#gender #Texas #LGBTQ #academia #Gleichschaltung
"How a secret recording of a gender identity lecture upended Texas A&M
Officials have struggled to detail the exact reasons for the A&M professor’s termination, citing a technical issue with her course description. Faculty say the move was politically motivated.
It was the third week of Texas A&M’s summer semester and students in the ENGL 360: Literature for Children class were reading 'Jude Saves the World,' a novel that features a 12-year-old protagonist who navigates coming out as nonbinary.
On the projector screen, Professor Melissa McCoul shared a graphic of a purple 'gender unicorn,' often used to teach the differences between gender identity, expression and sexuality.
As the discussion began, one student angled a phone in her lap, pressed record on a video and then raised her hand.
'I just have a question, because I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching,' said the student, who went on to accuse the professor of violating President Donald Trump’s executive order, which recognizes only two biological sexes.
McCoul told the student she disagreed with her assessment, and after a short back-and-forth, captured on video, McCoul asked the student to leave.
A few days later, the class was canceled. McCoul was never officially reprimanded for the incident — there is after all, no state or federal law that prohibits instruction on race, gender or sexual orientation in Texas universities, nor is there a university policy. And by fall, McCoul had started teaching again.
But earlier this month, the recording of the confrontation — and a second one between the student and Texas A&M President Mark A. Welsh III, who first defended McCoul — was shared on social media by a GOP state representative, igniting a firestorm. Republicans quickly seized on the exchange to question the teaching of gender identity at a public university and demanded firings. Within days, Welsh terminated McCoul and demoted College of Arts and Sciences’ Dean Mark Zoran and the head of the English department, Emily Johansen — decisions that intensified scrutiny and ultimately culminated in his own resignation on Thursday afternoon.
Those administrative sanctions have raised questions about academic freedom and political influence on campus. GOP officials have heralded the moves as a win against diversity, equity and inclusion programming in public universities, while the university itself has carefully offered some distance between McCoul’s summer course material and her dismissal.
In a public statement, Welsh said McCoul was fired because, after the summer, she continued to 'teach content that was inconsistent with the published course description for another course this fall,' an apparent nod to his concern that McCoul’s emphasis on LGBTQ+ viewpoints was not properly advertised in course materials."
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/19/texas-a-m-welsh-firing-professor-gender-mccoul/
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