How Do Conservatives Respond to Trans Death?
On grief, humanity, and bigotry.
(cw: transphobia, death, suicide)
Something that’s always bugged me about the trans women in sports “issue” is that both sides ignore a very simple reality: trans girls join sports teams to have fun. In a rush to dehumanize us, conservatives spread lies and misinformation about everything to the current state of the law (that trans people are already required by the NCAA to be on hormones for 12 months in order to compete) to the issue’s context itself (why would a trans elementary- or middle-schooler who hasn’t hit puberty yet need to be barred from sports teams?) In response, trans advocates tend to take a highly empirical and logic-based strategy towards these claims; we cite the actual state of the law to argue that it needn’t be changed further, we show off academic studies about the measurable difference between men & women’s bodies post-puberty and/or post-puberty, we draw connections between the push to rigorously define the parameters of acceptable womanhood and bigoted movement’s of the past (like I myself did in my podcast episode about the subject, which I still think is very good!), and we point out to onlookers that the true goal of anti-trans sports policies is to push trans people out of public life entirely.
Neither side fully humanizes the actual subject of the so-called debate; the actual trans girls and women who are actually on these sports teams, or who want to be but are being pushed out. One need only talk to a young trans person to realize that their motivations for doing sports are simple: to make friends, to stay in shape, to show off their school spirit, to learn teamwork or leadership skills, or simply for the love of the game. But no, it cannot be that trans people want to play a game with other people, for fun, the most basic impulse that a young human being can experience; we simply must be secret misogynists trying to steal other students’ scholarship opportunities.
Bigotry, like most sins, clouds your judgement and takes you further from your humanity, further from your community, further from God. Bigotry prevents people from seeing a child in need as a child in need, and instead makes you see them as an enemy to be defeated. Worse yet, the trans community’s dehumanization has been so effective that even our own movements have been tainted by this need to be constantly proper, constantly on the defensive, constantly on high alert for microaggressions. While any cisgender schmuck with a podcast can be invited to discuss trans issues, in order for actual trans people to be taken seriously, we need to be experts on government policy, feminist theory, biochemistry, the nature of colonialism, and the complete history of everything from clothing to sports to the English language. Without the privilege of individualism, one crack in our logic in any public capacity is reason enough to delegitimize all of us. Through it all, we don’t allow ourselves relief. We can never truly let our guard down, so we forget to feel, we forget to be human.
I live for the day that trans people get to be flawed, that we get to play a fun game with our friends without our motivations being questioned, that we get to live free of judgement. Unfortunately, as February 2024 has showed, we are still far from that world.
Nex Benedict was a non-binary Chahta (Choctaw) teenager who lived on Cherokee Nation territory in Owasso, Oklahoma. They loved reading, drawing, playing Minecraft, and their cat Zeus. Their family knew about their gender identity and from what we currently know, they were supportive. In an incident earlier this month, Nex was assaulted by three teenagers in their high school’s bathroom. Within a day of this incident, Nex died, possibly due to the trauma inflicted on them by their classmates.
Newly released footage shows Nex discussing the incident in their own words, from a hospital bed hours away from passing. Even Nex themself is unclear as to why they were attacked in this way, but one doesn’t need a powerful imagination to come to the conclusion that their transness was a motivating factor:
