Consider This from NPR - How Two Recent Cases Of Violence Illustrate The Lives of LGBTQ People

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

Suicide rates for queer and trans people are disproportionately high. They're also routinely targets of violence and hate crimes.While some states have protections for queer and trans people, many other states have passed laws that restrict the rights and visibility of transgender individuals.The stories of Nex Benedict and Dime Doe illustrate both those trends.Benedict died by suicide the day after a physical altercation in their school bathroom. Benedict had been bullied by other students for more than a year.Dime Doe, a Black trans woman, was killed in 2019. Last month a man who had been in a relationship with Doe was found guilty of killing her. It's the first time a hate crime against a trans person was brought to trial. What do these cases tell us about the lives of trans and queer people in America?If you or someone you know needs help, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, Consider This listeners, a heads up, today's episode mentions suicide. My first thought was, what if they get hurt? What if somebody hurts them because of who they are? Not because of what they do or what they believe, but who they are. Brandi Sanders is a mom of two. Her youngest child, who's now 24 years old, is non-binary. And when her child came out as a teen, Sanders worried about their safety and wanted to support them.

When my youngest came out, I just had this urge to get resources to help navigate this journey. Sanders lives in Oklahoma and is vice president of the Oklahoma City chapter of PFLAG. That's Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She spent more than a decade in her community helping parents of queer and trans youth better understand and help them. Oklahoma legislators proposed more than 50 bills in 2024 alone that the ACLU frames as anti-LGBTQ, everything from dictating how educational curriculums deal with gender to restricting bathroom use and sports participation, among other things.

Oklahoma is also where 16-year-old Nex Benedict died. Every parent is going to think, what if that was my kid? You know, every school has a kid like Nex. In February, Benedict, who's non-binary, was found dead at home. They had gotten into a fight at school and the restroom the day before. Benedict's family says they had been bullied and targeted at school well before that altercation. The Oklahoma Medical Examiner's Office recently determined that Benedict died by suicide, and the Tulsa County District Attorney has declined to press charges related to the fight.

But Brandi Sanders says Benedict's death is indicative of a bigger issue that many LGBTQ youth face across the U.S. Every school has a kid like the kids that were in that bathroom that day. This is not an isolated, one-off problem. This has been going on for a long time. How could this even happen? But then that disbelief was almost met with a wave of, it's all too real that this is the kind of thing that could be happening and the kind of thing that is happening. 400 miles away in Missouri, 17-year-old Parker Andrews has felt the impact of Benedict's death.

Andrews says the bullying of LGBTQ youth, combined with the onslaught of all of that legislation, contributes to the discrimination and violence that many queer and trans people face. Gender affirming care greatly reduces the suicide rate. And that very same thing can be said for being able to use the bathroom you identify with, or even just being able to go to school and be called the right pronouns. Having these spaces where you can feel like yourself and be yourself is really important. And when we don't have these spaces, when we actively are destroying these spaces, we do see things like this happen. Consider this. Suicide rates for queer and trans people are disproportionately high, according to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ plus suicide prevention nonprofit. Queer and trans people are also routinely targets of violence and hate crimes.

All of this plays out in a patchwork legal structure, where in some places they have more protection, and others, laws are passed that restrict their rights. And around the time that Next Benedict died, a federal case over a hate crime based on gender identity went to trial for the first time. So what does all of this tell us about the lives of trans and queer people in America? I'm Scott Detrow. It's Consider This from NPR.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions about next Benedict's death. According to a summary report of the autopsy, Benedict died after consuming two different types of medication. The district attorney said Benedict left what he framed as, quote, some brief notes which appeared to be related to the suicide. Now, Benedict's family has expressed skepticism around the medical examiner's findings. The complete autopsy report is slated to be released before the end of March. The more information we have on this case, the better we can have an understanding of what happened. Chris Tassone is a policy counsel at the National Center for Transgender Equality. What's also known is that like many transgender teens, Benedict was a target of harassment.

A school student in Oklahoma was facing bullying, facing harassment, and was in a situation of violence, and none of those things were handled appropriately by the state of Oklahoma or the school district that they were in. Around the same time that Benedict died, there were new developments in another state, in another case of violence against a trans person that garnered attention. Dime Doe was a black trans woman in South Carolina who was killed in 2019.

And last month, a man who had been in a relationship with Doe was found guilty of killing her. It marks the first time in the U.S. that a federal case was brought to trial involving a hate crime based on gender identity. I asked Chris Tassone how this case fits into the larger conversation about violence against trans people. Well, it is such a mixed bag when we look at this case. On one hand, it is a very good sign for access to justice for the trans community. This is the first time that a federal hate crimes charge was brought to a trial and the person convicted on that charge by a jury, which says that just like all of the other groups who are covered by hate crimes legislation, that these avenues for seeking justice

are becoming increasingly available to the trans community. But it's also important to note violence against the trans community is a much more frequent occurrence than we would like. And particularly for black trans women, that is a demographic that is disproportionately at greater risk of victimization and at greater risk of being the victim of a bias-related incident or a hate crime. And so I think it is important to recognize that not everybody in the trans community has an equal access to justice. And for some of us, this is a very hopeful case

that our rights are going to be supported. And for some people in the community, they are very concerned that this case was one out of so many that we still have a lot of distance to cover, a lot of ground to cover before we start seeing meaningful change. And we don't want to get hung up on this one success. You're talking about all of these challenges. What was it about the Dime Doe case that made this path possible and made this verdict possible? Well, one of the things that we know from the people who were working on this case is that the text messages between Ms. Doe and her partner, many of which were then deleted, were very instrumental in being able to get the charge of hate crimes to stick,

to get this prosecuted and convicted as a hate crime. And that's because that was essentially a killer admitting, like, I am concerned because of your gender identity. I am upset that your gender identity is going to lead to other people in the community believing things about me. And this is the thing that I am upset about. This is my motivation for wanting to kill you. And given the context of what happened with

Next Benedict and what is happening so frequently throughout the country right now, do you view the verdict in the Dime Doe case as a win when there is still so much ongoing violence and anti-LBGTQ laws targeting trans youth and trans adults? When you're talking about a murder trial, the positive outcome, the win would have been for that person to never have died in the first place. But we have gotten the best possible outcome, which is justice for Dime and her family and her loved ones in that the killer was brought to justice. So in that way, maybe it is a small win, but I don't think that that's a win that you can claim anything larger from. There is still a long way we have to go for our community as a whole being able to access justice and being able

to live our lives freely without fear and harassment and discrimination. You have this recent verdict in the Dime Doe case. You have this focus on what happened to Benedict. What do you think these two very different cases indicate about the current state of protections for trans people in the country? I think it shows how very patchwork those protections can be and how much, number one, where you live is going to dictate the protections that you have from the government in a way that does not exist for other people. And I think it shows how we can't necessarily rely entirely on those protections. It is one thing to change the law, and that is important in

accessing the same justice that everybody in the U.S. should be entitled to and the same freedoms everyone should be entitled to. But it alone is not enough to make the transgender community, the non-binary community, safe in this country. We also have to come to an understanding that trans people are people and they are your friends and they are your neighbors and they are your children. And so there are really two parts to this. You know, the ACLU is tracking nearly 500 different bills this year that it defines as anti-LGBTQ. We have seen this become a central part of a lot of political campaigns. We have seen rhetoric about this issue become more and more central in Republican primaries in particular. What do you think is at stake at this moment?

Right now, we are very much at an inflection point where it is much easier to rally people behind hostility and hate and fear than it is to rally someone around a love. And there are definitely politicians who are banking on that, who use these anti-trans bills, who use anti-trans sentiment, who will create facts out of thin air or create allegations against the trans community to whip up that fur and get people to the polls to vote for them. And right now we have an opportunity to take a hard look at what's happening in our society and take a hard look at what is being said about trans people and recognize that it's not true. To recognize that trans people trans people to live safely,

then I think we can keep making progress so that we can have a free and safe society for everyone. And if we do allow that fear, if we do allow that hate to control us, I think that we are going to enter a period where it becomes very unsafe to be trans in the US. Let's bring this back to Next Benedict. What do you think people listening should know about Next Benedict? I think the most important thing to know about Next Benedict is the boring detail, is the fact that Next was a 16-year-old kid. Nex was going to school. They had friends. They went home to family who loved them. They probably spent more time on TikTok than they should have and not gotten all their homework done on time. They were a kid,

and they deserved to be a kid, and they deserved to still be here now. And they deserved to be a kid and they deserved to still be here now. And they deserved that from society. They deserved that from the Oklahoma government and the lawmakers and officials in Oklahoma who are passing bills that make it harder for students like Nex to be a kid. And they deserve it from the school and the Department of Education. And I know there are still a lot of questions around next. But the important fact is they should not have been bullied. They should not have been the victim of an assault at school. And when they were, it should have been handled appropriately.

And we failed next. And because we failed next, next is not here. That was Chris Tasson from the National Center of Transgender Equality. And if you or someone you know needs help, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. That's 988. The reporting you heard at the top of this episode was done by Brianna Scott, who also produced the episode.

It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.