AVELLINO: Nex Benedict deserved dignity
Content warning: suicide
On Wednesday, 16-year-old student Nex Benedict's full autopsy report was released.
The report did not have any smoking guns, really. The findings almost wholly echoed an initial March 13 summary: Benedict was in a physical altercation with some of their bullies in the girl's high school bathroom they were forced to use. That day, they go to the hospital, where police inform them that seeking charges against their bullies is risky because Benedict started the fight and could be charged as well.
The next day, Benedict took a combination of drugs to kill themself, struggling to breathe while on the floor in front of their mother.
When initial reports of Benedict's suicide came out, anti-transgender conservatives felt somehow vindicated. Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said, "I think it's terrible that we've had some radical leftists who decided to run with a political agenda and try to weave a narrative that hasn't been true."
It is true that many progressives initially blamed the physical altercation as the cause of Benedict's death. I fail to see how the much more abhorrent truth — that Benedict fell into such deep despair after being bullied for "well over a year" that they took their own life — somehow vindicates the pundits and legislators who encourage such mental anguish through rhetoric and the force of the state.
Equally unwilling to accept responsibility for their culpability is Chaya Raichik, most commonly known by the account handle Libs of TikTok. The account, which regularly targets liberal content on TikTok and had already been used to pressure a teacher at Benedict's high school to resign, ran with the initial autopsy as her get-out-of-jail-free card.
"Nothing to see here," Raichik posted to the social media platform X. "Just a massive nonprofit organization accusing a citizen journalist of being responsible for a de*th because I post TikToks they don't like."
Raichik's profile photo for her X account is a picture of her grinning ear-to-ear while displaying a USA Today cover story titled, "When Libs of TikTok Posts, Threats Increasingly Follow." The story details how drag queen story hours, university LGBTQ+ groups and medical clinics are flooded with vitriol once her posts go viral. And she loves it.
In 2023, New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie, a favorite of mine, penned the essay, "There Is No Dignity In This Kind of America." Bouie detailed the striking number of anti-transgender laws in the U.S. in recent years (which have only ballooned since he wrote that piece) and connects it to an oft-forgotten aspect of politics: the degradation of dignity.
"Politicians and those of us in the media tend to frame these conflicts as part of a 'culture war,' which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy," wrote Bouie.
The most historically minded of the Times columnists, Bouie, details Frederick Douglass' rich intertwining of democracy and dignity as tools that reinforce each other. Though never written in detail, Douglass' writings imply an emphasis on democracy as a "means toward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity," according to "The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass" by Nicholas Bromell, a professor emeritus in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
This informed Douglass' strong support for women's suffrage as a dignifying measure for half the country's population. His strong opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act was also an undignifying indecency against an entire sect of human beings deserving equal recognition, "imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges."
Once pointed out, the connection between dignity degradation and disrespect for democracy is self-evident. Democracy is more than Election Day: it is a willingness to treat one another as equals in the public sphere, to see other members of your community as having the same intrinsic value as you and to respect the opposition's victories when they win and their rights when they lose.
When somebody loses respect for democracy or for dignity, the other necessarily fails. It is not coincidental that approximately two and a half weeks after Benedict's suicide, Sen. Tom Woods (R-Okla.) said about LGBTQ+ people, "We are a religious state. We are going to fight to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma because we're a Christian state."
Nor is it by chance that former President Donald J. Trump, whose efforts to steal the 2020 election were the most blatant assault on democracy since the Jim Crow South, has the most explicitly transphobic policy platform in history. Removing gender-affirming doctors from Medicare and punishing transgender-supportive teachers are part of a vision for the U.S. where democratic values of equality and recognition are trailer trash and dignity for the marginalized is a fantasy.
Raichik's actions, Trump's actions, Woods’ actions and so many more Republicans are not operating in a realm of respect for people like Benedict. They function under a mentality where loathing is encouraged and "the cruelty is the point." They will not recognize transgender rights, or Black rights or any group's right to dignity and respect. And if they endanger other Americans' right to dignity and respect, then they endanger mine, too.
And I hate them for that.
A decent society necessitates the recognition of each others' dignity. It is clear from the bullying that transgender youth face from their peers and their government that not everybody believes in that. But until they do, we have a moral responsibility to keep these people away from office as much as humanly possible.
Noble Avellino is a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in economics and minoring in political science. Avellino’s column, “Noble’s Advocate” runs on alternate Mondays.
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