the power of the social movements that won civil rights for LGBT people in the first place.
In the 1970s, NPOs were one of the the top maneuvers out of Reagan’s neoliberal economic playbook, resulting in the mass privatization of once public services such as health care, housing, and advocacy for marginalized groups. This way of delivering “services,” almost always in a manner that underserves target populations and deeply exploits NPO workers, was designed as a way to divert the energy of militant political activists in the civil rights movement away from activism in the streets and into professionalized service delivery. [X]
It should surprise none of us that HRC has ties to weapons manufacturers when the biggest donor to anti-racist NPOs in the 1970s was the warmongering, pro-police Ford Foundation. This kind of organization will never build the political movement that is needed to drastically improve the material conditions of working-class people of any kind, and in fact, capitalism from the U.S. to Russia to China and back deeply relies on the continuation of the hetero-patriarchal nuclear family.
The days of the mass, militant civil rights movement in the United States have elapsed—at least for now. Through a decades-long deadly combination of cooptation, state repression, the devastating impacts of the AIDS epidemic, and constant violence against the transgender community, LGBT people are given little standing to negotiate the terms of our survival, let alone our thriving. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t or won’t. In face of many onslaughts, both literal and political, we must choose to reject pessimism and instead embrace the difficult path to building the only force that can stop any of these violent actors—a militant mass movement that stops the forces of production, the corporations, and the banks, and seizes them for the people through an economic, social, and political revolution.
This movement must be built slowly and steadily in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and community organizations, and it must ultimately result in mass mobilizations that stop the gears of daily economic life from turning, as our queer forebears did. It must be built through solidarity with the families of victims, such as the dozens of vigils already held for Nex Benedict. It must be built through our teachers’ unions, whose members have demonstrated that they are ready to mobilize and invest in the fight for LGBT rights, but like so many are insidiously misguided in their methods.
In a recent national congress of the National Educators Association in Florida, thousands of teachers bravely engaged in a “We Say Gay” rally, and later dedicated $580,000 of the national union’s budget to supporting the rights of LGBT teachers and students. [X] Tragically, most of this money goes to lobbying for the re-election of the Butcher Biden and the same Democrats who claim to support gay rights in one breath and quietly vote in favor of increasing police budgets, privatizing education, expanding fossil fuel drilling, and funding genocide in Palestine. Until we take back control of our local and national unions, they will stay an instrument of the Democrats.
For activists in teachers’ unions and school workplaces, we must start by becoming active and coming together through rank-and-file formations. Our LGBT ABCs should be passing resolutions of support, joining with LGBT teachers and coordinators of student groups to hold rallies, and educating our communities on the connection between LGBT-phobia and all oppression. From there, we must expand our work from our local unions to organize coalitions with other workers, union and non-union, and organize at the city and statewide level to put a stop to anti-LGBT legislation while demanding the enaction of civil protections and social services—and broader causes such as the end of war, racial justice, climate justice. Let the work begin where we are, and not stop until all of us are free. Rest in power, Nex, and all those we have lost.