By Sarah Holliday

Nex Benedict was a 16-year-old girl who identified as nonbinary in Oklahoma. On February 7, she and another transgender-identifying student got into an altercation with three other students in the girls’ bathroom. Allegedly, this started because the three girls were bullying Benedict and her friend over their gender identity.

On February 8, Benedict was declared dead.

The death of such a young girl is tragic. And bullying under any circumstance should never be tolerated. However, what should also never be tolerated is letting the legacy media exploit a tragedy to promote their agenda. But that’s exactly what has occurred, and what we see happen far too often.

Plastered across media outlets, you may see words such as “transphobic slaying” when it comes to Benedict’s death. Without so much as a second glance, major news anchors took the death of a young, vulnerable, and gender-confused child so that they could push a narrative that suited their liking. How despicable.

If someone heard this story and didn’t know any better, they may believe that Benedict died because she was beaten severely during the fight as an act of utter hatred — that’s what the legacy media claimed. Additionally, Oklahoma, the state where these events took place, passed legislation in 2022 that said people must use the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex. By and large, the media is suggesting that this policy is why Benedict died. According to their headlines, Benedict would still be alive if she was able to use the bathroom of her choice. Again, anyone who didn’t know any better might buy into these lies that simply couldn’t be any farther from the truth.

While Benedict’s cause of death is still under investigation, the official police statement said her death was not related to the bathroom altercation. Interesting, isn’t it?

The Left loves to pretend that those on the Right are filled with hatred and “transphobia.” They love to act like the heroes and make anyone who disagrees with them the villain. While the Left’s opinion carries very little weight in my list of concerns, if anything grieves me, it’s the fact that the LGBT mob has the audacity to pretend, on top of everything else, that they actually care about the children they claim to “fight for” when they push their ideology into school policies.

The truth is, trans policies, whether in schools, sports, or anywhere in society, have done far more harm than not. They are responsible for high school female athletes being injured (and in some cases sent to the hospital) because they’re forced to compete against 6-foot boys who think they’re girls and don’t know how to control their biological physical dominance.

LGBT policies in general are part of why pornographic content now sits on the shelves of children’s school libraries. Never mind the fact that children are exposed to books containing sexually explicit words and visuals — it’s all about the “inclusion,” right?

The Left claims that different policies would have resulted in a different outcome for Benedict, and I couldn’t agree more. I firmly believe that if the school had different policies that, instead of feeding into gender delusion, actually helped ground kids in the reality that there are two sexes and that you can’t magically change which one you are born into, Benedict could have been in a much better position both mentally and physically. I agree that there should be different policies, because the current policies advocating for gender confusion are destroying children’s lives. Or in this case, ending them.

Two experts at Family Research Council, Dr. Jennifer Bauwens and Walt Heyer, exposed the reality that trauma, typically experienced during childhood, is at the heart of gender confusion. And those who experience trauma need to be met with people who are going to help them work through their trauma rather than allow their trauma to dictate their lives and make irreversible decisions (such as body mutilation).

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at FRC, shared on Thursday’s episode of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” her own experience fighting trans policies in schools. “When this happened in my school system way back in 2016,” she said, “one of the things that all of us parents said at the time was, ‘Kids are going to get hurt if you pursue these [pro-trans] policies. Children are going to be hurt.’” And she emphasized that it’s even more sad because the children are getting hurt from “school policies that don’t need to be in place.”

FRC President Tony Perkins added, “[T]hese types of policies that are being pushed from Washington and embraced by many in the educational establishment … [are] creating these situations among children that unfortunately [have] some really bad outcomes.” And Perkins highlighted that when the trans policies cause negative outcomes, the response is not to get rid of the policy, but rather to implement more of them. “This ideology … is nonsensical, … damaging, and destructive,” he insisted. Not to mention the fact that “it’s very, very confusing. I would hate to have to be in school at 16 years old and be processing all this gender garbage.”

Perkins urged that “the last thing policymakers need to do is back away from common sense in protecting students, both physically, mentally, and spiritually.”

This story is still unfolding, but we don’t need all the information to understand how heartbreaking it is. And, really, we’ve seen this before when the Left politicized the death of Matthew Shepard. They claimed he was murdered simply because he was gay, when the full story revealed him to be a drug dealer and prostitute with several enemies. It’s easy to tell the story you want when you decide to forgo all the actual details.

As far as what we are dealing with now, Kilgannon summarized the circumstances well when she shared with The Washington Stand, “Instead of creating division and dissent by politicizing this death, the progressive LGBT movement would be better off listening to the people they criticize and trying to understand them. Politicians in Oklahoma and across the country and even in Canada have passed laws upholding student safety and privacy because parents demanded it. Parents have tried to work with local officials with varying success. LGBT and trans activists are now trying to exploit this horrible loss of life for their own political gain.”

And so, our role is to continue pushing for legislation that will protect children from LGBT ideology. And in addition to that, let’s make sure that when we share a story, we do so in a way that reflects what it really entails. I think, in a sense, the truth can defend itself. We just have to make sure it’s being proclaimed.

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.