The Restrictive Gender School Policy Results in The Death Of NonBinary Student
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| Nex BenedictSue Benedict/Sue Benedict, via Associated Press |
J. David Goodman and
Reporting from Houston and Owasso, Okla.
en one of the loudest voices in the state seeking to prevent discussion and promotion of L.G.B.T.Q. issues in schools. His fellow Republicans in the Legislature have backed a wave of new and proposed laws aimed at gay and transgender people.
In interviews, transgender students said that the rhetoric from officials like Mr. Walters has been seen by their classmates as permission to harass and bully them at school.
At an Oklahoma Board of Education meeting this week, Sean Cummings, the vice mayor of a town adjacent to Oklahoma City known as The Village, blamed the board’s anti-gay and anti-transgender policies for the bullying of Nex. “You brought it on,” he said, addressing Mr. Walters directly.
Questions remained about the bullying that family members said Nex had experienced at Owasso High School before the bathroom altercation on Feb. 7, and what connection it might have had to their death. The police on Wednesday said that Nex had not died from trauma, a finding that Mr. Walters reiterated
Late Friday, the Owasso Police Department released several videos showing Nex walking under their own power after the altercation and, separately, speaking in the hospital with a police officer.
Nex told the officer they poured water on several girls who were making fun of them inside the girl’s bathroom, and that three girls then knocked them to the floor and “started beating” them up.
“I blacked out,” Nex told the officer.
Investigators had yet to determine what caused the student’s death, said Nick Boatman, a spokesman with the Owasso Police Department.
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of the advocacy organization GLAAD, called the death “a tragic, senseless, and shocking attack that should never be forgotten” in an Instagram post this week.
Mr. Walters said the tragedy had been compounded by outside advocates seeking to make a political point.
“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,” he said. “You’ve taken a tragedy, and you’ve had some folks try to exploit it for political gain.”
Officers have conducted interviews with students and staff at Owasso High School. The school district has said that the altercation lasted less than two minutes and that the students involved were able to walk to a nurse’s office afterward.
No report to the police was made until after Nex was taken to a hospital by a family member, the police have said. They went home that day. The following day, Nex was rushed back to the hospital by local medics and was pronounced dead. The state medical examiner’s office declined to comment on the autopsy or any toxicology results but said its final report would eventually be made public.
Much of the criticism Mr. Walters has received has focused on his recent appointment of Chaya Raichik to a state committee. Ms. Raichik, who has posted anti-gay and anti-transgender content on her X account, Libs of TikTok, is part of a committee that considers the appropriateness of school library books.“Ryan Walters has created a devastatingly hostile environment for trans, two-spirit, and gender-nonconforming students,” said Nicole McAfee, the executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, which advocates for transgender and gay rights. Since Nex’s death, they said, “I’ve seen more times than I can count folks share an image that Ryan Walters put out during his campaign of folks in a bathroom with language villainizing trans youth specifically.”
Mr. Walters, 38, has been an unapologetic lightning rod in Oklahoma, mounting direct verbal attacks on school districts, teachers’ unions, and occasionally individual teachers whom he has accused of promoting “pornography” or “radical gender theory” in public schools. He was appointed to the cabinet position of secretary of education by Gov. Kevin Stitt in 2020 and then won election as state superintendent in 2022.
He has pressured educators in several districts to resign, including a teacher who mounted a protest over the banning of certain books, and an elementary school principal who performed in drag outside of school.
Such an aggressively partisan approach surprised some of Mr. Walters’s former students, many of whom admired him as an approachable teacher who valued debate. “Walters would go out of his way to be apolitical,” said Shane Hood, who took at least three history classes with Mr. Walters at McAlester High School. As a teacher, Mr. Hood said, he gave little indication of his political views, apart from displaying large cutouts of Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan.
“He was probably a schoolwide favorite,” said Mr. Hood, 22, adding that Mr. Walters’s current political persona did not fit with the teacher he knew.
Mr. Walters’s public fights have come as conservative states around the country have passed laws restricting the rights of transgender people. In Oklahoma, lawmakers have banned gender-transition care for minors and explicitly prohibited the use of gender-neutral markers on birth certificates.
The Oklahoma Legislature is currently considering a bill to prohibit residents from changing their sex designation on birth certificates, and another to require public schools to adopt the policy that gender is an “immutable biological trait” and bar the use of alternative preferred names or pronouns. Another proposal, known as the Patriotism Not Pride Act, would prevent state agencies from displaying flags or symbols in support of gay and transgender people.
“It’s just incredibly harmful,” said Whitney Cipolla, a board member at Oklahomans for Equality, which advocates for gay and transgender rights. “I know queer educators who are frightened to be teaching.”
In interviews, transgender and nonbinary teenagers in Oklahoma said the political climate had made things more difficult for them.
“There’s a lot of feelings of helplessness,” said Hali, 18, a transgender girl and high school senior in the town of Claremore, who asked that her last name not be used out of concern that she may be targeted by anti-transgender activists. “You always have that little bit of fear that you could be attacked, that you could be one of the victims.”
Hali said she knew Nex after having met them as part of a program in Tulsa that offers counseling and other assistance to young people, including those who are gay or transgender. Nex was “very kind and outgoing and a very sweet person,” Hali said but added that she did not know much about the altercation that preceded Nex’s death.
Asked about how Oklahoma schools should treat students who identify as transgender, Mr. Walters said the schools would “continue to treat every student with dignity and respect,” but would not “go into the transgender ideology by accepting all of those premises” and forcing teachers to adopt them.
Mr. Walters, who described himself as a lover and reader of history, said he saw the nation at a kind of crossroads.
“I really see there’s a civil war going on, where the left is really fighting for the soul of our country,” he said. “They are undermining the very principles that made this country great, our Judeo-Christian values and our traditions in this country.”
Getting back to those values and traditions, he added, “that’s what will unify us.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma. More about J. David Goodman
Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio. More about Edgar Sandoval.
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