Nex Benedict died one day after a fight in a school bathroom. Their mother Sue Benedict tells Bevan Hurley that the gender fluid teenager endured more than a year of abuse simply for being who they were
A lot. I may not have been aware that I was trans back when I was a kid but growing up became a very lonely existence once girls and boys isolated themselves into their little tribes. When the siloing process sticks you with a peer group that implicitly knows you to be an ill fit and even when you try to get along your brain doesn’t register that gendered sense of “this is a person who acts and thinks like me” you don’t as a habit really make very close friends.
Kids are very good at forming hardcore social bonds where they let their sense of individual identity slip in favor of their group. While I didn’t experience trans hate growing up directly persay being placed in situations where you just can’t make decent bonds tends to make you an easy target for being ripped to shreds as somebody else’s exercise of building pack solidarity. It takes very little for children to find justification to be violent.
I’m sure every American here has stories. The only reason I and my friends were never bullied much was early on in 6th grade, I stuffed a jock into their locker.
The thing was he was trying to stuff a friend of mine in a locker; with his coach as hall monitor (“boys will be boys,”).
For the record the only thing that I could get to fit was his head and shoulders. Also, the fire dept was breaking out the jaws of life when the lunch lady showed up with bacon grease… so he spent the first ten or so minutes of every class trying to make shit up about that… while everyone knew.
I mean… Its been a few decades, but i do seem to recall that yes, one of the lunchladies did in fact look like that… It was a large school (actually, two large schools, the kitchen served both a middle school and high school.) and had the kitchen and staffing to go with it.
she was also incredibly grumpy.
to be fair, I would be grumpy too if I had to deal with shitty kids bitching about food all day long. though in my defense, they sorted lunches by last name, and I was always in the last lunch of the day… meaning that we always got the leftovers from the previous lunch cycles.
Teenage girls are psychotic, getting into fights with a trans kid and beating them to a pulp. How many psychotically violent teens are in schools?
All of them. Some are better at self control, but none of us were sane.
Seriously. How can anyone expect us to be when our skull meatballs were still congealing?
A lot. I may not have been aware that I was trans back when I was a kid but growing up became a very lonely existence once girls and boys isolated themselves into their little tribes. When the siloing process sticks you with a peer group that implicitly knows you to be an ill fit and even when you try to get along your brain doesn’t register that gendered sense of “this is a person who acts and thinks like me” you don’t as a habit really make very close friends.
Kids are very good at forming hardcore social bonds where they let their sense of individual identity slip in favor of their group. While I didn’t experience trans hate growing up directly persay being placed in situations where you just can’t make decent bonds tends to make you an easy target for being ripped to shreds as somebody else’s exercise of building pack solidarity. It takes very little for children to find justification to be violent.
I’m sure every American here has stories. The only reason I and my friends were never bullied much was early on in 6th grade, I stuffed a jock into their locker.
The thing was he was trying to stuff a friend of mine in a locker; with his coach as hall monitor (“boys will be boys,”).
For the record the only thing that I could get to fit was his head and shoulders. Also, the fire dept was breaking out the jaws of life when the lunch lady showed up with bacon grease… so he spent the first ten or so minutes of every class trying to make shit up about that… while everyone knew.
I find it hard to believe he got stuck that badly.
Did the lunch lady look like this? And was there a Scottish groundskeeper there as well?
I mean… Its been a few decades, but i do seem to recall that yes, one of the lunchladies did in fact look like that… It was a large school (actually, two large schools, the kitchen served both a middle school and high school.) and had the kitchen and staffing to go with it.
she was also incredibly grumpy.
to be fair, I would be grumpy too if I had to deal with shitty kids bitching about food all day long. though in my defense, they sorted lunches by last name, and I was always in the last lunch of the day… meaning that we always got the leftovers from the previous lunch cycles.