In police body cam footage recorded in the hospital on the day before his death, Nex Benedict reaches out to shake the officer’s hand. His legs are spread casually on the exam bed, his other hand resting on his thigh—no obvious nerves, keeping things chill. He’s dressed in black, hair well above his shoulders and pushed back. As he tells the officer about having been “jumped” by three girls in the bathroom and having “blacked out” at his high school earlier that day, his affect is that of a guy attempting to act tough and unfazed in front of another guy.
The video is an important document of how Nex—the 16-year-old Owasso, Oklahoma, student whose sudden death on Feb. 7 has sparked national outrage—described the altercation at his school in the hours between the fight itself and the next day, when he suddenly lost consciousness at home. (His exact cause of death is undetermined, pending a full report by the medical examiner.) But it’s also a record of how Nex spoke and dressed and acted on what he thought was a normal school day. Those details of style and presentation speak to me personally as an adult trans man who was once a transmasculine teenager. Looking at Nex before he died makes apparent some of the invisible struggles, compromises, and small victories that are so common for people like me, people like Nex, a community whose life experience is often dismissed and undermined and questioned.
I’m using he/him pronouns for Nex because reporting by NBC Out has confirmed that while Nex used the pronouns they/them in some contexts, including around family, he/him is how his friends and partners knew him. The pronouns, plus his friends’ description of him as trans, plus how he looks and sounds on video combine to present a picture of Nex as a masculine-of-center trans kid. The word for this is transmasculine, encompassing binary trans men (like me) and nonbinary people whose genders hew toward, but don’t fully line up with, maleness.
Before I go on, I want to be clear: I realize that I did not know Nex. I know that Nex isn’t me. I don’t mean to speak for him or put him in a box or classify him. Part of the tragedy of dying so young is that Nex won’t get to grow up, or explore his identity further, perhaps in ways that might have changed over time. I am not trying to take that complexity or possibility away from him when he was still exploring who he was and who he wanted to be. Exploration and self-discovery lie at the heart of what it means to be an adolescent, especially an LGBTQ+ one, and Nex was lucky to have the support of family and friends who were giving him the room to find himself.
That said, we do know Nex was presenting himself as transmasculine at the time he died. And that matters because transmasculine people are made invisible, often described as the “lost daughters” of nonaffirming cisgender parents, denied agency by made-up stories of “social contagion,” and used as pawns in a political game to deprive trans people of our rights and dignity. But rarely are we looked at and accepted for who we are, without a layer of conservative propaganda that feminizes us and denies us our experience.
When I watch Nex, I remember being transmasculine and 16. It all comes rushing back. His cocky little head tilt. How he’s trying to carry himself as masc as possible in his posture and gestures, despite being called “she” and “miss” by the police officer. I recognize this approach of quietly asserting oneself as masculine without making an undignified fuss about the pronouns other people are using, accidentally or otherwise. I did that. Most of us do that.
One detail I’ve noticed that other people might not was that in the school picture of Nex that’s been circulated in the media, he’s wearing makeup. In other photos, his hair is soft around his face, rather than pushed back. Even his facial expressions are softer in pictures. The side he showed on video, acting more tough and boylike, seems like it wasn’t the part of him photographers were looking to capture. His family (who were by all accounts supportive and who deserve understanding, grace, and compassion) may also have unconsciously gravitated to pictures where he looked more girlish.
When I was about the same age, my own senior photo was taken wearing women’s clothing, makeup, smiling, with no glasses. Even though on most days that year I wore men’s jeans, a T-shirt, a flannel men’s button-down, and no makeup, on Picture Day, the photo was of something—someone—different. It’s a classically transmasculine experience to have this constant negotiation with how you’re trying to present yourself and the more feminine way adults would like you to be. For me, people chalked up my way of dressing and my hatred of being in pictures to “low self-esteem.” For other kids I knew, it was dismissively called “attention-seeking.”
Watching Nex after his death, seeing his pictures and hearing how he was described differently by his queer friends and his clearly loving but struggling-to-understand family, is nearly unbearable. The way he walks through the halls in the surveillance footage. His slightly baggy clothing concealing any curves that might otherwise show themselves. He didn’t have “low self-esteem”—he was coming into his own.
The reality of transmasculinity is to constantly encounter practical barriers—mismatched documents that don’t match your appearance, airport pat-downs no matter which gender you appear as, choices about which restroom is the least likely to lead to physical violence—not to mention social judgement and disapproval, all meant to halt our self-expression. And yet ironically, conservatives in recent years have somehow managed to convince themselves that being transmasc is much too easy. They say there’s an epidemic of transmasculinity among young girls, a TikTok contagion that needs to be suppressed. They say a kid like Nex can’t be allowed to explore all sides of who he is, has to be molded into a feminine girl and later a woman and a mother. Becoming at all like me is seen by conservatives as a tragedy for kids like Nex, an ugly subhuman fate to be avoided.
As a member of the transmasc community, it can be hard to know how to speak up in defense of the ability of kids like Nex to come into their own. My words of support and care are constantly at risk of being twisted into something unrecognizable, as if I’m trying to force young people into being like me, instead of wanting them to find themselves, whoever that may be, as I once found myself. It aches to want to help, or even just offer assurance that a future is possible, only to be accused of recruiting or “grooming,” to be equated with a catching disease.
The truth is this: On the day he died, Nex Benedict was transmasculine. In the days before he died, he was transmasculine in a school that didn’t want him to be that way, in a state that has passed laws trying to stop him from being that way, and in a family for whom transness was a foreign, though not unwelcome, concept. No one in the trans community made Nex Benedict transmasculine. Instead, we have tried to raise the alarm over the wave of anti-transgender hate that has swept the country and made his life and the lives of other trans youth more difficult, more precarious. Now that he’s dead, we must remember him not as conservatives who hated him would want us to define him, but as he was. Nex Benedict was transmasculine—he was a kid who wore boyish clothes, used he/him pronouns with his friends, and downplayed a fight he’d blacked out in to seem less soft. It is a disservice to his memory and to all the trans kids who are still alive, who need us to see them and fight for them, to do anything other than celebrate that fact.
