WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — President Joe Biden weighed in Thursday on the recent death of a gender-confused Oklahoma teenager, who was originally falsely insinuated to have been beaten to death but now appears to have taken her own life and has been seized upon by LGBT activists to push the false narrative that children’s lives depend on affirming their gender confusion.
“Nex” Benedict, a 16-year-old female Owasso High School student who identified as “non-binary,” died on February 8, one day after allegedly being beaten in a school bathroom along with another classmate by three other students. She was initially treated and released, but hospitalized again and died the next day.
The story drew significant attention and speculation that Benedict died from injuries she sustained in the attack, bolstered by a “source who claimed to be the mother of Benedict’s best friend” claiming she died due to “complications from brain trauma.” That was enough for many to declare her a casualty of an alleged “anti-trans violence epidemic” in the United States and a broader culture of “bigotry.” Prominent Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi, for example, claimed an “anti-trans fervor fueled by extreme Republicans across the country is having deadly consequences for our children.”
Subsequent reporting revealed more nuance to the situation, however, including text messages in which Benedict said the fight started because she “got tired of” unspecified prior “bullying” by the assailants “so I poured some water on them and all 3 came after me.” She added that the school did not report the incident to the police. Another report has Benedict telling police that the bullying was verbal: “They said something like ‘why do they laugh like that,’ and they were talking about us, in front of us. So, I went up and poured water on them and all three of them came at me.”
On March 14, the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office announced its findings that Benedict actually died by suicide, specifically a combination of the drugs Diphenhydramine and Fluoxetine. The girl’s family then released additional details from the autopsy report, which reported several injuries from the fight but “no lethal trauma.”
That same day, the White House released a statement attributed to Joe Biden, declaring that “[e]very young person deserves to have the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are,” falsely suggesting that people’s confused transgender “identities” reflect who they actually are, and that Americans “must all recommit to our work to end discrimination and address the suicide crisis impacting too many nonbinary and transgender [sic] children.”
To the Biden administration, that “work” means uncompromising support for all major aspects of the LGBT movement, including reopening the military to recruits afflicted with gender dysphoria, promoting gender ideology within the military (including “diversity” and drag events on military bases), holding White House events to “affirm transgender kids,” condemning state laws against underage “transitions” as “close to sinful,” promoting underage “transitions” (potentially at taxpayer expense) as a “best practice,” and trying to force federally funded schools to let males into female athletic competitions and restrooms.
That comes despite the fact that his own Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a since-deleted report last year acknowledging that “lesbian, gay, and bisexual[-identifying] adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”
Moreover, narratives claiming that Benedict’s bullying led her to commit suicide overlook how gender confusion itself is also significantly linked to suicidal tendencies. A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
READ: Elon Musk, Matt Walsh highlight study showing transgender surgeries double risk of suicide
The danger is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
Despite a meteoric rise in the LGBT movement’s social standing, political power, and cultural influence over the past several years, left-wing activists continue attempting to paint homosexuals and gender-confused Americans as victims of a violence “epidemic,” usually by citing murder cases in which the victim identified as “LGBT” regardless of whether their status was the motive or even known to the perpetrator and by citing raw numbers of such deaths while omitting how they compare with overall crime statistics.
Last year, there were 26 “transgender” Americans who died by homicide according to the far-left LGBT activist group Human Rights Campaign, but none of the victims’ profiles establish transgender status as a motive for their killings; in fact, four were apparently murdered by sexual partners, one by a reckless driver, and one as part of a mass shooting in Chicago.
To put the number in perspective, the United States saw more than 19,000 overall murders in 2022, including 10,470 murders of blacks and 7,704 murders of whites, and in 2021 American Jews were the subjects of 321 hate-crime cases, followed by Sikhs at 214 cases.