Ben has kind of won the slightest trust from the Isle kids, but only slightly. They don't understand him and they think he isn't being genuine because no one would be so open with their intentions like he is, so what he's doing must be a front. They aren't openly distrusting of him, but they don't trust him.
Until Gil wound up in the hospital.
Long story short, he wound up taking a very bad fall and slammed his head on the way down, Ben was there and dead certain he heard something crack. Ben, not knowing what else to do, immediately called 911 and had Gil taken to the hospital. Ivy and Mischa were alerted, of course, but for a good twenty minutes, Ben was the only one accompanying Gil. And the way the nurses and doctor at the hospital treated him pissed him off.
Number one, they said everything to Ben, not to Gil, and that had started when Ben had told the paramedics about Gil's intellectual disability (they were asking questions to try and get an idea of how bad his head trauma was and Gil struggled with some of them in ways that could have been explained by his ID, so Ben told them.) And number two, they misgendered him. Multiple times. The straw that broke the camel's back was when the nurse came back to report on the results of the pregnancy test they'd done- a test that had already been difficult for Gil to have to go through considering his trauma and dysphoria. And the nurse told Ben "Her pregnancy test came back negative." That was when he broke and asked to speak to her in the hallway.
Mischa and Ivy walked in on him giving the nurse a lecture about how she needed to speak to Gil, not to Ben, and how if she would actually look at Gil and not his chart, she would see that Gil is a young man, not a young lady, and that by ignoring who Gil was she was just making him feel uncomfortable and unsafe and that wasn't going to help his situation. And that if his current care team was unable to treat Gil with basic human dignity, Ben wanted different people to help his friend, please.
He won Mischa and Ivy's very rare respect that day, and it was the first major step he made in actually getting them to trust him. And Gil? Gil trusted him completely from that day on.
