Brandon Teena Was Failed By the American Legal System and the Media
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Content warning: This article contains subject matter that may be especially upsetting for readers, including references to suicide, violence, and the targeting of marginalized communities.
Brandon Teena was only 21 years old when he was murdered on New Year’s Eve, 1993. Teena, who was transgender, had recently moved from Lincoln to Falls City, Nebraska, looking for a fresh start. He left Lincoln because he’d been dogged by legal trouble stemming from check fraud and by a reputation as a romantic manipulator. In a Tubi documentary, local women recount being magnetized by Teena’s charm and affectionate nature but they became hostile and accusatory once they learned of his assigned sex at birth.
In Falls City, no one knew about Teena’s identity. Upon arrival, he started dating a local woman named Lana Tisdel, who introduced Teena to John Lotter and Marvin T. Nissen, and the two accepted Teena into their friend group as they would any other Nebraska man, drinking beer late into the night and rating the women they found attractive.
But the personal dynamics quickly shifted after Teena’s deadname and sex assigned at birth were revealed when local authorities referred to him as a woman. Lotter and Nissen were outraged, feeling like Teena deceived them. Days later, the two men sexually assaulted Teena after a Christmas Eve party. Although Teena promptly reported the incident with Tisdel’s support, when county sheriff Charles Laux questioned Teena he appeared to be more concerned with Teena’s gender presentation than with the ample evidence of the rape, The New Yorker reported. “Why do you run around with girls instead of guys being you're a girl yourself? Why do you make girls think you’re a guy?” Laux asked Teena.
After Laux’s questioning of Teena, Falls City police did not arrest Lotter and Nissen, but did question them and inform them that Teena had reported the rape. On December 31, Lotter and Nissen murdered Teena at a friend’s home, along with bystanders Lisa Lambert and Phillip Devine. Teena’s murder made national headlines partly because of the shocking and extremely violent nature of the act, but also because of how unfamiliar Americans were with transgender people.
“Today, transgender identity is often perceived as something you have on the inside that you have to learn to name and recognize,” Jules Gill-Peterson, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Histories of the Transgender Child, told Teen Vogue. But “[In the 1990s,] you could kind of improvise your way into becoming a man simply by changing your clothing, going to certain bars, and courting feminine women.”
There is no record of Teena self-identifying as “transgender” explicitly. During Laux’s questioning of Teena, Teena classified his decision to live as a different gender than the one assigned to him at birth as a “sexual identity crisis,” and ex-girlfriends of his reported that Teena had told them he was a “hermaphrodite.”
According to Gill-Peterson, at the time the mainstream perception was that individuals like Teena belonged to a broad swath of sexually deviant “people found on the coasts and in large cities.” But Gill-Peterson says Teena’s murder “antagonized” that idea and “exposed that there are LGBT people in working-class, rural America and they don’t just fit into the kind of cosmopolitan version of gender and sexuality most Americans assumed.”
“If you asked a random person off the street in the 1990s or early 2000s to name a trans man, odds are they couldn't, but if they did it was almost definitely Brandon Teena,” said Max Osborn, assistant professor in the department of sociology and criminology at Villanova University, who studies the carceral system’s impact on LGBTQ+ populations.
“For trans men and trans masculine people growing up during that time, that was the only available example of what being a trans man looked like: being outed, sexually assaulted, dismissed and ridiculed by law enforcement, violently killed, and then misgendered after your death,” Osborn said. On Saturday Night Live in 1996, Norm McDonald called Teena a “cross-dressing female” and said that “I believe everyone involved in this story should die,” about Teena, Nissen, and Lotter.
Six years after Teena’s murder, his story became known to millions more Americans through the 1999 Oscar-winning film adaptation, Boys Don’t Cry. “That movie was tremendous in generating national and even international awareness [about transgender identity]. There’s no way you can underestimate that,” said Jen Manion, professor of history and sexuality, women's and gender studies at Amherst College. “It galvanized people to include trans people in the LGB movement, and although it did receive some backlash in the 21st century, it really helped create the conditions that led to its own critique.”
Although Boys Don’t Cry screenwriter and director Kimberly Peirce dramatized many elements of Teena’s experience, she kept the film’s line of questioning between Laux and Teena identical to sections of the transcript of the encounter. In Laux’s questioning of Teena, Osborn saw a throughline of how the American criminal legal system often absolves perpetrators of transgender violence of their guilt with accusations of deception and victim-blaming.
“Sheriff [Laux] tried to point to [Teena’s] gender presentation as a reason not to believe him,” Osborn said. “Essentially he was a woman lying about his gender so he must be lying about being a victim as well. After his death, you saw similar accounts in the media that misgendered him and sensationalized his identity… Some of the pieces were lucidly saying that [Teena] presenting himself as a man led to his death.”
In 1997, in the New Yorker, John Gregory Dunne called Laux’s questioning “salacious, accusing, and derogatory,” and implied that if Laux had approached Teena’s rape differently, Teena might not have been murdered.
Carrie Buist, associate professor of criminology with a focus on queer criminology at Grand Valley State University, said that violence against LGBTQ+ people has historically been explained away under the “gay and trans panic defense.” Since the 19th century, the defense has acquitted perpetrators of violence against queer and transgender people by arguing that the victims’ identities were deceptive.
According to Buist, the perpetrators would say, “'Well, I didn't know that so-and-so was a different gender or sex.' They would usually find out in the middle of a sexual encounter or some form of dating and then they would just lose all control and murder the LGBT person they were with. That's been used as a defense for a very long time and has seen success in some areas. It's still not banned throughout the US.”
Osborn said, “It is a little bit paradoxical to look to the carceral and legal system to address violence against trans people when it is also one of the greatest perpetrators of violence against trans people. I think anyone who has had contact with that system likely has a sense that it is not the first place to look for justice or accountability.”
Osborn believes that narratives of victim-blaming continue to show up in cases of violence against queer and transgender people today — most recently, in the death of 16-year-old transgender Oklahoma high school student Nex Benedict on February 8, 2024.
“Coverage about Nex Benedict has centered around the fact that he had splashed water on his assailants before they attacked him. In some cases again, you're seeing this narrative [on social media] that this is sufficient justification for beating somebody badly enough that they needed medical attention,” Osborn said.
Benedict died one day after he was beaten by three girl classmates in the bathroom of Owasso High School. On March 21, 2024, Stephen Kunzweiler, district attorney of Tulsa County announced that no charges would be filed in connection with Benedict’s death. In the announcement, Kunzweiler said that the altercation in the bathroom appeared to be an incident of “mutual combat.” However, according to NBC, a medical examiner found “multiple contusions, lacerations, and abrasions on his head and neck.” Benedict’s death was ruled a suicide.
“When we see violence against trans people…we often see a public backlash and there’s some form of a push for more hate crime legislation and greater punishments for people convicted of hate crimes, but I don’t think that’s necessarily always the most effective thing to do,” Osborn said. “Hate crime legislation is very reactive. It’s punishing people who have already committed a serious act of violence as opposed to looking at the conditions that allowed that violence to happen in the first place.”
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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