Listen to Owasso Students, Not Chaya Raichik or Taylor Lorenz
Arguing about who’s platforming Chaya Raichik is a distraction from the voices we desperately need to hear from right now.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Two things happened this month. I want to talk about one of them, and I don’t want to talk about the other. Unfortunately, I have to justify not talking about it… by explaining it in brief.
So, briefly:
On Saturday, journalist Taylor Lorenz shared a video interview she conducted with Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, alongside a Washington Post article about the interview. Raichik is infamous for inciting threats of violence against LGBTQ+ people and their allies by directing a rabid audience of nearly three million followers at queer people over the internet. The interview is, I guess, interesting; Raichik shows up to the inexplicably outdoors meeting wearing a t-shirt that has Lorenz’s face printed on the front, then goes on to deny that sexual harassment exists, suggests we live in a post-gender world in which “there are zero genders,” and insists that gender was “invented by [a pedophile].”
I’ve seen a lot of arguments about whether or not the interview should have taken place at all. Some people feel that platforming Raichik and giving her any extra attention is a grave sin; others believe that ignoring Raichik and the bizarre, fascistic things she says is the greater evil.
I have a third, spicier take:
I just don’t care.
I am, generally speaking, totally uninterested in what Raichik has to say, or whether or not Taylor Lorenz should let her say it, because there are far more important things happening right now that I want to talk about, and I don’t want to hear about them through the lens of Chaya Raichik’s evil.
If you keep up with news about trans folks at all, you probably already know what I want to talk about. On Wednesday, February 7th, nonbinary/transmasc Oklahoma student Nex Benedict was violently assaulted by their peers in an Owasso High School bathroom. The next day, Nex was dead. Reporting by NBC has provided a window into how Nex’s friends remembered him.
The Owasso Police Department says Nex’s death "[wasn't] a result of trauma," but Sue Benedict, Nex’s mother, has described the statement as a cover-up meant to pacify the public. Furthermore, the officer responsible for writing and releasing the statement, Lieutenant Nick Boatman, clarified to one reporter that the medical examiner never explicitly stated that Nex “did not die… as a result of that fight.”
An environment in which it is permissible for a student to be violently beaten and later die without school officials so much as reporting the incident to police is not created overnight. It does not come to be over the course of a single month. It’s been fomenting for years, and the voices I want to hear from and uplift in the wake of Nex’s death are those of the young people who have endured that nightmare firsthand.
Lorenz also interviewed two LGBTQ+ Owasso students—one former, one current—for her Washington Post article.
Alec, who graduated from Owasso High School not that long ago but recently moved out of state due to the rising tide of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments, spoke about the book bans that he saw while he was in school, saying “it was very scary seeing my state erasing the LGBTQ community as a whole.” He feels that these bans make it seem as though queer people are “unacceptable and inappropriate… to just exist around and to learn about.”
Evan Powers, who currently attends Owasso High School and is trans, told Lorenz that he wears a bulletproof backpack to school, and that he’s “scared to go to school every day.” He said that, although he wants to do well in school and go to college, the transphobic atmosphere at his school makes it difficult just to attend his classes normally.
Other former Owasso students haven’t been shy about sharing their experiences online, either.
In a Reddit thread about Nex’s death on the subforum r/Tulsa, a user who claims to have attended Owasso High School said they suffered threats of violence and administrative neglect after coming out to their peers. In another thread posted to the r/Oklahoma subreddit, user Chocolatecoww said they graduated from Owasso High School in 2016, and described the school as majority “white Christian,” and said that if you failed to fit that mold, it was “not the place to go to school.”
More than one user echoed similar sentiments.
But the most damning story I found from a former Owasso student was a video posted by TikTok user stressedout.eden.
Eden, 19, states that they graduated from the school in May of last year, and alleges that Owasso school administration “has never cared about the safety of [their] students.”
Explaining that they were “out as queer for four years and trans for one year,” Eden alleged that one of their teachers repeatedly called them slurs. Even after Eden made school staff aware of the situation, they were not removed from this teacher’s class. They go on to describe being the victim of corrective sexual assault in a school bathroom, after which they were instructed by school administration to “keep quiet,” so as not to supposedly ruin their assaulter’s life.
Eden also claims that Nex isn’t the first person to lose their life as a result of Owasso High School’s negligence. They spoke about “Eli,” a 16-year-old Junior at the school who took his own life on August 5th, 2021, after countless pleas to school administrators to “get him help… fell on deaf ears.”
While I can’t directly verify the claims of anybody who says they were once an Owasso student, I have no reason to doubt them. Ask any queer student or recent graduate in Oklahoma, in Texas, in Florida, in any red state where anti-trans rhetoric has reached an alarming, violent peak, and I’m sure they’ll share a horror story or two with you.
It isn’t important to me what Chaya Raichik or any other stochastic terrorist has to say for themselves. What matters to me is that an entire generation of queer youth who should be living in the most progressive, accepting period of human history are instead enduring hatred and violence sometimes worse than what I experienced growing up in the rural south.
I don’t know how we can fix this, but I know how we can start: by listening to people like Alec, Evan and Eden, who have important and harrowing stories to tell us about the state of anti-LGBTQ+ hatred in our public schools. Lawmakers and educators need to hear their voices and their stories, and they need to take swift and decisive action to ensure that nobody ever has to suffer the way these young queer people have suffered.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in Rapid City.