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.
Reading this, I thought this would have happened in some small town in the middle of nowhere. This attack happened in Owasso. That’s only twenty minutes from me. How could this have happened so close?
Even though the “crazy, rural, uneducated bible thumping republican” is the pervasive stereotype, unfortunately that brand of nutjob is not as geographically isolated as people tend to think. Percentage wise, you may say (for an exagerated example, not an actual figure) 60% of rural people are christian nationalists, and 0.5% of cityfolk. That’s 1200 in a town of 2000 and 5000 in a city of 1,000,000