I Blew the Whistle on my School, and then Trump Pulled the Plug

If the EEOC is no longer processing complaints on behalf of trans employees, I guess I’ll just have to do it here

“Just so you know, there’s a cop in there.”

The keys to my classroom pressed deep into my palm as I hovered an inch from the door handle. There’s no way I heard that correctly. It’s not even seven in the morning, and the parking lot outside is still bathed in the deep blue of pre-dawn. Students are gathered in scattered huddles in the hallway, the knees of their pajama pants tucked under oversized sweaters as they doze against lockers. My eyes are barely open, and a paper cup full of hot mint tea is pressed dangerously close to the laptop I’m balancing on my hip. It’s twenty minutes to the start of my first class, and there is definitely not a cop on the other side of this door.

“What?”

“Yeah, he just went in. Sam let him in.”

Sam, my favorite custodian, the custodian for whom we pooled two hundred bucks for a Wing Stop gift card last Christmas, let a cop into my room? Why?

I swallowed the bile rising like mercury in my throat and let myself in, careful to check that it locked behind me. And there he was, leaning against a desk and surveying the room – a collection of student research projects stapled to the wall, a banner for the Academic Decathlon team, a decade’s worth of graduation announcements lining the back whiteboard, and a quote written out in large black letters above my desk: You Don’t Have to Burn Books to Destroy a Culture, Just Get People to Stop Reading Them. He hopped up to his feet when he saw me, and wasted no time:

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but an email came into the school this morning. There’s been a threat against you. We’re going to search your room.”

I was the first person to teach out of this classroom after it was built

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In April of this year, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received new marching orders from the Trump administration that effectively gutted legal recourse for transgender employees across the country: any new worker complaints that cited “gender-identity discrimination” would now be coded as “Class C.” What does that mean? If you’ve never braved a dive headfirst into American employment law, here’s a quick guide:

The EEOC exists primarily as the enforcement arm against employment discrimination in this country, but they receive many more claims than they could ever hope to review and process. In the mid-nineties, they started a new system (called the Priority Charge Handling Procedure) to create a sort of shorthand for how they want to proceed with any new case:

“A” charges are almost definitely going to be handled by the EEOC directly, not referred to mediation, and they have a high likelihood of being successful in court for the claimant.

“B” charges are probably not going to court, and the EEOC likely doesn’t have the resources to put a ton of effort into pursuing litigation. They will likely be referred to mediation.

“C” charges are the EEOC graveyard. This is where “silly or frivolous” cases end up, and it’s astronomically unlikely that the agency will do anything other than notify the organization that’s been charged. This is where claims of discrimination go to die.

So this means that in April, Trump’s EEOC made a pretty bold and damning assertion: transgender people aren’t discriminated against in any American workplaces. Doesn’t happen. No need to look any further. It’s all good here.

As a transgender person who had just spent the last year and a half filing and working with the EEOC on a discrimination case of my own, this wasn’t amazing news. I wasn’t sure what the outcome of my own case would have been, but it felt a little like being whacked in the shins with a cricket bat, especially since I had to be convinced over and over again by everyone close to me that my case was worth pursuing in the first place.

If you’ve ever been on the business end of workplace discrimination (or any kind of abuse in which one party holds pretty much all of the power), you know that an essential element is doubt. Did that actually happen to me? Was it a big deal if it did? If I say something, will it all just get worse? Do I even want to bring everything back up again?

This is because the ghost of the pain still lives inside of me, and clawing into the dirt of some of the worst experiences of my life feels like exhuming the body of a hurt I’d just as soon like to forget. I’m a lifelong writer who has sat in front of a keyboard over and over again, unable to put words to a pain that still sears like a branding iron against the softest parts of my heart. It’s been too hot to touch for a long time.

But now, I’m angry enough to get over it.

If I’m never going to get my day in court, if I’m never going to see the people who ignored me forced to confront their own cowardice, I’ll just do it here. The timelines, the screenshots – I have it all, and I’m ready to air it out. I still remember the heat rising in my throat, flushing my chest and my neck and my face until my ears burned, as I sat on the phone with legal counsel for the first time:

“I don’t care about getting paid,” I said. “I just want the next trans teacher who stumbles into that school to have a different experience. I want these people to be afraid to fuck up this badly a second time.”

Photo taken at a writing workshop I taught for a queer summer camp

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Don’t tell them, I’d been told. We’re going to move you to another room. Just keep teaching like nothing is wrong.

But something was wrong. There were dogs in my classroom now– dogs sniffing under the coffee maker and behind my desk and inside bookshelves– dogs looking for a bomb.

I wouldn’t see the email until much later, the email that outlined exactly why some faceless nameless whoever wanted me and all of my students dead. It would be weeks before I asked to see it, and weeks more before I read a word. My email wasn’t listed on the school website, so it had been sent to a handful of my colleagues instead. They knew before I did exactly what this person thought of me, and how he wanted to handle it. Warning, the following is quoted directly from the threatening email, and the language within is extremely triggering:

“School* has failed to provide a safe learning environment for its children, it now(sic) only ALLOWs but ENCOURAGES sexually deviant and degenerate behavior from its staff. We won’t stand idly by as leftists continue to sexualize our children and push this perverted sh*t into classrooms… I’m sick of hearing about p*rnography being displayed to children or people enacting sexual acts onto children… You are child abusers, you are scaring(sic) the next generation… Anyone who refuses to do anything abotu(sic) this is a f*cking coward. We won’t tolerate this, we won’t stand idly which is why we placed multiple pipe bombs in Deadname* “Flint’s” classroom, as well as in other locations in the high school and [his] house 1234 Street*. You will evacuate or you will all die. We will personally ensure that this subhuman degenerate c*cksucking piece of sh*t is killed… Superintendent’s* home at 4321 Street* and the School District* have also been rigged with explosives and will detonate shortly after receiving this email. The school district is equally as bad for ENCOURAGING this degeneracy. F*ck you all, we’ll see you burn in hell.”

I didn’t know what the email said as I walked between desks, my hands linked behind my back. I tried to focus on my students, who were scribbling away on a journal prompt I’d written up on the whiteboard moments before. I thought about trying for a short discussion, but every time I went to open my mouth, my tongue was dry and my lips were glued shut.

This is the worst day of my life, I thought.

Which is wild, because I thought the exact same thing three months earlier, and I would be wrong twice.

Because why did this person, the one who had allegedly spent a night hiding pipe bombs between copies of The Great Gatsby, know my name? Or the name I had before? Or my school?

That would be Fox News’s fault. More specifically, a writer working for them named Hannah Grossman. In her time updating the right wing world about my egregious existence in public education, Hannah wrote about me at least three times. Always careful to skirt right along the edge of libel, she made sure her readers believed that I was a dangerous child predator, and that my classroom library contained actual hardcore pornography. For her and her readers, that meant specifically the YA novel Juliet Takes a Breath and the YA guide This Book is Gay. It didn’t matter that the sexuality in these books was comparable, and even tamer, than in titles we actually taught in eleventh and twelfth grade English (books like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). She knew (presumably– I’ll take the hint from Fox and put an asterisk around her intentions, as they are truly unknowable) that the iron was hot against queer books in the fall of 2022. Why not strike as many times as possible? After all, clicks were clicks.

Her first article, revised at least once after its initial publication to tone down some of the more libel-y language, was published in September:

“California high school teacher boasts 'queer library' with material on orgies and BDSM/kink”

Pleased with its success, she published a second time:

“California teacher who outraged parents with BDSM materials claims it helped kids' identity development”

The pub date for article number two? Just two days before the bomb threat.

So how could the worst still be ahead of me?

After the threatening calls began to come in to my school, I made treat bags for the front office staff I knew would have to answer them

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So far, it seems like the worst of all of this belongs squarely to bad actors hundreds of miles from my campus, so why did I go to the EEOC with a claim against my school district?

Well, I sort of expect this behavior from Hannah Grossman and the faceless bomb moron. This is what they do, this is their job: be angry, ruin lives, clock out. I had different expectations of the people I worked for. I was twenty one when I stepped onto campus and handed the keys to my first classroom. I wasn’t a new hire causing problems and drama right out of the gate: I’d faithfully served my school with dedication and loyalty for more than a decade, coming in early and staying late, coaching teams and supervising dances, chaperoning field trips and volunteering for extra assignments that didn’t pay. In my time on my campus, I’d never had a negative mark in an evaluation or one single disciplinary meeting. Even in the fallout from Fox News, in meetings where I cried and begged for different decisions, it was always clear that I hadn’t violated any policies. I wasn’t being punished, they always said– everything they were doing was for my safety.

But it’s clear that very little – if anything – was actually for my safety. Because I didn’t feel safe, and never would again. What happened instead was a slow picking away at the skeletal remains of my life at my school. Every new decision that followed was like watching some harbinger corvid nibble a little deeper into my liver. I wasn’t being saved, I was being abandoned. It would happen slowly, and I wouldn’t recover.

In the days after the first Fox article, I waited. I waited to see what my school district would do. Would they send a statement out to parents? Would they explain that it wasn’t true? That I wasn’t a threat to students? That my library didn’t violate any policies? After years of me showing up for them, were they going to show up for me?

No, they weren’t.

Every meeting felt disciplinary, even as I was being assured it wasn’t. My library was searched and gutted, and new rules were set up just for me. As phone calls came in across the country, accusing me of increasingly outrageous things, I was told to answer for them. We got a tip that you’ve been showing students pornographic magazines after school. Is this true? Nothing was credible, nothing was true, but they wouldn’t say anything about it. There were no statements of support, no standing behind a teacher whose library they’d once awarded. Some parents organized a protest at Back to School Night. Fearing violence and a lack of support, I skipped it.

After the bomb threat in December, the silence continued. The superintendent, who had also been named in the email, never called me. The next time she saw me, she pretended nothing had happened at all. The threats and articles continued. The incidents stacked. I could feel my body weakening. I stopped eating. I wouldn’t go out anywhere near the school, sick and afraid that someone would recognize and hurt me. The district hadn’t rejected any of the claims made in the news, hadn’t clarified, and left me standing on my own in a sea of hate. I started putting in the absolute minimum effort at work, and the joy I once had for teaching was gone. It felt like it had been sucked out of me. I kept my classroom door locked, and jumped whenever I heard a knock.

All during this time, I was making videos about my life as a teacher for TikTok and Instagram. I knew better than to disparage my school or my community, so I kept it vague. Viewers who knew that I’d been “featured” on Fox asked me how my school district was handling it.

“Are they being supportive?” They would ask. “Tell me they’ve got your back.”

For a long time, I thought I could still savage it. Before I knew anything about myself, I knew that I was a teacher. Who was I if I wasn’t? I’d been told not to film on campus, a rule that other teachers were not being asked to follow, and I didn’t want to hurt a relationship that was already hemorrhaging.

Sure, I said. Everything is going to be fine.

After district administrators asked what it was I wanted them to do, I made a list of suggestions. None of my suggestions were answered or used.

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Is any of what happened discrimination based on my gender identity? What responsibility does a school district have to protect its teachers? Is any of what happens outside of a school relevant to the rules enforced on the inside of one? Is neglect, abandonment, and betrayal enforceable? Of the dozens of homophobic and transphobic incidents that occurred while I was a teacher, which (if any) are my district responsible for?

I’m going to give you exactly what I gave to the EEOC to help you decide. Below is the exact timeline I once drew up as I was fighting against doubt in my decision to file a claim.

What do you think?

EEOC Timeline:

I come out as queer in early 2019

August 2019:
After school “club rush” event, the Queer Student Alliance president’s car is vandalized, her LGBTQ+ flag sticker is scraped from her bumper in the student parking lot and stuck under her windshield wipers. This will continue to become a pattern over the next several years, as harassment against LGBTQ+ students escalates during these “club rush” events.

September 2019:
A teacher from another department confronts me in the front office and tells me that my “political choices” will “send me and my students to hell.”

March 2021:
Student group We’re All Welcome* puts on its yearly “LGBTQ Talk”, inviting the whole of the student body (~2,500 students) to the theater for a lunchtime presentation. The event is supervised so poorly (hundreds of students jeering and laughing, very minimal adult supervision), I have a panic attack before my next class.

I come out as transgender in the summer of 2021, and begin using “they/them” pronouns. I change my name legally before the start of the school year.

August 2021:
A student enrolled in my class openly mocks the LGBTQ+ community on a day in which I am absent and have a substitute teacher. The substitute and a campus supervisor witness the homophobic tirade but do not respond. In subsequent meetings with administration, they express to me that the student will face consequences, but it is eight months before he serves it: a single detention. He keeps his position on the football team and within student government. He is the child of a teacher and athletic coach.

I receive a double mastectomy in July of 2022.

August 2022:
A group of 3-5 parents from my school begin to bring claims against me to the school district, arguing that I should not be allowed to have a social media presence. The leader of the claims begins her campaign for the school board.

September 2022
Fox News publishes an article claiming that I am indoctrinating students and distributing pornography because I have an LGBTQ+ library. Harassment escalates from there, including a group of parents protesting outside of our school on Back to School Night. Threats begin to come into my district email, along with direct phone call threats to the school. The emails and calls threaten violence, burning down the school as a whole, and direct claims against my life. All incidents related to my home are reported to City* PD. Administration handles all communication to law enforcement from the school. I am asked frequently by my administration to tell them if I have shown students pornographic material, which I have not. District officials begin to remove selected books from my library, though there is no policy to support their removal.

Between September and December 2022:
Several meetings are held between my administration, myself, and HR. Fifteen LGBTQ+ books are removed from my classroom library by district representatives, though I am assured that I have not violated any district guidelines or policies. I am told I can no longer film videos for social media on campus, though I have never filmed during school hours, with any campus-identifying features, or visible students. No other teachers are asked to follow this policy, no other classroom libraries are searched, and no other books are removed from any other place on campus. The only specific accommodation for my safety I am offered is an escort to and from my car.

September 2022:
A white envelope mailed from an unfamiliar address in Kentucky and addressed to my deadname is put by front office staff in my teacher inbox. The letter says “JESUS DIED FOR YOU” in large print letters on a single white paper. Letter is reported to and surrendered to administration.

December 6, 2022:
A bomb threat is emailed to my campus and copied to several of my colleagues, targeting me, my classroom, and the home of our district superintendent. I am not made aware of the bomb threat until I am already at school and find a County* sheriff in my room. I am asked to move my class to another teacher’s room while bomb dogs investigate my classroom. I am told not to alert my students that anything is wrong. When my room is announced as clear, I am told to return and continue to teach the rest of the day.

The bomb threat is made public in the following week, and during a public school board meeting, several parents again assert that LGBTQ+ literature is pornography. The district makes no statement in my support, and again I am told privately that I have not violated any district policy. My district email address is changed for the first time, and is no longer listed publicly.

December 16, 2022:
The superintendent contacts me for the first time “to say hello,” nearly two weeks after the bomb threat. She does not mention the continued harassment or the bomb threat.

May 26, 2023:
Two students who attend my school comment on my public Instagram account with disparaging comments about my trans identity, in violation of our district policy against cyberbullying. I report them to my administration, who responds that they will not be contacting or speaking with either student. They are not spoken with, and there are no consequences. Administration tells me they “don’t know what I want them to do about it.”

At this time, I have grown fearful of my community and no longer attend any optional school events, including games, dances, or performances. I no longer purchase classroom supplies or necessities within five miles of my school. I stop coaching the school’s Academic Decathlon team.

October 12, 2023:
Parent harassment continues online. Posts about my teaching at my school appear on Facebook groups for parents in my district, misgendering me, deadnaming me, asserting that I am a danger to their children, and that I should not be allowed to teach. An Instagram account for parents in my district posts photos of me with my deadname and my school. No admin action is taken, and the district continues its silence.

November 8, 2023:
I begin to receive droves of subscription emails to my school email address that I have not signed up for, the nature of which is primarily religious (such as “Christian Woman Daily”) and using my deadname. In one day I receive 44 of these emails. My district email is not available publicly and would only be accessible within the school district. Our IT is not able to stop the emails, and my email address is surrendered to my administration until they are able to issue me a third alternative district email address. This takes five days, and I continue to receive the emails until November 13, 2023.

November 13, 2023:
I return to school after five days sick at home to a four-page letter left to me from my substitute teacher. In the letter, he details his opinions about homosexuality and the Christian bible, and ends by inviting me to attend his church. He leaves the note inside a personal book he found in the drawer of my desk. I report the letter to administration and surrender it to them.

November 14, 2023:
A meeting is held between me, administration, and a union representative about the sub note and my intention to leave teaching at my school and be put on stress-related medical leave, to be initiated by a note from my doctor. During the meeting, I am assured that the sub will not return to campus and won’t be able to contact me.

November 29, 2023:
The substitute returns to campus. He knocks on my door at lunch and I open, not knowing who he is. He introduces himself and says he wanted to meet me. I find a reason to push him out, and contact administration immediately. They tell me that they hadn’t filed the paperwork yet, which is why the sub was able to access me on campus. That day, the paperwork is filed and the sub is told he can not return.

December 2023:
I teach my last day in my classroom, after just more than ten years serving at my school.

Italics and * indicate that a name has been changed or redacted

An example of many instances of digital parent harassment

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Ironically, in April, the same week that Trump’s EEOC announced that they would now scoot all transgender discrimination claims to “Class C,” I got an email that my former school district had responded to my filing. I still haven’t read it, but I asked my husband to skim it for me– I wanted him to distill the worst of it into something with as little bitterness as possible.

They were claiming, my husband told me, that I couldn’t have had that bad of a time working there.

I never complained about them online, they said.

So how bad could it have been?

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I still don’t know what the result of my case would have been, or if it will ever move forward again. It’s possible that writing this now tanks my chances of ever seeing justice. I’m not a lawyer, and that’s very intentional. Laws change, and they’re changing a lot right now. We’re living in a time in which precompliance is the norm, and organizations of all kinds are showing just how contagious cowardice can really be. It’s only been six months since Trump signed a piece of paper alleging that trans people don’t exist at all. We’re being denied passports, healthcare, basic dignity and human rights, and even establishment democrats are deciding that we aren’t worth fighting for.

So this might be a terrible idea, but I’m not going to keep my school’s secrets anymore. If these places don’t have the government to answer to, it’s the least I can do to speak my own truth as loud as I can. It’s what I owe to myself, if nothing else. That will have to be good enough for now.

My first book, Teach Like an Ally: An Educator's Guide to Nurturing LGBTQ+ Students, just hit shelves. If you’d like to support me and my work, consider becoming a subscriber, donating to our Great Trans American Road Trip, or following my work on TikTok and Instagram.