All faculty at Texas A&M are required to submit their course materials for review before being allowed to teach the course.
Madeleine Cook
TNS
A Texas A&M University professor who was fired for discussing gender identity in the classroom last year is suing the school, Board of Regents and interim president, according to court documents filed Wednesday.
Melissa McCoul’s lawsuit alleges former university President Mark Welsh III was contacted by Gov. Greg Abbott’s chief of staff, who pressed to terminate her, and that Provost Alan Sams was told to not give her a required hearing before doing so.
McCoul’s lawsuit also states that the university knowingly violated her free speech and due process rights to “appease political critics.”
In a statement released Wednesday, McCoul wrote that she could have never imagined suing Texas A&M, and described her role at the university as her “dream job.” She was hired by the university in 2017.
“There’s no satisfaction in doing this, only sadness,” McCoul wrote. “I had hoped to keep doing that work for many years to come. Despite how I was treated, I still love the institution, my former colleagues, and the students of A&M. I hope that this lawsuit will cause the University to think twice about treating others similarly.”
McCoul is also asking for damages, back pay and to be reinstated to her position. She was in the second year of a three-year contract when she was terminated.
The termination came after Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison, Midlothian Republican, posted a video on social media of a student who recorded McCoul teaching about gender identity in a summer class. The student argued her lesson was in violation of a President Donald Trump executive order. There isn’t a Texas law prohibiting gender identity teaching.
In December, after McCoul’s firing, Texas A&M’s Board of Regents issued a guidance prohibiting faculty from “requiring or encouraging students to hold certain beliefs, particularly regarding gender or race ideology or sexual orientation, or to feel shame for belonging to certain racial or ethnic groups.”
Texas A&M last week also ended its women’s and gender studies programs, and said that hundreds of course syllabuses have been or will be altered under a new policy regulating how gender can be discussed in class.
Samuel O’Neal is a local news reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram covering higher education and local news in Fort Worth. He joined the team in December 2025 after previously working as a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He graduated from Temple University, where he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the school’s student paper, The Temple News.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in its latest LGBTQ+ rights case Tuesday, weighing the constitutionality of bans passed by nearly half of U.S. states on the practice known as conversion therapy for children.The justices are hearing a lawsuit from a Christian counselor challenging a Colorado law that prohibits therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation or gender identity. Kaley Chiles, with support from President Donald Trump’s Republican administration, argues the law violates her freedom of speech by barring her from offering voluntary, faith-based therapy for kids.Colorado, on the other hand, says the measure simply regulates licensed therapists by barring a practice that’s been scientifically discredited and linked to serious harm.The arguments come months after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority found states can ban transition-related health care for transgender youths, a setback for LGBTQ rights. The justices are also expected to hear a case about sports participation by transgender players this term.State says therapy is health care and subject to regulationColorado has not sanctioned anyone under the 2019 law, which exempts religious ministries. State attorneys say it still allows any therapist to have wide-ranging, faith-based conversations with young patients about gender and sexuality.“The only thing that the law prohibits therapists from doing is performing a treatment that seeks the predetermined outcome of changing a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity because that treatment is unsafe and ineffective,” Colorado state attorneys wrote.Therapy isn’t just speech, they said — it’s health care that governments have a responsibility to regulate. Violating the law carries potential fines of $5,000 and license suspension or even revocation.Linda Robertson is a Christian mom of four from Washington state whose son Ryan underwent therapy that promised to change his sexual orientation after he came out to her at age 12. The techniques led him to blame himself when it didn’t work, leaving him ashamed and depressed. He died in 2009, after multiple suicide attempts and a drug overdose at age 20.“What happened in conversion therapy, it devastated Ryan’s bond with me and my husband,” she said. “And it absolutely destroyed his confidence he could ever be loved or accepted by God.”Chiles contends her approach is different from the kind of conversion therapy once associated with practices like shock therapy decades ago. She said she believes “people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex,” and she argues evidence of harm from her approach is lacking.Chiles says Colorado is discriminating because it allows counselors to affirm minors coming out as gay or identifying as transgender but bans counseling like hers for young patients who may want to change their behavior or feelings. “We’re not saying this counseling should be mandatory, but if someone wants the counseling they should be able to get it,” said one of her attorneys, Jonathan Scruggs.The Trump administration said there are First Amendment issues with Colorado’s law that should make the law subject to a higher legal standard that few measures pass.Similar laws also face court challengesChiles is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization that has appeared frequently at the court in recent years. The group also represented a Christian website designer who doesn’t want to work with same-sex couples and successfully challenged a Colorado anti-discrimination law in 2023.The group’s argument in the conversion therapy case also builds on another victory from 2018: A Supreme Court decision found California could not force state-licensed anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to provide information about abortion. Chiles should also be free from that kind of state regulation, the group argued.Still, the Supreme Court has also found that regulations that only “incidentally” burden speech are permissible, and the state argues that striking down its law against conversion therapy would undercut states’ ability to regulate discredited health care of all kinds.The high court agreed to hear the case after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld the law. Another appeals court, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, has struck down similar bans in Florida.Legal wrangling has continued elsewhere as well. In Wisconsin, the state’s highest court recently cleared the way for the state to enforce its ban. Virginia officials, by contrast, have agreed to scale back the enforcement of its law as part of an agreement with a faith-based conservative group that sued.
WASHINGTON —
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in its latest LGBTQ+ rights case Tuesday, weighing the constitutionality of bans passed by nearly half of U.S. states on the practice known as conversion therapy for children.
The justices are hearing a lawsuit from a Christian counselor challenging a Colorado law that prohibits therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation or gender identity. Kaley Chiles, with support from President Donald Trump’s Republican administration, argues the law violates her freedom of speech by barring her from offering voluntary, faith-based therapy for kids.
Colorado, on the other hand, says the measure simply regulates licensed therapists by barring a practice that’s been scientifically discredited and linked to serious harm.
The arguments come months after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority found states can ban transition-related health care for transgender youths, a setback for LGBTQ rights. The justices are also expected to hear a case about sports participation by transgender players this term.
State says therapy is health care and subject to regulation
Colorado has not sanctioned anyone under the 2019 law, which exempts religious ministries. State attorneys say it still allows any therapist to have wide-ranging, faith-based conversations with young patients about gender and sexuality.
“The only thing that the law prohibits therapists from doing is performing a treatment that seeks the predetermined outcome of changing a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity because that treatment is unsafe and ineffective,” Colorado state attorneys wrote.
Therapy isn’t just speech, they said — it’s health care that governments have a responsibility to regulate. Violating the law carries potential fines of $5,000 and license suspension or even revocation.
Linda Robertson is a Christian mom of four from Washington state whose son Ryan underwent therapy that promised to change his sexual orientation after he came out to her at age 12. The techniques led him to blame himself when it didn’t work, leaving him ashamed and depressed. He died in 2009, after multiple suicide attempts and a drug overdose at age 20.
“What happened in conversion therapy, it devastated Ryan’s bond with me and my husband,” she said. “And it absolutely destroyed his confidence he could ever be loved or accepted by God.”
Chiles contends her approach is different from the kind of conversion therapy once associated with practices like shock therapy decades ago. She said she believes “people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex,” and she argues evidence of harm from her approach is lacking.
Chiles says Colorado is discriminating because it allows counselors to affirm minors coming out as gay or identifying as transgender but bans counseling like hers for young patients who may want to change their behavior or feelings. “We’re not saying this counseling should be mandatory, but if someone wants the counseling they should be able to get it,” said one of her attorneys, Jonathan Scruggs.
The Trump administration said there are First Amendment issues with Colorado’s law that should make the law subject to a higher legal standard that few measures pass.
Similar laws also face court challenges
Chiles is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization that has appeared frequently at the court in recent years. The group also represented a Christian website designer who doesn’t want to work with same-sex couples and successfully challenged a Colorado anti-discrimination law in 2023.
The group’s argument in the conversion therapy case also builds on another victory from 2018: A Supreme Court decision found California could not force state-licensed anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to provide information about abortion. Chiles should also be free from that kind of state regulation, the group argued.
Still, the Supreme Court has also found that regulations that only “incidentally” burden speech are permissible, and the state argues that striking down its law against conversion therapy would undercut states’ ability to regulate discredited health care of all kinds.
The high court agreed to hear the case after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld the law. Another appeals court, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, has struck down similar bans in Florida.
Legal wrangling has continued elsewhere as well. In Wisconsin, the state’s highest court recently cleared the way for the state to enforce its ban. Virginia officials, by contrast, have agreed to scale back the enforcement of its law as part of an agreement with a faith-based conservative group that sued.
Gov. Newsom on Friday waded further into the controversy surrounding a higher education compact President Trump has presented to nine universities including USC, chiding campus leadership to “do the right thing” and reject the offer.
The compact, sent Wednesday to the University of Southern California and other campuses nationwide, has roiled higher education with its demands for rightward campus policy shifts in exchange for priority federal funding.
On Thursday, Newsom swung back at the Trump proposal and threatened to cut “billions” of dollars in state funding to any California university that agrees to it.
Newsom offered fiery remarks during a bill signing at UC Berkeley on Friday, escalating the stakes in the high-pressure decision confronting USC.
“Do the right thing,” he said. “What’s the point of the system? What’s the point of the university? What’s the point of all of this if we don’t have academic freedom? … It’s not a choice, and the fact that I felt I needed to even send that message is rather shocking, because some people think it is.”
Newsom scoffed at the notion that USC, a private institution, even has to deliberate over the Trump offer — calling it a “false choice.”
The compact’s conservative goals
The White House offer to USC and a small group of prominent universities — among them the University of Arizona, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas and Brown University — calls on campuses to follow Trump’s views on admissions, diversity and free speech, among other areas. In exchange, they would get more favorable access to federal research grants and additional funding, in addition to other benefits.
Universities would also have to accept the government’s definition of gender and would not be allowed to recognize transgender people’s gender identities. Foreign student enrollment would be restricted. In regards to free speech, schools would have to commit to promoting a wide range of views on campus — and change or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” according to the compact.
In a campus letter Friday, USC interim President Beong-Soo Kim said the White House offer “covers a number of issues that I believe are important to study and discuss.”
“I have already heard from several members of our community, and in the weeks ahead, I will be consulting with the Board of Trustees; the deans and leadership team; and members of the Academic Senate, the Academic Freedom Task Force, the President’s Faculty Advisory Committee, and other stakeholder groups to hear their wide-ranging perspectives,” Kim said. “These conversations can take time, but they are essential to building trust and community.”
He said it was his responsibility to “advance USC’s mission and uphold our core values.”
Speaking at the Berkeley event, Newsom said USC is among California’s “great universities” that are “all in this together” as campuses face an uncertain and rocky future amid the Trump presidency.
A day earlier the governor threatened to withhold Cal Grants, the state’s largest financial aid program to California public and private universities that sign onto Trump’s deal. The grants are awarded based on income, and students become eligible through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid or California Dream Act Application.
In 2024-25, $2.5 billion in Cal Grants were doled out statewide. USC received Cal Grants worth about $28 million during that academic year.
UC negotiations ongoing
In response to a question about the proposal to USC and whether Newsom would issue the same threat of removing state funding to UCLA — the subject of ongoing negotiations over a sprawling U.S. Department of Justice antisemitism investigation — the governor said he was “not concerned” about the UC system.
“I’m not concerned about their capacity to organize a strategy that’s thoughtful and deliberative that maintains our values … without resorting to the kind of expressed concerns that I have about the university in question that was on that list,” Newsom said.
As UCLA continues to negotiate with the Trump administration, Newsom said he has confidence in the university system, whose leaders have been working “collaboratively for weeks” to come to a resolution.
The governor’s more tempered remarks were a shift from his comments in August and September, when he said UC should “sue” Trump and should not “bend the knee,” a reference to his belief that the deals made by Brown and Columbia universities with the White House were bad moves that empowered the government to target more campuses.
“Governor Newsom, [UC] President [James B.] Milliken and the board of regents are fully aligned in protecting the values, integrity and unparalleled quality of the University of California system,” UC Board of Regents Chair Janet Reilly said Friday in a statement to The Times following Newsom’s comments.
In a Friday letter, Milliken said the Trump compact was also a subject of talks among system leaders.
“Just within the last few days, the administration has announced a plan to impose a myriad of new requirements on universities seeking federal funding, which we will discuss soon with faculty leadership,” said Milliken, without elaborating on the matter.
The Trump proposal has not been sent to UC. A White House official said the initial campuses on its list were the first group in potentially many more colleges to receive the terms.
After the Justice Department found in July that UCLA violated Jewish students’ rights amid its response to spring 2024 pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the Trump administration sought a nearly $1.2-billion penalty from the school. The government is also seeking changes over admissions, foreign student enrollment, diversity programs and other GOP priorities in higher education.
While praising UC’s handling of federal negotiations, Newsom was less supportive of recent actions by UC Berkeley to release the personal information of 160 employees to Department of Education as part of a federal investigation into alleged campus antisemitism.
UC officials said they strive to protect employee privacy and were required to share information with the department because it enforces civil rights law on campuses. Faculty have criticized the move, with some likening it to anti-free speech practices during the McCarthy era.
Newsom said he “requested an independent review” of the data release in order to “make a judgment as to whether or not it was appropriate, whether or not it was consistent with past practices or whether or not it should be adjusted in terms of policy.”
USC ‘between a rock and a hard place’
Rick Hess, an education analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said Newsom’s remarks “seemed not inappropriate.”
“If a [Kamala] Harris administration had tried something like this, I think Republican governors would be equally livid,” said Hess, director of the institute’s education policy studies.
“USC is between a rock and a hard place,” Hess added. “If they say no, what does any of this mean? What does it mean to not be prioritized for federal research funds? Does that mean the tap will be shut off? On the other hand, once you’ve signed … will the administration abide by the promises it has made? Part of the problem is, it is not entirely clear what it means to say yes and what it means to say no.”
Newsom blasted institutions that have already “sold out” by signing Trump’s compact. The University of Texas has suggested it could agree to the terms. Leaders of the Texas system were “honored” that the Austin campus was chosen to be a part of the compact and its “potential funding advantages,” according to a Thursday statement from Kevin Eltife, chair of the board of regents.
“In this state, our state of mind must be resolute,” said Newsom. “I don’t mean to put pressure on people. I need to put pressure on this moment and pressure test where we are in U.S. history, not just California history. And so forgive me for being so firm. This is it. We are losing this country.”
Should a college professor be able to share information about gender identity in a children’s literature class? Can an elementary school teacher offer an “unpopular opinion” about the Charlie Kirk murder on her personal Facebook page? Not without consequences, and not as long as Republican leaders are micromanaging public institutions, free speech advocates say.
Four people lost their jobs at Texas A&M University this month after a student objected to a discussion about a book involving a nonbinary child, falsely claiming such a conversation is not allowed under the Trump administration. The student took a recording of her classroom exchange with the professor to the university president, and a Republican lawmaker made it his mission to publicize the situation and rally support for the ouster of the A&M officials involved.
The termination of professor Melissa McCoul; the demotions of College of Arts and Sciences Dean Mark Zoran and English Department Head Emily Johansen; and the subsequent resignation of University President Mark Welsh III prompted a firestorm of controversy and debate about government overreach into higher education institutions.
Academics across the country have strong opinions on these topics, but many professors, including those at Houston universities, are uncomfortable talking about them publicly.
The incident in McCoul’s Texas A&M classroom was publicized by Texas Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, and had members of the public calling for the professor’s firing, tagging Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican lawmakers.
🚨CAUGHT ON TAPE: TEXAS A&M STUDENT KICKED OUT OF CLASS AFTER OBJECTING TO TRANSGENDER INDOCTRINATION… and A&M President defends “LGBTQ Studies.”
Harrison did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Days after McCoul lost her job, conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk was murdered on the Utah Valley University campus, and as people weighed in on social media, a campaign was launched to get people fired from their jobs who spoke in a negative way about Kirk, who was an ally of President Donald Trump.
Governor Abbott called for the expulsion of a student at Texas State University who allegedly mocked Kirk’s death at a memorial. “Hey Texas State. This conduct is not accepted at our schools. Expel this student immediately. Mocking assassinations must have consequences,” Abbott wrote on X. The student was expelled later that day.
Texas Education Agency officials reported earlier this month that 280 complaints have been filed against teachers who commented on Kirk’s death on social media. While some of the posts were no-doubt inflammatory, suggesting that Kirk “got what he deserved,” others pointed out that they thought Kirk was a racist and posted clips that they presumably believed illustrated their point.
Randal Scamardo, a Texas A&M graduate who works as an assistant professor of Spanish at Lees-McRae College in North Carolina, said the situation at his alma mater is troubling. It appears that while it’s acceptable to laud Republican and Christian ideology in all public classrooms, differing opinions are shut down, he said.
“Since governments are expected to provide public education, it’s easier for them to create something that looks like education but is more akin to indoctrination,” Scamardo said. “People interested in doing that should be kept far away from the content of public education.”
Ironically, the indoctrination argument goes both ways. Harrison has argued that rogue educators must be fired for indoctrinating students into a “woke” ideology that includes Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices and gender identity.
University of Houston lecturer Nancy Sims said on the Houston Matters radio show earlier this month that she devotes the first 15 minutes of her Women in Politics class to discussing the issues of the day, such as something President Trump said, action taken by the Legislature, or “any kind of policy that’s affecting women’s lives.”
“I think it’s very challenging to teach situations in the real world when the Legislature is trying to put parameters around you to not allow that,” Sims said on the radio show. “How can you discuss women’s rights without discussing the role of gender identity in women’s rights? You’re trying to put parameters on us that don’t allow us to discuss reality in the world that students will face when they leave campus.”
“It’s had a chilling effect on all public universities,” Sims told the Houston Press, declining to comment further.
Details are still unfolding in McCoul’s case, but accusations have been made that the topic of gender identity wasn’t relevant to a discussion on children’s literature.
According to reports, McCoul’s students were reading a novel called Jude Saves the World, featuring a 12-year-old protagonist who comes out as nonbinary. The professor shared a graphic of a “gender unicorn” to teach the differences between gender identity and sexuality.
According to the video released by Rep. Harrison, the student who later complained to the administration said, “I just have a question, because I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching. Because, according to our President, there’s only two genders and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology. This also very much goes against, not only myself, but a lot of people’s religious beliefs.”
McCoul told the student she had the right to leave the class when concerns about the topic were raised.
No state or federal law prohibits instruction on race, gender, or sexual orientation in Texas universities, nor is there a university policy. An executive order issued by Trump in January states that U.S. government policy is to recognize two sexes and that federal funds could not be used to promote gender identity. However, legal experts have said that the order doesn’t prohibit a professor from teaching lessons on the topic.
McCoul’s children’s literature class, held over the summer, was canceled after the incident but the professor was back in the classroom teaching in the fall. She was not officially reprimanded for the incident until the video surfaced.
McCoul’s notice of termination, according to her attorney Amanda Reichek, “alleges that she was instructed on numerous occasions to change the course content to align with the catalog description and the course description that was originally submitted and approved, yet failed to do so.”
“However, Professor McCoul’s course content was entirely consistent with the catalog and course description, and she was never instructed to change her course content in any way, shape, or form,” Reichek said in an emailed statement. “In fact, Dr. McCoul taught this course and others like it for many years, successfully and without challenge. Instead, Dr. McCoul was fired in violation of her constitutional and contractual rights, and the academic freedom that was once the hallmark of Texas higher education.”
The professor appealed her termination and is “exploring further legal action,” Reichek said.
A tenured faculty member sent an anonymous letter last week to the student body at Texas A&M, noting that, for the second time in two years, a university president has stepped down “under public criticism from Texas political leaders and social media actors – accompanied by the resignation or removal of academic administrators and, in this most recent case, the firing of a faculty member in what appears to be a response to political pressure.”
M. Katherine Banks was the university president prior to Welsh. She retired in the wake of a controversy over the hiring of a Black female to lead A&M’s revitalized journalism program but received backlash from conservative groups that alleged a DEI hire.
“This follows years in which faculty have been lampooned in partisan media and by state officials as ‘woke’ activists, supposedly more concerned with ideology than with research and education,” the anonymous faculty member wrote. “We come to work knowing that serving your interests carries the risk of public ridicule, doxing, and, now it appears, loss of one’s job.”
“What makes this moment even more distressing is that outside agitators are trying to pit students against faculty, encouraging you to use the classroom as their weapon. I feel a long way from my first day standing in front of a classroom of Aggies, when students lined up to say howdy and introduce themselves. Now I wonder if they are recording.”
Texas A&M junior Ian Curtis, a journalism major and editor-in-chief of the student newspaper The Battalion, said last week that his peers were not particularly outraged about McCoul’s firing, but they were concerned that President Welsh was seemingly forced to resign amid the controversy.
Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh III, pictured with his wife Betty, resigned last week amid a controversy over a professor teaching gender identity in a children’s literature class.
Screenshot
The retired U.S. Air Force four-star general exited campus on September 19 with his wife Betty as students displayed signs that read, “American Hero & Our Hero. The Student Government Association rounded up dozens of current and former student leaders to sign a letter of support for Welsh and students protested for academic freedom.
“The professor situation, that gets into the politics of the day,” Curtis said. “People’s opinions are really divided on that on campus, but there was a lot of popular support for President Welsh. There’s an interesting dynamic here. It’s all the same scandal so it all gets thrown into one, but I think, among the student body, there’s a lot of support for Welsh because of everything he did for the university, which isn’t always the same as the reaction to the firing of the professor.”
Following the Course Description
The course description in McCoul’s publicly listed syllabus for the “Literature for Children” course states that the class will “tease out the boundaries of children’s literature,” including what counts as children’s literature and what differentiates writing for children from writing for adults, the Texas Tribune reported.
The syllabus lists Jude Saves the World as a course text and describes it as a children’s book by Ronnie Riley about a “nonbinary, bisexual 12-year-old who uses they/them pronouns.”
“Some of the material in this class might be controversial, and it is likely differing opinions will emerge,” the syllabus states. “You are certainly not required to agree with me (or your peers), or to adhere to any particular viewpoints. However, I do insist upon respectful, courteous dialogue, especially in matters where emotions run high.”
So it appears the students knew — or at least were provided information — on what the class would entail when they signed up for it.
Scamardo, the North Carolina professor, who earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. at the Universidad de Cadiz in Spain, said in general, course catalog descriptions are supposed to be four lines or less.
“We’re trying to make the courses look interesting,” he said. “We want students to register for these courses, and these descriptions have to be used semester after semester without having to be constantly altered. That is not very easy to do, but you also have a syllabus that gives more in-depth information. The students are supposed to read the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, when they still have time to drop the class and get their money back if they don’t like what they see planned out for the next 17 weeks.”
The professor added that students need to “lighten up, learn as much as they can, and go with the flow a little bit,” particularly when taking a political science course or a class that covers current events.
“Trust your college professors; they are the experts,” he said. “Take away what you like and disregard the rest. Keep the culture wars out of the classroom. You’re there to learn, not fight.”
Rice University political science professor Mark Jones said recently on the Houston Matters radio program that the course catalog references general topics but “it’s a rubric that you fill in throughout the course.”
“Especially in something like politics, you often are filling it in as the course evolves because you often try to use examples that come from current-day politics,” he said. “If you’re talking about democracy or elections, you’re probably not going to bring in some type of political philosophy that has nothing to do with politics, but it’s tough to say from the start exactly what you’re going to be covering in a course, especially for topics that are ever-changing, like politics.”
State Officials Also Get Involved in Secondary Education
As the so-called scandal at Texas A&M got a lot of attention this month, it became clear that secondary education classrooms are not immune to the watchful eye of the state government.
The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passed a bill earlier this year requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public K-12 classrooms as long as the posters are donated. Two lawsuits have been filed to challenge the legislation and courts have ruled that such a measure is unconstitutional.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated a legal victory against Austin ISD on September 15, prohibiting the district from teaching critical race theory.
“Critical race theory is anti-American propaganda and in no world will I allow the woke indoctrination of Texas children,” Paxton said in an emailed statement. “While this order is an important step forward, I want to make clear to any school district considering any breach of this law: we will be watching.”
And in the Facebook post heard ‘round Texas, Abilene ISD Superintendent John Kuhn lamented that the “burden is heavy” for administrators in public education.
“Yesterday I spent hours at an update listening to the impacts on teachers and admins at public schools of bill after bill passed by our lege,” he wrote. “Did you know that one bill says teachers are going to be required to catalogue every book in their classrooms? Kindergarten teachers have hundreds of tiny books. With what time? When? Did you know that another bill says nurses can’t provide any health care whatsoever and counselors can’t provide any emotional support whatsoever without a written permission slip from parents?”
“Legislators have been convinced by political groups who hate public schools that everyone inside them are wicked, evil people,” Kuhn added.
Kuhn went on to say that Abilene teachers were referred to as “demons” by social media commenters who objected to the teaching of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in an honors English class. The book is about a child who lost his father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and it contains a few curse words, Kuhn said.
“My teachers aren’t demons,” Kuhn wrote. “They may have made a mistake in assigning this book to 15-year-olds rather than 17-year olds and for that there are people online saying they need to be fired. Today, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is likely temporarily coming off our library shelves while we review our book challenge policies. Read the book. It’ll make you cry.”
He went on to say that “we can’t win in public ed anymore” and he was thinking about retiring when he is eligible in January.
“I’m sick of politicians playing divisive politics and leaving local public servants to clean up the mess,” Kuhn wrote. “Public schools are apolitical entities with the job of teaching kids to think critically and become awesome humans. We aren’t perfect. We have missteps because we are human organizations. But don’t call my teachers DEMONS while you cuss in the comments.”
“There is a political movement to pull the teeth of local officials at schools and on city councils and county commissioners courts so that all we have is centralized state leadership. So local yokels like yours truly have to be continually demonized and legislated into submission.”
Academic Freedom
The controversy at A&M has prompted free speech advocates to question whether McCoul’s firing not only was unfounded but endangers academic freedom in Texas.
Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said public institutions can’t fire employees for exercising their First Amendment rights. Such occurrences are likely to prompt some educators to seek employment in other states, Rank said in a published report.
A recent survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors and the Texas Faculty Association found that 25 percent of Texas professors have applied for out-of-state jobs in the last two years. Over 60 percent said they would not recommend that colleagues or graduate students seek positions in the state. The chief complaint among those surveyed was the political climate.
Texas A&M’s College Station campus is home to more than 76,000 students.
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Caro Achar, engagement coordinator for free speech at the ACLU of Texas, said free speech is the “cornerstone of our — and any — democracy, and it must apply to all Texans regardless of the viewpoints they express.”
“All public colleges and universities have a constitutional obligation to protect academic freedom on their campuses,” she said. “For decades, the Supreme Court has emphasized the importance of public universities maintaining learning environments where students and faculty are free to learn and explore new ideas. The censorship of certain topics and viewpoints destroys these environments and threatens the very foundation of our democracy.”
Curtis, the A&M junior, said he didn’t think students are concerned about what they can talk about in class, but they are concerned about the political overreach that’s preventing universities from handling their business internally.
“I’ve been in classes where professors have had to say, ‘This is a class where we discuss current events.’ I think it’s a fear, maybe a nervousness or anxiety, that extends to the students sometimes, but a lot of us … we’ve still got to pass our exams. Maybe the severity of what’s going on hasn’t hit the student body yet,” he said.
“I think the resignation of Welsh really put that into perspective for a lot of people,” he added. “It was like, this political thing that I wasn’t paying attention to extended to someone I’ve met. I shook his hand and he came to my awards events. That really shocked a lot of people into caring and looking into the situation.”
Senate Bill 17, requiring state universities to dismantle DEI offices and cease various programs, activities, and trainings that were traditionally conducted by them, became effective in January 2024. That got students’ attention because it affected some of their clubs and extracurricular activities, Curtis said.
Texas A&M is a diverse institution with more than 70,000 people at the main campus, but the perception, based on the visual displayed on televised football games, is a majority-white, conservative campus with a military-style Corps of Cadets and male “yell leaders” instead of cheerleaders, said Curtis, who grew up in College Station.
Texas A&M University is known for its Corps of Cadets and military traditions. The institution began accepting women in 1963.
Screenshot
“There’s a community for everyone; there are representative bodies for queer students, every ethnic group or international student,” he said. “The campus and the school itself is a community and there’s something for everyone here.”
Former A&M President Welsh at first said he wouldn’t fire McCoul but then reversed course and did so, saying at the time, “This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility.”
But some students believe that academic freedom is under attack, Curtis said, pointing to a reportThe Battalion did earlier this year on the conservative influence that far-right publication Texas Scorecard has on A&M’s policies and personnel discussions.
“Virtually every article they publish is not fully factual, sometimes not even close to factual,” Welsh is quoted saying in the article. “They have never printed a retraction when we provided them with the facts.”
And yet members of the A&M Board of Regents repeatedly pointed to published reports in the Scorecard to justify policy-making decisions, according to The Battalion.
Curtis said students are aware of the political pressure on university administrators but they typically don’t get involved until it affects their daily lives. He said he didn’t think anything would change among students other than reacting to changes at the institutional level.
“I think you’re going to see a shift in how other people conduct themselves more than how students conduct themselves,” he said. “I think there will be a domino effect from that. I think the issue is that you have people on social media seeing one moment out of context, and it being shared by a politician, and then you have people in Austin with their eyes on it. You have university systems that feel like they need to make changes based on that.”
“It’s reactionary. An uneducated opinion is being shared and it’s leading to all this change,” he added. “I think that frustrates a lot of students.”
Should a college professor be able to share information about gender identity in a children’s literature class? Can an elementary school teacher offer an “unpopular opinion” about the Charlie Kirk murder on her personal Facebook page? Not without consequences, and not as long as Republican leaders are micromanaging public institutions, free speech advocates say.
Four people lost their jobs at Texas A&M University this month after a student objected to a discussion about a book involving a nonbinary child, falsely claiming such a conversation is not allowed under the Trump administration. The student took a recording of her classroom exchange with the professor to the university president, and a Republican lawmaker made it his mission to publicize the situation and rally support for the ouster of the A&M officials involved.
The termination of professor Melissa McCoul; the demotions of College of Arts and Sciences Dean Mark Zoran and English Department Head Emily Johansen; and the subsequent resignation of University President Mark Welsh III prompted a firestorm of controversy and debate about government overreach into higher education institutions.
Academics across the country have strong opinions on these topics, but many professors, including those at Houston universities, are uncomfortable talking about them publicly.
The incident in McCoul’s Texas A&M classroom was publicized by Texas Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, and had members of the public calling for the professor’s firing, tagging Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican lawmakers.
🚨CAUGHT ON TAPE: TEXAS A&M STUDENT KICKED OUT OF CLASS AFTER OBJECTING TO TRANSGENDER INDOCTRINATION… and A&M President defends “LGBTQ Studies.”
Harrison did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Days after McCoul lost her job, conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk was murdered on the Utah Valley University campus, and as people weighed in on social media, a campaign was launched to get people fired from their jobs who spoke in a negative way about Kirk, who was an ally of President Donald Trump.
Governor Abbott called for the expulsion of a student at Texas State University who allegedly mocked Kirk’s death at a memorial. “Hey Texas State. This conduct is not accepted at our schools. Expel this student immediately. Mocking assassinations must have consequences,” Abbott wrote on X. The student was expelled later that day.
Texas Education Agency officials reported earlier this month that 280 complaints have been filed against teachers who commented on Kirk’s death on social media. While some of the posts were no-doubt inflammatory, suggesting that Kirk “got what he deserved,” others pointed out that they thought Kirk was a racist and posted clips that they presumably believed illustrated their point.
Randal Scamardo, a Texas A&M graduate who works as an assistant professor of Spanish at Lees-McRae College in North Carolina, said the situation at his alma mater is troubling. It appears that while it’s acceptable to laud Republican and Christian ideology in all public classrooms, differing opinions are shut down, he said.
“Since governments are expected to provide public education, it’s easier for them to create something that looks like education but is more akin to indoctrination,” Scamardo said. “People interested in doing that should be kept far away from the content of public education.”
Ironically, the indoctrination argument goes both ways. Harrison has argued that rogue educators must be fired for indoctrinating students into a “woke” ideology that includes Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices and gender identity.
University of Houston lecturer Nancy Sims said on the Houston Matters radio showearlier this month that she devotes the first 15 minutes of her Women in Politics class to discussing the issues of the day, such as something President Trump said, action taken by the Legislature, or “any kind of policy that’s affecting women’s lives.”
“I think it’s very challenging to teach situations in the real world when the Legislature is trying to put parameters around you to not allow that,” Sims said on the radio show. “How can you discuss women’s rights without discussing the role of gender identity in women’s rights? You’re trying to put parameters on us that don’t allow us to discuss reality in the world that students will face when they leave campus.”
“It’s had a chilling effect on all public universities,” Sims told the Houston Press, declining to comment further.
Details are still unfolding in McCoul’s case, but accusations have been made that the topic of gender identity wasn’t relevant to a discussion on children’s literature.
According to reports, McCoul’s students were reading a novel called Jude Saves the World, featuring a 12-year-old protagonist who comes out as nonbinary. The professor shared a graphic of a “gender unicorn” to teach the differences between gender identity and sexuality.
According to the video released by Rep. Harrison, the student who later complained to the administration said, “I just have a question, because I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching. Because, according to our President, there’s only two genders and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology. This also very much goes against, not only myself, but a lot of people’s religious beliefs.”
McCoul told the student she had the right to leave the class when concerns about the topic were raised.
No state or federal law prohibits instruction on race, gender, or sexual orientation in Texas universities, nor is there a university policy. An executive order issued by Trump in January states that U.S. government policy is to recognize two sexes and that federal funds could not be used to promote gender identity. However, legal experts have said that the order doesn’t prohibit a professor from teaching lessons on the topic.
McCoul’s children’s literature class, held over the summer, was canceled after the incident but the professor was back in the classroom teaching in the fall. She was not officially reprimanded for the incident until the video surfaced.
McCoul’s notice of termination, according to her attorney Amanda Reichek, “alleges that she was instructed on numerous occasions to change the course content to align with the catalog description and the course description that was originally submitted and approved, yet failed to do so.”
“However, Professor McCoul’s course content was entirely consistent with the catalog and course description, and she was never instructed to change her course content in any way, shape, or form,” Reichek said in an emailed statement. “In fact, Dr. McCoul taught this course and others like it for many years, successfully and without challenge. Instead, Dr. McCoul was fired in violation of her constitutional and contractual rights, and the academic freedom that was once the hallmark of Texas higher education.”
The professor appealed her termination and is “exploring further legal action,” Reichek said.
A tenured faculty member sent an anonymous letter last week to the student body at Texas A&M, noting that, for the second time in two years, a university president has stepped down “under public criticism from Texas political leaders and social media actors – accompanied by the resignation or removal of academic administrators and, in this most recent case, the firing of a faculty member in what appears to be a response to political pressure.”
M. Katherine Banks was the university president prior to Welsh. She retired in the wake of a controversy over the hiring of a Black female to lead A&M’s revitalized journalism program but received backlash from conservative groups that alleged a DEI hire.
“This follows years in which faculty have been lampooned in partisan media and by state officials as ‘woke’ activists, supposedly more concerned with ideology than with research and education,” the anonymous faculty member wrote. “We come to work knowing that serving your interests carries the risk of public ridicule, doxing, and, now it appears, loss of one’s job.”
“What makes this moment even more distressing is that outside agitators are trying to pit students against faculty, encouraging you to use the classroom as their weapon. I feel a long way from my first day standing in front of a classroom of Aggies, when students lined up to say howdy and introduce themselves. Now I wonder if they are recording.”
Texas A&M junior Ian Curtis, a journalism major and editor-in-chief of the student newspaper The Battalion, said last week that his peers were not particularly outraged about McCoul’s firing, but they were concerned that President Welsh was seemingly forced to resign amid the controversy.
Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh III, pictured with his wife Betty, resigned last week amid a controversy over a professor teaching gender identity in a children’s literature class. Credit: Screenshot
The retired U.S. Air Force four-star general exited campus on September 19 with his wife Betty as students displayed signs that read, “American Hero & Our Hero. The Student Government Association rounded up dozens of current and former student leaders to sign a letter of support for Welsh and students protested for academic freedom.
“The professor situation, that gets into the politics of the day,” Curtis said. “People’s opinions are really divided on that on campus, but there was a lot of popular support for President Welsh. There’s an interesting dynamic here. It’s all the same scandal so it all gets thrown into one, but I think, among the student body, there’s a lot of support for Welsh because of everything he did for the university, which isn’t always the same as the reaction to the firing of the professor.”
Following the Course Description
The course description in McCoul’s publicly listed syllabus for the “Literature for Children” course states that the class will “tease out the boundaries of children’s literature,” including what counts as children’s literature and what differentiates writing for children from writing for adults, the Texas Tribune reported.
The syllabus lists Jude Saves the World as a course text and describes it as a children’s book by Ronnie Riley about a “nonbinary, bisexual 12-year-old who uses they/them pronouns.”
“Some of the material in this class might be controversial, and it is likely differing opinions will emerge,” the syllabus states. “You are certainly not required to agree with me (or your peers), or to adhere to any particular viewpoints. However, I do insist upon respectful, courteous dialogue, especially in matters where emotions run high.”
So it appears the students knew — or at least were provided information — on what the class would entail when they signed up for it.
Scamardo, the North Carolina professor, who earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. at the Universidad de Cadiz in Spain, said in general, course catalog descriptions are supposed to be four lines or less.
“We’re trying to make the courses look interesting,” he said. “We want students to register for these courses, and these descriptions have to be used semester after semester without having to be constantly altered. That is not very easy to do, but you also have a syllabus that gives more in-depth information. The students are supposed to read the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, when they still have time to drop the class and get their money back if they don’t like what they see planned out for the next 17 weeks.”
The professor added that students need to “lighten up, learn as much as they can, and go with the flow a little bit,” particularly when taking a political science course or a class that covers current events.
“Trust your college professors; they are the experts,” he said. “Take away what you like and disregard the rest. Keep the culture wars out of the classroom. You’re there to learn, not fight.”
Rice University political science professor Mark Jones said recently on the Houston Matters radio program that the course catalog references general topics but “it’s a rubric that you fill in throughout the course.”
“Especially in something like politics, you often are filling it in as the course evolves because you often try to use examples that come from current-day politics,” he said. “If you’re talking about democracy or elections, you’re probably not going to bring in some type of political philosophy that has nothing to do with politics, but it’s tough to say from the start exactly what you’re going to be covering in a course, especially for topics that are ever-changing, like politics.”
State Officials Also Get Involved in Secondary Education
As the so-called scandal at Texas A&M got a lot of attention this month, it became clear that secondary education classrooms are not immune to the watchful eye of the state government.
The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature passed a bill earlier this year requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public K-12 classrooms as long as the posters are donated. Two lawsuits have been filed to challenge the legislation and courts have ruled that such a measure is unconstitutional.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated a legal victory against Austin ISD on September 15, prohibiting the district from teaching critical race theory.
“Critical race theory is anti-American propaganda and in no world will I allow the woke indoctrination of Texas children,” Paxton said in an emailed statement. “While this order is an important step forward, I want to make clear to any school district considering any breach of this law: we will be watching.”
And in the Facebook post heard ‘round Texas, Abilene ISD Superintendent John Kuhn lamented that the “burden is heavy” for administrators in public education.
“Yesterday I spent hours at an update listening to the impacts on teachers and admins at public schools of bill after bill passed by our lege,” he wrote. “Did you know that one bill says teachers are going to be required to catalogue every book in their classrooms? Kindergarten teachers have hundreds of tiny books. With what time? When? Did you know that another bill says nurses can’t provide any health care whatsoever and counselors can’t provide any emotional support whatsoever without a written permission slip from parents?”
“Legislators have been convinced by political groups who hate public schools that everyone inside them are wicked, evil people,” Kuhn added.
Kuhn went on to say that Abilene teachers were referred to as “demons” by social media commenters who objected to the teaching of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in an honors English class. The book is about a child who lost his father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and it contains a few curse words, Kuhn said.
“My teachers aren’t demons,” Kuhn wrote. “They may have made a mistake in assigning this book to 15-year-olds rather than 17-year olds and for that there are people online saying they need to be fired. Today, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is likely temporarily coming off our library shelves while we review our book challenge policies. Read the book. It’ll make you cry.”
He went on to say that “we can’t win in public ed anymore” and he was thinking about retiring when he is eligible in January.
“I’m sick of politicians playing divisive politics and leaving local public servants to clean up the mess,” Kuhn wrote. “Public schools are apolitical entities with the job of teaching kids to think critically and become awesome humans. We aren’t perfect. We have missteps because we are human organizations. But don’t call my teachers DEMONS while you cuss in the comments.”
“There is a political movement to pull the teeth of local officials at schools and on city councils and county commissioners courts so that all we have is centralized state leadership. So local yokels like yours truly have to be continually demonized and legislated into submission.”
Academic Freedom
The controversy at A&M has prompted free speech advocates to question whether McCoul’s firing not only was unfounded but endangers academic freedom in Texas.
Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said public institutions can’t fire employees for exercising their First Amendment rights. Such occurrences are likely to prompt some educators to seek employment in other states, Rank said in a published report.
A recent survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors and the Texas Faculty Association found that 25 percent of Texas professors have applied for out-of-state jobs in the last two years. Over 60 percent said they would not recommend that colleagues or graduate students seek positions in the state. The chief complaint among those surveyed was the political climate.
Texas A&M’s College Station campus is home to more than 76,000 students. Credit: Screenshot
Caro Achar, engagement coordinator for free speech at the ACLU of Texas, said free speech is the “cornerstone of our — and any — democracy, and it must apply to all Texans regardless of the viewpoints they express.”
“All public colleges and universities have a constitutional obligation to protect academic freedom on their campuses,” she said. “For decades, the Supreme Court has emphasized the importance of public universities maintaining learning environments where students and faculty are free to learn and explore new ideas. The censorship of certain topics and viewpoints destroys these environments and threatens the very foundation of our democracy.”
Curtis, the A&M junior, said he didn’t think students are concerned about what they can talk about in class, but they are concerned about the political overreach that’s preventing universities from handling their business internally.
“I’ve been in classes where professors have had to say, ‘This is a class where we discuss current events.’ I think it’s a fear, maybe a nervousness or anxiety, that extends to the students sometimes, but a lot of us … we’ve still got to pass our exams. Maybe the severity of what’s going on hasn’t hit the student body yet,” he said.
“I think the resignation of Welsh really put that into perspective for a lot of people,” he added. “It was like, this political thing that I wasn’t paying attention to extended to someone I’ve met. I shook his hand and he came to my awards events. That really shocked a lot of people into caring and looking into the situation.”
Senate Bill 17, requiring state universities to dismantle DEI offices and cease various programs, activities, and trainings that were traditionally conducted by them, became effective in January 2024. That got students’ attention because it affected some of their clubs and extracurricular activities, Curtis said.
Texas A&M is a diverse institution with more than 70,000 people at the main campus, but the perception, based on the visual displayed on televised football games, is a majority-white, conservative campus with a military-style Corps of Cadets and male “yell leaders” instead of cheerleaders, said Curtis, who grew up in College Station.
Texas A&M University is known for its Corps of Cadets and military traditions. The institution began accepting women in 1963. Credit: Screenshot
“There’s a community for everyone; there are representative bodies for queer students, every ethnic group or international student,” he said. “The campus and the school itself is a community and there’s something for everyone here.”
Former A&M President Welsh at first said he wouldn’t fire McCoul but then reversed course and did so, saying at the time, “This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility.”
But some students believe that academic freedom is under attack, Curtis said, pointing to a reportThe Battalion did earlier this year on the conservative influence that far-right publication Texas Scorecard has on A&M’s policies and personnel discussions.
“Virtually every article they publish is not fully factual, sometimes not even close to factual,” Welsh is quoted saying in the article. “They have never printed a retraction when we provided them with the facts.”
And yet members of the A&M Board of Regents repeatedly pointed to published reports in the Scorecard to justify policy-making decisions, according to The Battalion.
Curtis said students are aware of the political pressure on university administrators but they typically don’t get involved until it affects their daily lives. He said he didn’t think anything would change among students other than reacting to changes at the institutional level.
“I think you’re going to see a shift in how other people conduct themselves more than how students conduct themselves,” he said. “I think there will be a domino effect from that. I think the issue is that you have people on social media seeing one moment out of context, and it being shared by a politician, and then you have people in Austin with their eyes on it. You have university systems that feel like they need to make changes based on that.”
“It’s reactionary. An uneducated opinion is being shared and it’s leading to all this change,” he added. “I think that frustrates a lot of students.”
The policy had been blocked by a nationwide injunction from a federal judge in Massachusetts, and an appeals court declined to lift the injunction.
In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed his staff to stop issuing passports with an X gender marker, which had been available since 2022, and said the State Department would no longer allow passport holders to change their gender marker. Existing passports would remain valid, but new or renewed passports would not reflect the holder’s gender identity. The policy was in keeping with Trump’s executive order saying the federal government would recognize only male and female sexes as assigned at birth.
Five trans people and two who are nonbinary filed suit against the policy in February in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. In the case, known as Orr v. Trump, they are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the law firm of Covington and Burling LLP.
U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick issued a preliminary injunction in April blocking the policy for six of the seven people who sued — those who doctors said would suffer irreparable harm under the policy. In June, she expanded the injunction to cover almost all trans and nonbinary applicants. The policy is motivated by prejudice and “likely violates the constitutional rights of thousands of Americans,” she wrote. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit refused to lift Kobick’s injunction.
In the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court, filed Friday, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer contended that the injunction “has no basis in law or logic. Private citizens cannot force the government to use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents that fail to reflect the person’s biological sex — especially not on identification documents that are government property and an exercise of the President’s constitutional and statutory power to communicate with foreign governments.”
Sauer called the passport policy “eminently lawful” and entirely rational, adding, “it is not discrimination based on sex to define a person’s sex as the person’s immutable biological classification rather than the sex with which the person self-identifies.”
Jon Davidson, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, released a statement saying, “As the lower courts have found, the State Department’s policy is an unjustifiable and discriminatory action that restricts the essential rights of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex citizens.
“This administration has taken escalating steps to limit transgender people’s health care, speech, and other rights under the Constitution, and we are committed to defending those rights including the freedom to travel safely and the freedom of everyone to be themselves without wrongful government discrimination.”
The justices have not said if they will hear the appeal.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and a group of LGBTQ+ and student rights organizations are suing to block a new state law that would ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in K-12 public schools.
In a lawsuit filed last month in federal court, attorneys from the ACLU of Texas and Transgender Law Center argued that Senate Bill 12 violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments as well as the Equal Access Act. Gov. Greg Abbott signed the legislation last June, and it will go into effect Sept. 1 alongside an array of other transformative laws for public education in Texas.
“Senate Bill 12 is a blatant attempt to erase students’ identities and silence the stories that make Texas strong,” said Brian Klosterboer, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas. “Every student — no matter their race, gender, or background — deserves to feel seen, safe, and supported in school.”
Supporters of SB 12 say DEI programs use class time and public funds to promote political agendas, while opponents believe banning those initiatives will disproportionately harm marginalized students by removing spaces where they can find support.
Here’s what you need to know about the effort to block the law.
What the ban would do: Authored by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, SB 12 prohibits public school districts from considering race, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation in hiring decisions. The ban also bars schools from offering DEI training and programs, such as policies designed to reduce discrimination based on race or gender identity, except for when required by federal law.
The law requires families to give written permission before their children can join any school club, and prohibits school groups created to support LGBTQIA+ students. Parents will be able to file complaints if they believe their schools are not complying with the DEI ban, and the law requires school districts to discipline employees who knowingly take part in DEI-related activities.
Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen, said SB 12 builds on a 2021 state law barring public schools from teaching critical race theory, an academic discipline that explores how race and racism have influenced the country’s legal and institutional systems. While critical race theory is not taught in Texas public schools, the term has become a shorthand used by conservatives who believe the way some schools teach children about race is politically biased.
DEI advocates say initiatives that promote diversity provide support for marginalized communities in workforce development and higher education, while critics say DEI practices give preference to people based on their race and ethnicity rather than on merit.
What the lawsuit says: Attorneys from the ACLU and the Transgender Law Center are suing Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath and three school districts on behalf of a teacher, a student and her parent. They’re also representing the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, two organizations that say they would be harmed by the ban. The ACLU amended the complaint in September, adding as plaintiffs the Texas American Federation of Teachers, another student and his parent.
The suit calls SB 12 an “overzealous” attempt to ban DEI in public schools and argues that it censors constitutionally protected speech and restricts students’ freedom of association. It’s also vague and overly broad, the suit says.
“S.B. 12 seeks to erase students’ identities and make it impossible for teachers, parents, and volunteers to tell the truth about the history and diversity of our state,” said Cameron Samuels, executive director at Students Engaged in Advancing Texas. “The law also guts vital support systems for Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and LGBTQIA+ students and educators.”
As part of the lawsuit, the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network claims SB 12 singles out the organization by explicitly restricting student clubs based on “sexual orientation or gender identity,” language the group uses to describe the student organizations it sponsors at schools. That restriction harms the freedom of speech of the group and its members, the suit says. The Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network has chapters in Texas at more than a dozen school districts, according to the filing.
Lawsuits against similar laws have had mixed results in the past.
Because of SB 12’s ban on discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms, opponents have compared it to Florida’s “don’t say gay” law, which attracted widespread media attention in 2022 due to its far-reaching impacts in public schools. Civil rights lawyers sued to block it, saying the law violated free speech and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. But a federal judge dismissed the case and said the plaintiffs had no legal standing and had failed to prove harm from the law. The attorneys ultimately agreed to a settlement with Florida education officials that clarified the law to allow discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms only if it’s not part of instruction.
The Texas Education Agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The broader push against DEI: The DEI ban on K-12 schools comes two years after the Texas Legislature passed a similar ban for the state’s higher education institutions. Senate Bill 17 requires public universities to close their diversity offices, ban DEI training and restrict hiring departments from asking for diversity statements, or essays in which a job candidate expresses their commitment to promoting diversity in the workplace.
Creighton, who also authored that bill, has warned higher education leaders that they could lose millions of dollars in state funding if they fail to comply with the law. Earlier this year, Abbott threatened Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh III’s job after claims spread online that Texas A&M was sending students and staffers to a conference that limited participation to people who are Black, Hispanic or Native American.
At the national level, President Donald Trump has ordered all federal agencies to end “equity-related” practices and asked contractors to certify they do not promote DEI efforts. Trump also told schools and universities they would lose federal money if they do not eliminate diversity practices.
Over the last five years, Texas and other Republican-led states have also taken other steps to abolish and ban DEI efforts in public education and the workforce. Similar to Trump, Abbott issued an executive order in January mandating that Texas agencies end all forms of DEI practices.
“We must always reject race-based favoritism or discrimination and allow people to advance based on talent and merit,” Abbott said.
Disclosure: ACLU Texas and Texas A&M University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Melissa McCoul, the Texas A&M University professor who was criticized by a student for discussing gender identity, has been fired.
Her firing follows the removal of the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Mark Zoran, and the head of the English department, Emily Johansen, from their administrative positions. McCoul is appealing and considering her legal options.
During the summer, a student in McCoul’s children’s literature class objected to the professor’s assertion that there are more than two genders. The student said this is illegal because of Donald Trump’s executive order saying the federal government recognizes only male and female genders, as assigned at birth, therefore denying the existence of transgender, nonbinary, or intersex people. The student also said her religious sensibilities were offended by McCoul’s comments. The exchange was recorded on cell phone video.
Texas A&M President Mark Welsh announced Monday that the dean and department head would be removed from those positions, while it’s unclear if they’ll continue as faculty, but a recording reported to be between him and the student had him saying McCoul would not be fired. However, he released a statement Tuesday saying she had been terminated, effective immediately. He did not name McCoul, but other sources have identified her as the professor in question.
The reason he gave was not specifically about gender issues but that the course material differed from the description in the catalog. After finding out that the class “contained content that did not align with any reasonable expectation of standard curriculum for the course,” he “made it clear to our academic leadership that course content must match catalog descriptions for each and every one of our course sections,” he said in the statement.
“However, I learned late yesterday that despite that directive, the college continued to teach content that was inconsistent with the published course description for another course this fall,” he continued. Because of that, he told the university provost to terminate McCoul and ordered deans and department heads to make sure course material aligns with published descriptions, he wrote.
Republican politicians in Texas, including state Rep. Brian Harrison and Gov. Greg Abbott, had called for McCoul to be fired. Harrison termed McCoul’s discussion “transgender indoctrination” and urged the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the matter, which the DOJ says it’s doing. Glenn Hegar, chancellor of the Texas A&M System, which oversees Texas A&M’s main campus and 11 other universities, said he “will work with the Board of Regents to make certain that the A&M System takes the disciplinary action to ensure this does not happen again at one of our campuses.”
McCoul is fighting back. Amanda Reichek, her attorney, told The Texas Tribune that the professor’s course content aligned with the descriptions, and she had never been directed to alter anything. She had taught the children’s literature course for several years, and there had been no problems, Reichek said. So McCoul is appealing her termination and may take legal action.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates for free speech across the political spectrum, issued a statement denouncing McCoul’s firing. “After a video of a student complaining about discussions of gender identity in a Texas A&M ‘Literature for Children’ class went viral, Governor Greg Abbott demanded on X that Texas A&M President Mark Welsh fire Professor Melissa McCoul for the content of her course. Welsh promptly announced that McCoul had been terminated,” said FIRE Director of Campus Rights Advocacy Lindsie Rank.
“The message from Texas is alarming: Professors teach at the mercy of those in power, not under the protection of academic freedom or the First Amendment. In his statement, Welsh attempted to justify the firing by alleging McCoul taught ‘content that was inconsistent with the published course description.’ However, the current publicly available description of the course in Texas A&M’s Undergraduate Catalog is ‘Representative writers, genres, texts and movements.’ This is hardly inconsistent with a faculty member conducting a classroom discussion of gender identity in children’s literature.
“Further justifying his decision, Welsh wrote: ‘This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility.’ Welsh’s attempt to wave aside Texas A&M’s binding legal obligation to uphold academic freedom does not excuse McCoul’s termination.
“This is not the first time Texas A&M leadership has ignored the law of the land in favor of viewpoint-based censorship. FIRE will continue to fight for the First Amendment rights of all Americans — regardless of political views — in Texas and across our nation.”
Has your partner come out as trans or are they in the midst of transitioning? This blog is for you.
Coming out as trans can be painful, exciting, and quite a courageous process, rooted in deep self-discovery. Remember that they have not changed who they are, they are revealing themselves more fully to you and the world. They are also experiencing a world of emotions, possibly fear of rejection, loss of love, or misunderstanding.
What does it mean for you?
For you it may bring up a variety of different, complex and opposing emotions. You may experience surprise, grief, a deeper understanding, clarity, relief, fear, heartbreak, uncertainty for what the future holds. All of these emotions are completely valid. It is important to be able to grieve the changes even in the midst of supporting your partner. Both truths exist together. This is a space for both/and. You may experience deep sadness around the changes happening AND happiness to see your partner step into being more fully present. You may feel overwhelmed around the uncertainty for what the future holds AND excitement for a different kind of relationship. It may feel hard and complex and these emotions can exist side by side at the same time.
So Many Questions
This can be a time of questioning for you since it also reflects on your identity, assumptions and desires. The external appearance of the relationship changes. A seemingly heterosexual couple may now look like a same-gendered relationship and vice versa. This can raise both internal and external questions.
Some questions you may ask yourself are:
“What does this mean about my sexuality?”
“What if I am not attracted to my partner anymore after their gender presentation changes?”
These are all valid questions to explore in a safe place. It is a time to explore your own sexual identity as it may evolve and possibly become more fluid. Labels may continue to hold significance and on the other hand may expand and not be as important. You can choose to change your label or not. With this exploration it is important to remember that it doesn’t invalidate past or present experiences, it may just expand its context. It is important to continue conversations about these topics as both partners navigate to clarify any unspoken assumptions.
How do you talk about it?
One amazing tool during this transition is the Gottman- Rappaport Intervention where you are both able to slow the conversation down and both feel heard and validated in your own experience. One person shares without judgement or blame and the other listens for content and the underlying emotion. This creates a deep level of emotional connection. It can be quite healing if you can both respond with care, love and curiosity. This is not a time to problem solve, debate, convince or argue, instead it is to deeply understand each other creating a safe, affirming place for both partners.
Relearning Intimacy and Sexual Connection
Sexual orientation labels may shift, intimacy patterns may evolve. Sex may feel unfamiliar even in long term loving relationships. You may question what always seemed to be fact in terms of desire. Both may now be asking, “What turns me on now?” “What does my partner need or want?” “Can we have a fulfilling sex life?” “What does sex even look like anymore with this person?” Your partner’s body may change, and sensations, preferences and dynamics may change alongside. This is also a time to continue to be with all the feelings that arise, and in particular grief. Grief around what was and what may be lost or different. It is also a time to co-create something new. When you first got together it was hopefully a time of newness, firsts, and exploration.
Consider this a time of rediscovery. You might ask:
What feels good to me/you now?
How do I want to be touched by you?
How do you want to be touched?
How do I want to touch you?
What turns me/you on?
What desires do I/you have?
What hopes and fears and concerns do I/you have?
What does sex mean now to me/ to you?
If one or both of you feel uncomfortable talking about sex, go to your app store and download the Gottman Card Decks App (free). Open the deck called sex questions, these give structure and set questions that can open the conversation or give guidance.
Love Maps and Shared Dreams
This can be an amazing time to connect in a different and/or deeper way. Love Maps are how well you know and feel known by your partner, sharing your internal world with each other. Share with each other what is going on and how you are feeling, what you are wanting, even the day to day of work/school/kids/ life. Take time to revisit your dreams together. Share with each other what you still hope for the future as well as what may have changed individually or as a couple. Love Maps are not a “set and forget” conversation. Ask open ended questions as you walk on this path with each other.
Expect moments of miscommunication and pain. This is bound to happen. Take time to repair with each other. Do not hold onto unspoken wants and needs, voice them in the positive. When you do not get the response you had wanted, let them know and try again, this time saying it differently. Reach out to have a physical connection, holding hands or a hug. Make a joke (sometimes it doesn’t land well or is too soon to be funny, if that happens apologize and let them know you care).
What’s next for us?
This takes many conversations. Feelings change. Hopes and fears and concerns change with time. At times the topic may feel too vulnerable or raw to share with your partner. Please get support outside of the relationship from someone who is experienced and trained in gender-affirming care and relationships. Your partner is not something to fix or pathologize. Getting support allows for space to share and hear other perspectives from those who have navigated those waters before. The Gottman approach reminds us: trust is built in small moments.
Stay or Go?
Some people choose to stay and work on it and some decide for a variety of reasons that they are not able to continue in the relationship with the changes. This isn’t a failure, it shows that you are evolving onto a different path that doesn’t include this person as a romantic partner anymore.
Grief is something that arises in this place. There is the loss of future dreams together. Your future may look different now. It is okay to grieve what your relationship was and what it can not be any longer. You had thought your life would look one way and it can feel like it has been completely turned upside down.
Impact on Your Identity
You may have concerns and sadness about what it means for your own sexual identity. You may view yourself one way and now, the world may view you and possibly treat you in a whole different light. Instead of being viewed as straight or LBTQIA, you are viewed differently. And the community in which you found solace, may question your membership. This ties into how you present to the world, what labels they may place on you just from your appearance.
If you want guidance and notice needing more tools then you currently have, reach out to a therapist. Check out the Gottman Referral Network where you can find a therapist who is well versed in this research backed method.
Intimacy During and After the Process
Another aspect that can feel quite raw and challenging is the sexual connection and how that shifts. Gender identity and sexual expression are intertwined and as one person transitions and expresses their gender identity differently, you both may experience changes in desires, comfort levels, and they may have different boundaries around their body and how this now affects how you both show up sexually. This can be a place of excitement as you explore new territory together, on the other hand grief may arise. It can be quite painful emotionally as there are changes with arousal patterns and the alignment of sexual orientation. Questions may arise like:
Am I still attracted to my partner?
Will I like who my partner is once they start hormones?
Will I continue to be attracted to my partner once they have surgery?
Can we be physically intimate and both enjoy it?
This is where being able to have open conversations with a therapist or your partner are important, to be able to talk without blame and judgement and defensiveness as you explore this is vital. Even with the support of a therapist or open conversations, the sexual incompatibility may be a breaking point. When you realize that separating is the healthiest path forward it may be absolutely heartbreaking.
If the Relationship Ends
For some couples deciding to end the romantic relationship does not necessarily mean the end of the connection. Some people are able to work through the complexity of the changes and be able to co-parent or have a friendship. Not everyone is able to do this. I do encourage you to get support from someone who deeply understands and gets the dynamics around someone who is transitioning as you work through your own process.
Take time to reflect on what you want as well as what may not feel right anymore. This is a time to explore your own boundaries and values without any judgement or blame. You also have needs during this time and it is okay to be able to notice and express those needs.
Remember that ending a relationship does not equal failure. This path does not negate the love and connection that you shared together. With any change, there are often both gains and losses. This is the time to acknowledge the both/and, feeling both that you need to leave and also the grief and heartache. Know that it is not an easy road and please get help and support from others who have traveled this road before. This is a different experience than separating for other reasons and finding someone who really understands can make a world of difference.
Keep choosing connection and appreciation, one step at a time in the mess and joy of life.
This only touches on a few aspects and is a complex time for each partner.
For more great content, please check out the Gottman Blog. There are also online resources available, memoirs and narratives, workbooks, education resources, and forums. You are not alone in this and can find support.
The fight over gender and bathrooms at Fairfax County Public Schools is continuing, as the school system appealed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the Department of Education.
The fight over gender and bathrooms at Fairfax County Public Schools is continuing, as the school system appealed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the Department of Education to regain federal funding.
The Fairfax County School Board on Tuesday filed the appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for Virginia’s Fourth Circuit after a judge denied the school district’s request to obtain a preliminary injunction on Friday that would prevent the Department of Education from freezing its federal funding.
The Education Department placed Fairfax County Public Schools and four other Northern Virginian districts on “high risk” status, meaning the Education Department would scrutinize their federal reimbursement requests.
This all comes after the Department of Education claimed Fairfax, along with Loudoun, Prince William, Arlington and Alexandria City public schools are violating Title IX with their policies that let students use bathrooms based on their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
Judge Rossie Alston Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled Friday that the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction.
Fairfax and Arlington counties filed the initial lawsuit last month.
In a statement, FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid said they believe their current policies on Title IX regarding bathroom and locker room usage comply with state and federal law. They are continuing to reach out to the DOE about the “high risk” status designation.
“These vital federal funds that remain at risk support food and nutrition services, as well as staffing cafeterias. Other funding supports services and instruction for students with disabilities, aims to improve student achievement, enhances technical education, promotes teacher development, and funds community education programs,” Reid wrote.
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At Tuesday’s board meeting, Conroe ISD trustees declined to consider drafting a policy that would resemble a controversial gender identity measure in Katy ISD that is undergoing federal investigation.
Trustee Misty Odenweller proposed that the board write its version of this policy to dictate what bathroom facilities students could use. Notably, not allowing LGBTQ+ students to use restrooms that align with their gender identity.
Taking a page out of Katy ISD’s playbook, Odenweller added that she wanted the measure to implement the requirement that parents be notified if their children ask to go by new or different pronouns and determine whether teachers could opt not to use a student’s requested pronouns.
After several minutes of discussion, board president Skeeter Hubert questioned why the board could not hold off on the matter until the pending federal investigation into Katy ISD’s policy reached a resolution.
“This particular item is under investigation. I think that our district does a fantastic job with addressing this on a case-by-case scenario,” Hubert said. “I don’t know that we need to entertain a policy or procedure that’s going to, as [Trustee] Datren Williams was saying, alienate a group of people.”
Sumya Paruchuri, a junior at The Woodlands High School who identifies as gender-nonconforming, joined the roughly dozen public speakers voicing their opposition to the policy on Tuesday evening.
“The policy that the board would like to pass under the guise of student welfare puts an end to any sense of a safe environment for many students like myself,” Paruchuri said. “[It] would be subjecting an already at-risk population to potential abuse, abandonment and detrimental mental health effects.”
“You can – don’t – care about a word that I said, but you should care about what the government has to say,” Paruchuri added. “This policy violates multiple federal laws under several branches of the government. Students’ lives, our lives — my life — are not policies played in a political chess game.”
Sumya Paruchuri said they couldn’t imagine how students who’d be outed against their will would feel.
Photo by Faith Bugenhagen
Paruchuri noted that within the past year, 46 percent of trans and nonbinary youth reported seriously considering or attempting suicide — more than double the 22 percent reported by all youth.
Ben Miftode, a fellow CISD student, broke down in tears before the board when reflecting on their coming out experience, “I’m not standing here, asking you to move mountains or stand up and fight for something you may not understand.”
“I’m simply asking, are you an adult I can trust?” Miftode said.
In a separate conversation with the Houston Press, Paruchuri said several of their friends wanted to speak on the possible policy. When they learned the meeting would be livestreamed online, they chose not to because they feared their parents would view their public comments.
“I don’t think people who are advocating for the policy really understand its effects,” Paruchuri added. “Passing policies like this sets a standard of what’s okay and what’s not okay.”
A handful of attendees — mostly wearing red — were in favor of the board drafting a policy saying it would prevent children from using different pronouns secretly and protect them from what they referred to as the indoctrination of transgender ideology.
“Y’all are at a junction, a Pandora’s Box, okay? This doesn’t stop with a few kids deciding to be transgender. It will go into sports,” Kendrick said. “My niece had a girl in her high school who wanted to be a cat. Well, they had to put a litter box in the female bathroom. This is at the door. Remain strong CISD board.”
The crowd of those against the policy erupted after Kendrick’s comments. Several muttered, “That did not happen,” and shook their heads or rolled their eyes in response to Kendrick’s claim.
Alex Harris, one of the registered public speakers, carried a sign in support of such a policy.
Photo by Faith Bugenhagen
While discussing what prompted Odenweller to request that a policy be drafted, Trustee Stacey Chase requested specific examples of issues or incidents the district faced that such a measure would manage.
Trustee Melissa Dungan said an instructor at one elementary school handed out a third type of bathroom pass labeled “other,” and one teacher had high school students fill out a questionnaire that allowed them to select which pronouns they identified with.
Dungan also pointed out that a handful of instructors had signature blocks with pronouns other than he or she listed. Chase said that if an administrator handled the situation in every instance and it was resolved — as Dungan indicated — she didn’t see the problem.
“We don’t just make a point to make a point. It’s not worth anyone’s time to create things just to create things,” Chase said. “We don’t have to have a crystal ball to see where this leads. We can look right across the street to Katy ISD and see where it led them.”
Williams echoed Chase’s sentiment, describing the type of policy Odenweller wanted drafted as taking a “bully-like approach.”
“First of all, we need to stop beating around the bush. We keep picking on the same group of folks, right?” Williams said. “Our expectation here is not to help students. It’s to hurt them. That’s not — I’m actually flabbergasted we’re having this discussion right now.”
Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a student advocacy group, filed the initial complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against Katy ISD’s policy, stating that implementing the measure discriminates against students and goes against Title IX protections.
According to reports, staff have outed over 19 Katy ISD students since the district enacted the policy. The office opened an investigation into the matter last week.
Before Tuesday’s meeting, the student advocacy organization and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas sent a letter to Conroe ISD’s board and superintendent, Dr. Curtis Null.
The letter warned the district that passing the copycat policy would violate federal law and open the district up to face legal complaints or federal investigation. It urged trustees to reject the measure and indicated that a school board’s policies cannot reject or supersede federal law.
The organizations pointed out that Title IX’s nondiscrimination mandate protects LGBTQ+ students and called the district out for the harm that restricting bathroom usage that corresponds with a student’s gender identity, rejecting the usage of a student’s requested pronouns and cutting out LGBTQ+ content from books and instruction would cause.
In a conversation with the Houston Press, Chloe Kempf, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, said the organization was heartened by the board’s tabling of discussion about a potential policy.
“The policy itself would’ve been really disastrous for LGBTQ+ students in the district,” Kempf said. “Not only would a policy like that be unlawful, but it would cause a lot of harm and open up the doors to a lot of bullying and harassment against Conroe ISD students.”
“Even discussing having that policy on the table can be harmful,” she added. “It sends a message to students that the most powerful people in their school district — or at least some of them — believe that they should not be welcomed in the district or that there’s something shameful about their identity.”
According to Kempf, similar policies popping up in other districts are part of a broader campaign by Texas politicians at every level, from school boards up to the statehouse, to try to exclude transgender and nonbinary people from public life.
Taking crazy pills: Former President Donald Trump said last evening that the civil fraud verdict that will force him to pony up $355 million for inflating his net worth to banks is actually “a form of Navalny” and “a form of communism or fascism.”
When asked about the Russian state’s imprisonment and killing of dissident Alexei Navalny, Trump responded: “It’s happening here.” The indictments are “all because of the fact that I’m in politics,” in his telling.
He made these comments last night during a Fox News town hall. On Truth Social, his own alternative social media platform, Trump said, “the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country.”
Alexei Navalny, who was reported dead on Friday, served as an opposition leader in a state that disallows opposition and legitimate voting. Navalny garnered a massive following—more than 6 million YouTube followers, for starters, with at least one video viewed 130 million times—by doing legitimately good journalism digging into the kleptocratic, repressive Putin regime. Navalny offered normal Russians legitimate, well-sourced explanations for why they are so poor: their leaders consistently abdicate responsibility, choosing to enrich themselves. Their leaders are content with everyday people living in squalor and dysfunction, as long as they stay comfortable.
Running for office, and cutting through the state’s propaganda, made him so disfavored by the regime that he went into exile. Navalny returned to Russia in 2021 with full awareness that he would be locked up but a devout belief that he ought to continue his work domestically, displaying courage in the face of certain persecution. And sure enough, he was locked up, then sent to an even more remote prison camp called IK-3, in Kharp, which is in the Arctic Circle. His death there was reported last week, but the opposition movement will not die with him. “In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul,” said his widow, Yulia, “but I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”
Trump, on the other hand, misrepresented his net worth to banks, defrauding lenders (who…still had a responsibility to do due diligence, a fact ignored in much mainstream media reporting of the case). “Trump claimed his apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet, nearly three times its actual size,” writesReason‘s Jacob Sullum. “He valued Mar-a-Lago, his golf resort in Palm Beach, based on the assumption that it could be sold for residential purposes, which the deed precluded.” But “[New York Attorney General Letitia] James was not able to identify any damages to lenders or insurers,” writes Sullum, and “the striking absence of any injury commensurate with the punishment lends credibility to Trump’s reflexive complaint that he is the victim of a partisan vendetta.”
Both things can be true, that Trump attracts politically motivated ire—which attorneys general and judges are wrong to indulge—and that he also did something wrong by inflating his net worth. But he’s a far cry from Navalny—Trump enjoys self-dealing more than fact-finding and truth-telling—and the way this went down, via the court system, where Trump had the right to defend himself, is a far cry from how “justice” gets dispensed in Russia—by Putin, in penal colonies, via murders of anyone whose beliefs threaten the man in charge.
“Clinical psychologists with the Department of Veterans Affairs faced retaliation and ostracization at work after they publicly opposed a gender-inclusion policy that allows men to access women’s medical spaces within the VA,” reportsNational Review.
RFK Jr.’s “origin story makes this like Odysseus returning to the manor, stringing the bow, this is that iconic moment,” said Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan’s podcast. If you say so, Bret.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just announced a lawsuit against El Paso’s Annunciation House, an NGO in charge of a shelter network for migrants, for “facilitating illegal entry to the United States, alien harboring, human smuggling, and operating a stash house.” But going after charities that help migrants—whatever you think of the behavior they engaged in to get here—seems like a wrongheaded stunt.
I do not think this is true or that there’s much evidence for it:
do you want a black pill?
like… a really really black pill?
George Carlin would be pro-censorship if he were alive today b/c he didn’t actually love free speech, he just fucking hated Christians
“The enormous contrast between [Alexei] Navalny’s civic courage and the corruption of [Vladimir] Putin’s regime will remain,” writesThe Atlantic‘s Anne Applebaum. “Putin is fighting a bloody, lawless, unnecessary war, in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians have been killed or wounded, for no reason other than to serve his own egotistical vision. He is running a cowardly, micromanaged reelection campaign, one in which all real opponents are eliminated and the only candidate who gets airtime is himself. Instead of facing real questions or challenges, he meets tame propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, to whom he offers nothing more than lengthy, circular, and completely false versions of history.”
Related: People were arrested for laying flowers in memory of Navalny.
After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect.
Explore the January/February 2024 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to think that feigning sympathy for queer people was good PR. “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” he promised. Then, while in office, he oversaw a broad rollback of LGBTQ protections, removing gender identity and sexuality from federal nondiscrimination provisions regarding health care, employment, and housing. His Defense Department restricted soldiers’ right to transition and banned trans people from enlisting; his State Department refused to issue visas to the same-sex domestic partners of diplomats. Yet when seeking reelection in 2020, Trump still made a show of throwing a Pride-themed rally.
Now, recognizing that red-state voters have been energized by anti-queer demagoguery, he’s not even pretending to be tolerant. “These people are sick; they are deranged,” Trump said during a speech, amid a rant about transgender athletes in June. When the audience cheered at his mention of “transgender insanity,” he marveled, “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that.” He pantomimed weak applause. “But you mention transgender, everyone goes crazy.” The rhetoric has become a fixture of his rallies.
Trump is now running on a 10-point “Plan to Protect Children From Left-Wing Gender Insanity.” Its aim is not simply to interfere with parents’ rights to shape their kids’ health and education in consultation with doctors and teachers; it’s to effectively end trans people’s existence in the eyes of the government. Trump will call on Congress to establish a national definition of gender as being strictly binary and immutable from birth. He also wants to use executive action to cease all federal “programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” If enacted, those measures could open the door to all sorts of administrative cruelties—making it impossible, for example, for someone to change their gender on their passport. Low-income trans adults could be blocked from using Medicaid to pay for treatment that doctors have deemed vital to their well-being.
The Biden administration reinstated many of the protections Trump had eliminated, and the judiciary has thus far curbed the most extreme aspects of the conservative anti-trans agenda. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to the assertions of Trump’s Justice Department, the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ people from employment discrimination. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the investigations that Governor Abbott had ordered in Texas. But in a second term, Trump would surely seek to appoint more judges opposed to queer causes. He would also resume his first-term efforts to promote an interpretation of religious freedom that allows for unequal treatment of minorities. In May 2019, his Housing and Urban Development Department proposed a measure that would have permitted federally funded homeless shelters to turn away transgender individuals on the basis of religious freedom. A 2023 Supreme Court decision affirming a Christian graphic designer’s refusal to work with gay couples will invite more attempts to narrow the spaces and services to which queer people are guaranteed access.
The social impact of Trump’s reelection would only further encourage such discrimination. He has long espoused old-fashioned ideas about what it means to look and act male and female. Now the leader of the Republican Party is using his platform to push the notion that people who depart from those ideas deserve punishment. As some Republicans have engaged in queer-bashing rhetoric in recent years—including the libel that queerness is pedophilia by another name—hate crimes motivated by gender identity and sexuality have risen, terrifying a population that was never able to take its safety for granted. Victims of violence have included people who were merely suspected of nonconformity, such as the 59-year-old woman in Indiana who was killed in 2023 by a neighbor who believed her to be “a man acting like a woman.”
If Trump’s stoking of gender panic proves to be a winning national strategy, everyday deviation from outmoded and rigid norms could invite scorn or worse. And children will grow up in a more repressive and dangerous America than has existed in a long time.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Stoke a Gender Panic.”
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Nov 03 (IPS) – For many of Argentina’s voters the choice in the 19 November presidential runoff is between the lesser of two evils: Sergio Massa, economy minister of a government that’s presiding over a once-in-a-generation economic meltdown with a whopping 140-per cent inflation rate, or Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian who admires Donald Trump, wants to shut down the Central Bank and wields a chainsaw in public as a symbol of his willingness to slash the state. Many will rue that it ever came to this.
A peculiar outsider
A post-modern media celebrity, Milei’s performance style is a perfect fit for social media. He’s easily angered, reacts violently and insults copiously. He’s unapologetically sexist and mocks identity politics.
Milei bangs the drum for ‘anarcho-capitalism’, an ultra-individualistic ideology in which the market has absolute pre-eminence: earlier this year, he described the sale of human organs as ‘just another market’.
To expand his appeal beyond this extreme economic niche he forged an alliance with the culturally conservative right. His running mate, Victoria Villarruel, represents the backlash against abortion – legalised after decades of civil society campaigning in 2020 – and sexual diversity and gender equality policies, along with reappraisal of the murderous military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.
In the run-up to primary elections in August, the two mainstream coalitions – the centre-left incumbent Union for the Homeland (UP) and the centre-right opposition Together for Change (JxC) – displayed a notable lack of leadership and indulged in internal squabbles that showed very little empathy for people’s daily struggles. All they had to offer in the face of widespread concerns about inflation and insecurity were the candidacies of the current minister of the economy and a former minister of security. They made it easy for Milei to hold them responsible for decades of corruption, ineffectiveness and failure.
In Milei’s discourse, the hardworking, productive majority is being bled dry by taxation to maintain the privileges of a parasitic and corrupt political ‘caste’. His proposal is deceptively simple: shrink the state to a minimum to destroy the caste that lives off it, clearing their way for individual progress.
Milei gained traction among young voters, particularly young men, via TikTok. He found fertile ground among a generation that no longer expect to be better off than their parents. While many of his followers concede that his ideas may be a little crazy, they appear to be willing to take the risk of embracing the unknown on the basis that the really crazy plan would be to allow those long in control to retain their power and expect things to turn out differently. Milei has capitalised on the despair, hopelessness and accumulated anger so many rightfully feel.
Surprise after surprise
The first surprise came on 13 August, when Milei won the most votes of any candidate in the primaries.
Milei only entered politics in 2021, when the 17 per cent vote he amassed in the capital, Buenos Aires, sent him and two other libertarians to the National Congress. In the 2023 primaries he went much further, winning 30 per cent of the vote. He placed ahead of JxC, whose two candidates received a joint 28 per cent, and UP, the current incarnation of the Peronist Party, which took 27 per cent. The bulk of the UP vote, 21 per cent, went to Massa. That Peronism, once the dominant force, came third was a historic first.
The second surprise came on 22 October. Following the primaries, all talk was of Milei winning the presidency. He trumpeted his intent to win the first round outright. Measured against these expectations, his second place looks like an underperformance. But the fact that a candidate who wasn’t on the radar before the primaries has made the runoff shows how quickly the political landscape can shift.
In the October vote Milei took almost the exact share he’d received in the primaries. Massa finished above him with almost 37 per cent, displacing JxC, which lost four points on its second-place performance in the primaries.
The fact that the economy minister was able to distance himself from the government he’s part of – one often described as the worst in 40 years – to come first was viewed as a notable victory, even though his share was just about the lowest Peronism has ever received.
One explanation for Massa’s improved performance was turnout, which increased by eight points to almost 78 per cent – still low for a country with compulsory voting, but enough to make a difference. Much of the increase could be credited to the political machinery that mobilised voters on election day, aided by the minister-candidate pulling as many levers as he could to improve his chances. This included putting lots of instant cash into voters’ pockets, including through tax breaks benefiting targeted groups of workers and consumers.
An unpalatable decision
There’s still much uncertainty ahead. Economic failure is Milei’s best propaganda, so much will depend on how the economy behaves over the next couple of weeks. Milei and the destruction he represents can’t be written off.
Neither those currently in power nor those in the mainstream opposition recognise the obvious: Milei is their fault. They’ve held power for the best part of the past 40 years without effectively tackling any of the issues that concern people the most.
Many voters now feel they face an unpalatable choice between a corrupt and failing government and a dangerous disruptor. They fear that if they choose to keep Milei out, their votes may be misinterpreted as a show of active support for a continuity they also reject. What’s at stake here is more than one election. If Milei is kept at bay, the political dynamics leading to the current economic dysfunction will still need to be addressed – or the far-right threat to democracy won’t end with Milei.
Bukes Saliu, a forklift driver, is a Nigerian woman who challenging stereotypes. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS
by Promise Eze (lagos)
Inter Press Service
LAGOS, Sep 28 (IPS) – Bukes Saliu wakes up very early every workday to beat the gruesome Lagos traffic to head to a job quite unusual for a woman to engage in Nigeria. She is a forklift operator in one of the busy depots in the coastal city, a task traditionally meant for men in the West African country.
In a country where women are seen as second-class citizens and whose roles are expected to be confined to the kitchen, Saliu is not letting patriarchal norms put her in a box.
“People are always thrilled when I tell them what I do. Sometimes I get snide remarks from some men I work with, but I don’t allow that to get to me,” Saliu says.
In August 2022, her curiosity was piqued when she came across a post on WhatsApp from her friend featuring a woman confidently posed beside a forklift machine. That ignited her interest in the job. Soon after, she enrolled in training to become a skilled forklift operator.
“It was a change of career path for me. I used to be a project manager with a non-profit, but I left the job to be a forklift operator. The first day I started work, I was a bit afraid, but now I operate the machine like any other man would do. I believe that women should be allowed at the table because it brings different perspectives, ideas, and experiences,” she adds.
Patriarchy Lives in Nigeria
Discrimination against women has been a serious problem in Nigeria. Women still grapple with an array of challenges and are marginalized despite the Nigerian constitution providing for gender equality and nondiscrimination
Although the government has attempted to tackle these deep-rooted issues, the pace of progress remains sluggish. Women’s representation within politics and decision-making spheres remains poor. For example, out of a total of 15,307 candidates in the 2023 general elections, only 1,550 were women. Only three women were elected as senators as against nine in the last election, and only one woman emerged as a presidential candidate.
Women are often excluded from economic prospects. Within Nigeria’s populace exceeding 200 million, a mere 60.5 million people contribute to its labor force. Among this workforce, around 27.1 million women participate, a significant portion of whom find themselves involved in low-skilled employment. Nigeria’s position on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index is a lowly 123rd out of 156 nations.
Swimming Against the Tide
A limited number of women are challenging conventional gender norms for the purpose of livelihood, stepping into roles that are male dominated in Nigeria. However, this transition is often met with resistance and negative reactions.
In 2021, Iyeyemi Adediran gained widespread attention for her exceptional mastery of driving long-haul trucks for oil companies. However, despite her remarkable skill, the then 26-year-old shared that she faced derogatory remarks for daring to break gender norms associated with truck driving—an occupation traditionally considered male-dominated.
In 2015, Sandra Aguebor, Nigeria’s first female mechanic, gained widespread attention for her all-female garages across the country. However, she revealed that her mother initially did not support her ambitions, believing that fixing cars should only be done by men.
Faith Oyita, a shoemaker in Benue State, Nigeria, is not letting patriarchal norms stop her. Despite Aba, a growing men-led market in southeast Nigeria, dominating the shoemaking industry, Oyita has been determined to make a name for herself since 2015, even though she resides kilometers away. She says she has trained over 300 other people on how to make shoes.
“When I first started, I didn’t care about the challenges that came with shoemaking. I had a deep passion for it, and I wanted to beautify people’s legs. Even though it was a skill dominated by men, I was determined to do things differently. I knew that greatness doesn’t come from convenience. In the beginning, many people questioned why I chose shoemaking. Even the man who taught me was hesitant and doubted my potential. I was the only female among all his apprentices, and many assumed that I came because I wanted to date him. Despite all the negative remarks, I never gave up,” she tells IPS.
Patriarchy Came Through Colonialism
“A lot of what is happening today is not how we originally lived our lives as Nigerian women. Patriarchy actually entered our society during the colonial era. Before colonization, both men and women were able to do things without being restricted by gender. Historically, women were involved in trading goods and services, and they could even marry multiple wives for themselves.
“However, when the colonialists arrived, they distorted our culture and, using religion, promoted the idea that men held more power. We should strive to correct this narrative. It’s unfortunate that we have been socialized to believe that men should always be in leadership positions and that women should only be in a man’s home,” says Añuli Aniebo Ola-Olaniyi, Executive Director, HEIR Women Hub.
Speaking further, Ola-Olaniyi argues that women who want to break gender norms must have a change of mindset and be ready to face challenges.
“The country that colonized us has their women driving buses and flying planes. They have progressed from where they colonized us. But Nigeria has failed to empower its women. When a Nigerian woman does something that is traditionally seen as only for men, it is seen as a big accomplishment. However, she has always been capable of doing those things. It’s just that the opportunities were not available. I don’t even think it’s a switch in gender roles. I believe that women are simply starting to realize their potential,” she tells IPS.
Back-to-school season feels slightly different this year in Iowa: Some parents are reporting being asked to formally approve their children’s nicknames for use in class as part of Republican lawmakers’ ongoing war against LGBTQ+ topics in education.
The bizarre requests have come out of a cautious interpretation of a new, vaguely worded state law that purports to advance parental rights, which Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed in May.
The law, known as Senate File 496, includes a section barring teachers from using “a name or pronoun that is different than the name or pronoun assigned to the student in the school district’s registration forms or records” unless a parent has been notified and has approved the change.
Some schools have determined that this includes nicknames — at least for now, to be safe. Penalties for violating the law include disciplinary action against teachers and superintendents.
“Yes, hello, are these the parents of Kimberly Reynolds? We are required to tell you that your child has requested to use the gender neutral nickname of ‘Kim.’” pic.twitter.com/7hoFskjZi7
Local news outlets are documenting baffled reactions from parents.
“My kid started school yesterday, and she came home and she was like, ‘Oh, this weird thing happened,’” West Des Moines parent Bethany Snyder told Iowa News Now last week. According to Snyder, a teacher kept calling one student “Gabriel,” even though he told her that his name was “Gabe.” The teacher told Gabe he needed to have his parents fill out a form, citing the law.
An Iowa blogger, Nick Covington, shared an image of the form he received from his kids’ school district on social media, refuting an Iowa lawmaker’s attempt to minimize the scope of the legislation. The form Covington shared included space to write alternate names the student may go by.
Not true. I had to fill this out for my kids here in their rural Story County district. It’s happening all over the state because of a dumb, vague law you wrote that school districts are scrambling to comply with: pic.twitter.com/L4YzNuh3IE
Covington and Iowa state Sen. Liz Bennett (D) shared emails to parents that cite the law, saying specifically that it applies to students’ nicknames.
“Today, Joseph requested that he be called Joe in class. However, because that nickname was not provided in Infinite Campus, we need your permission in order to grant the request,” read the email Bennett tweeted. (Infinite Campus is an online platform that allows parents access to students’ classwork.)
The email Covington shared read, in part: “To maintain compliance with Iowa law, we ask that you please fill out this form for any student in your household that has a nickname that would be preferred over a legal name provided during registration.”
Republican state lawmakers who sponsored the bill say it was never meant to apply to nicknames.
However, educators across the country have reacted with similar caution in the face of other vaguely worded laws, such as in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill banning any discussion on gender identity or sexual orientation for certain grade levels. Critics say the lack of clarity is a feature, not a bug — meant to scare educatorsinto strict compliance.
Transgender people often entertain at weddings and other events, but they increasingly face violent acts, especially since part of an Act ensuring their rights was recently struck down. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
by Ashfaq Yusufzai (peshawar)
Inter Press Service
PESHAWAR, Jul 24 (IPS) – “The problems transgender people face start from their homes as their parents, especially fathers and brothers, look them down upon and disrespect them,” says 20-year-old Pari Gul.
Gul, a resident of Charsadda district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), left her house at 16 when her mother asked her to or face being killed by her father.
“I was born as a boy, and my name was Abdul Wahid, but when I came to Peshawar and joined a transgender group, I got a female name, Pari Gul. Since then, I have been going to weddings and other festive ceremonies to dance,” she says. “Dance is my passion.”
However, she has often been the brunt of discrimination and violence.
“During my five-year career, people have beaten me more than 20 times. Each time the perpetrators went unpunished,” she told IPS in an interview.
Trans people are often targeted in KP, one of Pakistan’s four provinces.
On March 28, a man shot dead a transgender person in Peshawar. It was the third incident targeting transgender persons in the province in less than a week. Despite the violence, violent attacks on transgender people aren’t considered a major crime.
Khushi Khan, a senior transgender person, says lack of protection is the main problem.
“People have developed a disdain for us. They consider us non-Muslims because we dance at marriages and other ceremonies,” she says.
“We had lodged at least a dozen complaints with police in the past three months when our colleagues were robbed of money, molested and raped but to no avail,” Khan, 30, says.
Last month, clerics in the Khyber district decided they wouldn’t offer funerals to transgender persons and asked people to boycott them.
Rafiq Shah, a social worker, says that people attack the houses of transgender, kill, injure and rob them, but the police remain silent “spectators”.
“We have been protesting against violence frequently, but the situation remains unchanged,” Shah said.
Qamar Naseem, head of Blue Veins, a national NGO working to promote and protect transgender people, isn’t happy over the treatment meted out to the group.
“Security is the main issue of transgender persons. About 84 transgender persons have been killed in Pakistan since 2015 while another 2,000 have faced violence, but no one has been punished so far,” Naseem says.
The lack of action by the police has emboldened the people.
“Health, transportation, livelihoods and employment issues have hit the transgender (community) hard. Most of the time, they remained confined to their homes, located inside the city,” he says.
There are no data regarding the number of transgender in the country because the government doesn’t take them seriously, he says.
In May 2023, the Federal Shariat Court (FSC) dealt a severe blow when it suspended the implementation rules of the Protection of Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act.
Farzana Jan, president of TransAction Alliance, says that FSC’s declaration that individuals cannot alter their gender at their own discretion, asserting that specific clauses within the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2018 contradict Islamic law, has disappointed us.
The FSC declared un-Islamic sections 3 and 7 and two sub-sections of Section 2 of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2018, five years after the law was passed, the FSC rolled back key provisions granting rights to Pakistan’s transgender community.
Some right-wing political parties had previously voiced concerns over the bill as a promoter of “homosexuality,” leading to “new social problems”.
The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2018, is against the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Quran and Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and will cease to have any legal effect immediately, the verdict stated.
Amnesty International said the verdict was a blow to the rights of the already beleaguered group of transgender and gender-diverse people in Pakistan. It said some of the FSC’s observations were based on presumptive scenarios rather than empirical evidence. The denial of essential rights of transgender and gender-diverse persons should not be guided by assumptions rooted in prejudice, fear and discrimination, AI said.
“Any steps taken by the government of Pakistan to deny transgender and gender-diverse people the right to gender identity is in contravention of their obligations under international human rights law, namely the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to which they are a state party,” it said.
The government should take immediate steps to stop the reversal of essential protections, without which transgender and gender-diverse people will be even more at risk of harassment, discrimination and violence, AI added.
On July 12, 2023, transgender representatives from all provinces held a press conference at Lahore Press Club, where they vehemently condemned the recent decision by the FSC against the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2018.
Arzoo Bibi, who was at a press conference, said it was time to stand united for justice and equality.
“Militants don’t threaten us, but our biggest concern is the attitude of the society and police,” said Arzoo.
IPS UN Bureau Report
One day in March, Katie Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Cobb County, Georgia, read “My Shadow Is Purple” by Scott Stuart, which she had purchased at an in-school book fair, to her class. Now, she’s fighting to get her job back.
In June, a monthslong investigation determined that she should be terminated from her position at Due West Elementary School because reading the book had violated a Georgia law which bans educators from teaching about so-called “divisive concepts” like systemic racism — but the school district hasn’t yet explained which part of the law Rinderle had broken.
The book is about acceptance, being true to oneself and moving beyond the gender binary.
“I really resonated with its message of acceptance of oneself and others, and every book I had in my classroom is one of acceptance,” Rinderle told CNN. “I knew that this book would fit perfectly in my classroom.”
According to Rinderle, a parent complaint led to an investigation by the Cobb County School District of the 10-year veteran teacher, and the elementary school’s principal asked Rinderle to resign. When she declined, she was terminated.
Last year, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed three educational laws that impacted what teachers can say and do in the classroom — and empowered parents to file complaints against educators they presumed to be in violation of these laws.
“After these laws were passed, it created a ripple of fear among teachers,” Craig Goodmark, a Georgia-based attorney who is representing Rinderle, told HuffPost.
Rinderle has been accused of violating the “divisive concepts” law, which prohibits teachers from discussing “divisive” issues such as saying that the United States is fundamentally racist. The law does not mention discussions or instruction on gender. (It does, however, carve out exceptions for teaching about racism in an academic context so long as educators are objective.) School districts are responsible for creating their own complaint processes.
As soon as it was passed, Georgia educators criticized the law for being too vague and difficult to interpret.
“It’s unclear if one particular parent would draw the line somewhere that the community at large would not draw the line,” Georgia Association of Educators President Lisa Morgan said last July. “How will principals and administrators handle that parent?”
“This has really caused a chaotic impact in the classroom where teachers don’t know what they can and can’t teach.”
– Craig Goodmark, a Georgia-based attorney representing Katie Rinderle
In Cobb County, it seems as though a single parent complaint can lead to an investigation and eventual removal.
Rinderle and her lawyer have both said that the school has not yet explained how reading “My Shadow Is Purple” was against the law. “When Katie was being investigated, she asked what part of the law she was violating,” Goodmark said. “And they couldn’t tell her.”
When HuffPost asked the school district which part of the law Rinderle had broken, a spokesperson said that all the facts and policies would be reviewed at a hearing set for Aug. 3: “Without getting into specifics of the personnel investigation, the District is confident the hearing is appropriate considering the entirety of the teacher’s behavior and history. The District remains committed to strictly enforcing all Board policy, and the law.”
The impact of the vague law goes beyond just Rinderle’s firing. “This has really caused a chaotic impact in the classroom where teachers don’t know what they can and can’t teach,” Goodmark said. “No one really understands how it’s supposed to be interpreted and it’s bad for Georgia students.”
Education and civil rights groups have announced their plans to sue the state of Georgia over its “divisive concepts” law, which they’re calling a censorship law. Last November the Southern Poverty Law Center, National Education Association and Georgia Association of Educators sent a letter of intent to the state.
“Efforts to expand our multicultural democracy through public education are being met with frantic efforts in Georgia to censor educators, ban books, and desperate measures to suppress teaching the truth about slavery and systemic racism,” Mike McGonigle, general counsel for the GAE, said in a statement.
There are already similar lawsuits in Florida and Oklahoma, where Republican legislatures have passed similar laws that limit what educators can say in the classroom.
Republicans nationwide have made a concerted effort to impose conservative beliefs onto public schools.
From laws that limit what teachers can say about gender, sexuality, and race to policies that allow parents to control which books students are allowed to have access to, the GOP is seeking to remake public schools into a right-wing paradise. The impact of laws that censor teachers and remove books from libraries has been felt across the country.
Goodmark said he will ask Cobb County to defend its termination of Rinderle at the hearing.
“Our very first question is … defend what a divisive concept is and explain why ‘My Shadow Is Purple’ violates it,” Goodmark said.
He says that she has a record of good performance reviews. “She was a leader in the Due West community, somebody who parents wanted to be in the classroom.”
“She has a lot of support in our community,” he added. “We have a lot of parents who are against this. Katie is going to fight for her job.”
LEESBURG, Va. — A special grand jury convened at the direction of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has issued a scathing report against a northern Virginia school system accusing it of mishandling a student who sexually assaulted classmates at two different high schools last year.
The grand jury report accuses the Loudoun County Public Schools superintendent of lying to the public to cover up what occurred, and authorities of ignoring multiple warning signs that could have prevented an assault.
“It is our considered judgment that (the second assault) never should have occurred,” the grand jury states in the report. “Had any one of a number of individuals across a variety of entities spoke up … then the sexual assault most likely would not have occurred. But nobody did.”
Youngkin issued an executive order on his first day in office in January requesting an investigation of the school system’s conduct in connection with the assaults. The school system sought to quash the investigation, calling it politically motivated. But the Virginia Supreme Court ruled earlier this year it could move forward.
The school system’s conduct became a major issue in the 2021 gubernatorial campaign, as Youngkin cited Loudoun schools as an example of administrators who placed social justice initiatives above student safety and educational fundamentals.
The assaults received outsize attention because the student who was convicted in both attacks is a biological male who wore a skirt in one of the attacks, playing into a national debate over how schools should treat transgender students and whether they should be allowed to use restrooms different than their biological sex.
The report also accuses school administrators and lawyers of stonewalling the special grand jury’s investigation. The report notes that school board members went out of their way in testimony to describe the assailant’s attire as a kilt rather than a skirt, something the report suggests was a coordinated effort by the school system’s legal team to push a coordinated narrative about what occurred.
A school system spokesman said the district would issue a statement responding to the report later Monday.
The first assault occurred in a girls’ bathroom stall at Stone Bridge High School in May 2021. The student was charged in juvenile court and barred by court order from returning to Stone Bridge. Administrators then transferred him to nearby Broad Run High School, where the second assault occurred in October 2021.
The grand jury report accuses the school system superintendent, Scott Ziegler, of lying about the assault at a school board meeting in June 2021, after the first assault occurred.
As the school board debated policies governing transgender students and whether they can use the restroom of their preference, a school board member asked Ziegler if the schools had a problem with sexual assaults occurring in bathrooms.
Ziegler responded that “to my knowledge we don’t have any record of assaults in our restrooms.” But emails show that Ziegler had been informed of the Stone Bridge assault and in fact had sent an email to board members informing them of the incident.
The report says teachers at both schools warned administrators of the student’s disturbing conduct weeks before each assault occurred. Even the student’s grandmother spoke up and warned the student’s probation officer, referring to her grandchild as a “sociopath,” according to the report.
Two weeks before the first assault, a teaching assistant wrote an email to another teacher and administrator noting that the boy sat on girls’ laps during study hall “and seems to have a problem with listening and keeping his hands to himself.”
The email resulted in a call to the student’s mother, but the grand jury report shows administrators seemed as concerned with whether the teaching assistant followed proper protocol in reporting her concerns as they were about the student’s conduct.
And the report faults administrators for passing the student off to Broad Run with insufficient communication about the risk he posed. At Broad Run, an art teacher reported to the principal that girls in the class were uncomfortable because the student was following them. Separately, he asked multiple students about posting nude photos online, according to the report.
The only punishment was an admonishment and requiring him to “write on a piece of paper that he would not commit such conduct again,” according to the report.
Attorney General Jason Miyares, whose office conducted the investigation, thanked grand jurors and said he looks “forward to the positive change in LCPS resulting from their work.”
COLLEGEVILLE, Minn. — As monks chanted prayers in Saint John’s University church, members of the student LGBTQ organization, QPLUS, were meeting in their lounge at the Minnesota institution’s sister Benedictine college, a few miles away.
To Sean Fisher, a senior who identifies as non-binary and helps lead QPLUS, its official recognition and funding by Saint John’s and the College of Saint Benedict is welcome proof of the schools’ “acknowledging queer students exist.”
But tensions endure here and at many of the hundreds of U.S. Catholic and Protestant universities. The Christian teachings they ascribe to differ from societal values over gender identity and sexual orientation, because they assert that God created humans in unchangeable male and female identities, and sex should only happen within the marriage of a man and a woman.
“The ambivalence toward genuine care is clouded by Jesus-y attitudes. Like ‘Love your neighbor’ has an asterisk,” Fisher said.
Most of the 200 Catholic institutions serving nearly 900,000 students have made efforts to be welcoming, said the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.
Among Protestant institutions, a few push the envelope, and most hope to avoid controversy, according to John Hawthorne, a retired Christian college sociology professor and administrator.
“Denominations won’t budge, so colleges will need to lead the way,” Hawthorne said, adding there might not be enough students in the future interested in conservative colleges. “Today’s college freshman was born in 2004, the year Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage.”
Most Christian schools list “sexual orientation” in their nondiscrimination statements, and half also include “gender identity” – far more than did so in 2013, said Jonathan Coley, a Oklahoma State University sociologist who maintains a database of LGBTQ student policies at Christian colleges.
But translating nondiscrimination into practice creates tensions and backlash. At some conservative schools, discrimination complaints have been filed, while some parents and clergy argue more affirming institutions are betraying their mission.
“We have to learn to live with this tension,” said the Rev. Donal Godfrey, chaplain at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution in a city with a history of LGBTQ activism and a conservative Catholic archbishop opposed to same-sex marriage.
“Catholic colleges and universities …. are the most LGBTQ-friendly places in the church in the United States,” said Francis DeBernando. New Ways Ministry, the advocacy organization for LGBTQ Catholics he leads, keeps a list of Catholic colleges it considers LGBTQ-friendly.
The Cardinal Newman Society, which advocates for fidelity to church teachings on Catholic education issues, maintains its own list of recommended schools.
“For these colleges, being ‘Catholic’ is not a watered-down brand or historical tradition,” Newman president Patrick Reilly said via email.
Other campus leaders see tension in Catholic teachings tending to skew conservative on human sexuality but progressive on social justice.
“It’s kind of a tightrope,” said John Scarano, campus ministry director at John Carroll University, a Jesuit school near Cleveland.
To parents and prospective students undecided between John Carroll and Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, Scarano says, “Here, your Catholicism is going to be challenged.”
At Franciscan, “we don’t move away from the truth of the human person as discovered in Scripture, the tradition of the Church, and the teaching authority of the Church,” said the Rev. Jonathan St. Andre, a senior university leader, adding Franciscan doesn’t tolerate harassment of those who disagree.
Students’ safety is a priority, said Mary Geller, the associate provost at Saint John’s and Saint Benedict. The single-sex institutions in Minnesota now admit students based on the gender they identify with, and consider transfers for those who transition.
That enrages a few parents, like a father complaining “that we have students with male body parts in a female dorm,” Geller recalled. “I just said, ‘Sir, I don’t check body parts.’”
Last year, LGBTQ students or former students at federally funded Christian schools filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, claiming its religious exemption allows schools to unconstitutionally discriminate against LGBTQ students.
In May, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched a separate investigation for alleged violations of LGBTQ students’ rights at six Christian universities — including Liberty University.
The independent evangelical university has greatly expanded its prohibitive rules, forbidding LGBTQ clubs, same-sex displays of affection, and use of pronouns, restrooms and changing facilities not corresponding to a person’s birth sex. Liberty’s student handbook bans statements and behaviors associated with what it calls “LGBT states of mind.”
“Liberty is very anti-gay,” said Sydney Windsor, a senior there who came to Liberty to quash her attraction for women and now identifies as pansexual. “It’s years of irreversible trauma.”
At some evangelical schools, the fight for rights has moved to LGBTQ diversity in faculty and staff hiring.
This year, Eastern University, located in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, and affiliated with American Baptist Churches USA, amended its policies to allow for hiring faculty in same-sex marriages — one of only a handful of evangelical schools to do so.
“If we can get faculty to come out and to have queer people openly represented on campus, that would be really big,” said Faith Jeanette Millender, a student there who identifies as bisexual or queer.
A clash between students, faculty and the school’s board of trustees over hiring LGBTQ faculty is unfolding at Seattle Pacific University, a Free Methodist Church-affiliated school.
The faculty held a vote of no-confidence in the board over its keeping the policy barring people in same-sex relationships from full-time positions. Faculty and students have also sued the board for breaching its fiduciary duty.
“I know how much Christianity has brought harm to communities, whether its people of color, women, or LGBTQ people,” said Chloe Guillot, 22, an SPU graduate student and one of 16 plaintiffs in that lawsuit. “I have a responsibility to step into those spaces and be willing to fight back. As someone who is a Christian, we need to hold ourselves accountable.”
The administration responded to one of the suits in a court filing saying it expects students and faculty to “affirm the University’s statement of faith, and to abide by its lifestyle expectations, which together shape the vision and mission of the institution.”
To students, concrete actions will show if LGBTQ people can truly be welcomed on Christian campuses.
Ryan Imm, a Saint John’s junior and QPLUS leader who identifies as gay, recalled an anti-LGBTQ slur used on his residential floor. But he also pointed to hopeful signs — like Saint Benedict’s popular drag show.
“It’s almost like people forget there’s dissonance,” Imm said.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
