One more piece of horror in the news

Over the past week I have been watching the coverage of Nex Benedict's death in Oklahoma with a heart full of grief and terror. 

A sixteen year old non-binary child was beaten by three girls in a bathroom. They died the next day. This story will be spun in various ways. Cause of death is not yet known. Their death may not have physically been caused by the fight. Nex may have been the one who escalated the fight from a verbal confrontation to a physical one. No matter how it’s spun, though, the facts seem to be that a child was beaten until they blacked out in a fight that started because of bullying about their gender identity. And that child is now dead. No amount of parsing the details will make that less horrific.

A brutal attack in a bathroom is the stuff of my parenting nightmares. Generally. And specifically.

My six year old was recently cornered by some older boys in a school bathroom and teased for looking like a girl. He wears his hair long and has delicate facial features. Even when he is dressed in stereotypical boy clothes and following all the boy rules (except the long hair) he is often misgendered. Adults apologize when corrected. Children tease. So far this incident of intimidation has been the worst of it and I think the school's response was appropriate. It still scares me.

He dabbles in gender non-conformity at home. Nail polish. Jewelry. As far as I can tell he is not unhappy about being a boy, just the constraints that come with it. He’s mad that the girls get all the pretty things. It’s an entirely fair critique of the world so I am doing the best I can to give him what he needs. 

I think of my own experience at 15, the day the younger brother of a classmate tried to hold me hostage in the band director's office. He was peppering me with questions about my sexuality, whether I liked girls, etc. because I had dared to insist in health class that AIDs wasn't a punishment for being gay, dared to insist that gay people deserve human rights. I had no sense of myself as queer at the time. I was attracted to boys so obviously I was straight. Other alternatives had simply never occurred to me. I remember my anger and my fear. I was angry both at the homophobia and the assumption that my stance against homophobia said something about my own sexuality. 

When I fumed about being bullied for being gay when I wasn't even gay one of my best friends kept telling me "but it would be ok if you were." Of course it would be, I thought, but I'm not.

I don't think I understood, then, what she was really saying.

I was more afraid than angry. It didn't matter what I was because I was in danger for what I appeared to be, for what another classmate told me was written about me on the wall of the boy's bathroom. I understood that facing a kid a few years younger than me and facing one of my peers were two different things.

It blew over. The day I was cornered was only a few days before winter break. I am ashamed to admit how deeply relieved I was when a rumor involving another boy took hold when we returned in January, ashamed, too, of how much punching down of my own I did. 

I sometimes think of moving back to the Midwest to be closer to family, to live somewhere greener with more water. I then imagine my son in the school district I grew up in. I remember how I struggled and all such thoughts evaporate immediately. If we went back we wouldn’t live where I grew up. We’d probably live in Madison or the suburbs, in a school district big enough to have AP classes, where I wouldn’t have to fight for calculus to be a high school option. It would be psychologically safer than my school was. And he might get a better education there than here. Still, having lived nearly half my life in LA, I can’t imagine going back to a city that’s 75% white.

I have to admit that I wanted to believe that staying in LA would offer some magic protection, some safety that I did not have growing up. I settled into my understanding that it’s ok to be different–across any number dimensions–here. I hoped that lesson would come easier for my child, that maybe in LA he could be whoever he is without so much friction.

I forget sometimes, in my bubble of artists and weirdos, how violently committed people are to their categories, their boxes. I don’t quite understand how in 2024 a boy with long hair is still a magnet for bullies. It took me by surprise. It shouldn’t have. I was trained as a sociologist. I know that categories are maintained by enforcing their boundaries, by punishing people who step outside them.

There’s no spell of protection, nowhere I can go that will guarantee my child’s safety. I can only try to give him the support he needs to be the person he wants to be and the support he needs to navigate the consequences of that in a world intent on hierarchies and categories, a world that will enforce them, sometimes violently.

My heart aches for Nex and for their people. My heart aches for all the other kids bullied, in bathrooms, in classrooms, in school yards, on buses, and at home for being themselves.

I know the answers but I still can’t keep myself from asking. How are we still so bound to our ideas of gender that bullying anyone who bends the rules, even just a little, is almost a foregone conclusion? How is refusing a binary a crime punishable by physical violence?  How can people be so cruel?