Posters online are putting the death of non-binary student Nex Benedict on the hands of Ryan Walters, the state's anti-trans education head.

An Oklahoma high school student was beaten by peers and subsequently died earlier this month.

Now, many online are saying that their death is emblematic of transphobic rhetoric promulgated by the state’s Secretary of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, who oversees the state’s Department of Education.

Chaya Raichik, who runs the controversial @LibsOfTikTok X account, is also being blamed.

Raichik was appointed to the State Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee in January by Walters.

On Feb. 7, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older, female peers at Owasso High School, where Benedict was a sophomore. A teacher broke up the altercation, but school authorities did not call an ambulance for Benedict. They did, however, go to the hospital that day and were later released.

Benedict died after a second trip to the hospital the next day. They were non-binary.

Many are positing that Benedict’s death was the result of a hate crime motivated, they say in part, by the anti-trans rhetoric Walters peddled as the head of the state’s top official in charge of education.

  • Zombiepirate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    9 months ago

    And wherever there was a ‘deserving’ Party member and no other place could be found for him, he would be dumped into education. The Nazi ‘educators’ were illiterate, from Rust, the Minister of Education, on down. They did not know what they wanted or where to find it. Putting ignorant ‘reliables,’ from politics or business, over the educators was also part of the Nazi way of humiliating education and bringing it into popular contempt.

    -They Thought They Were Free- The Germans, 1933 -45

    I know I don’t have to tell you, but it’s not a coincidence; it’s a plan.

    The GOP is a fascist party.