Build-a-Martyr Workshop, Sponsored by Turning Point USA

Now complete with a grifter mom.

This isn’t a story about a bad paper. It’s a story about how easily a lie becomes a movement when someone needs a villain.

I have been sitting with this story out of Oklahoma for a few days, trying to figure out why it lodged itself under my skin. A student at the University of Oklahoma turned in a reaction paper that ignored the assignment and attacked trans people, then claimed religious discrimination when she failed. Part of it is the obvious. I taught for years, and like many teachers, I have had students turn in work that made me wonder if we had even been in the same classroom. It happens. You grade fairly, you roll your eyes privately, you have a conversation with the student, you move on. No one calls the news. No one files a complaint with Jesus as their attorney.

Saved! (2004) dir. Brian Dannelly ~ Mandy Moore

This one feels different. It feels familiar in a way that makes my stomach tighten, like watching a rerun of something I hoped would never get picked up for another season.

A student turned in an assignment that did not answer the questions. She ignored the reading. She provided no evidence. She called trans people demonic. The person who paid the price was the trans TA who graded it.

I keep thinking about what that must have felt like. Showing up to teach. Doing your job. Applying the same rubric you apply to everyone. Then watching your name, identity, and credibility dragged across the internet because someone did not like the grade they earned.

I have been in rooms where parents insisted their child’s feelings were the true metric of mastery. I have been blamed for things I could not control. I have seen administrators side with the loudest adult instead of the correct one. None of that is new.

The speed of this feels new. The scale feels new. The eagerness of institutions to fold the second someone yells religious freedom while leaving out half the story feels very new.

This did not become a story because of the paper. It became a story because the TA is trans. It became a story because the right is starving for martyrs and villains. It became a story because people like Riley Gaines have created a blueprint for turning personal mediocrity into a political career. I keep going back to that line in her NY Times interview where she said about wanting to use sports to make trans rights “crumble.” She said the quiet part out loud. It is not about swimming. It is not about fairness. It is about dismantling acceptance one outrage cycle at a time.

It is strange to watch that strategy applied to a college essay that would not pass a high school rubric.

What unnerves me is not the bad essay or even the outrage. It is the pattern. The way a simple consequence can turn into a culture war spectacle the moment someone decides their feelings should outweigh reality.

I keep thinking about how easily “religious freedom” becomes the costume people wear when what they really mean is that they do not want to be questioned. It becomes a shield for bigotry and a shortcut out of accountability. It offers a ready-made script for anyone who wants to be a victim the moment they are asked to meet a standard. The more inadequate the argument, the louder the claim of persecution. The more fragile the ego, the quicker they turn to targeting the most marginalized person in the room. Trans people end up carrying the weight of everyone else’s refusal to look at their own shortcomings.

I can feel myself getting angry in a way I have not felt since I left the classroom. Not raging angry. More like tired angry. The kind where you rub your temples and think, we really cannot expect educators to survive this. Teachers are told to hold clear standards, use evidence, and teach critical thinking. The moment they do, the institution throws them aside because someone’s pastor does not like gender studies.

What are we supposed to do with that.

I keep imagining myself in that TA’s position. It makes my chest tighten. I know how easily one student complaint can derail a semester. I know how quickly administrators decide you are too controversial when what they mean is someone with political connections is angry. Being a queer educator was already a balancing act. Being a trans educator in this country right now feels like walking a tightrope held by people who pretend their hands are slipping.

The Mother, the Machine, The Martyr-Making

@wrapped.nil on Instagram

Another part of this story keeps sticking with me, and it is the mother. Kristi Fulnecky is not an overwhelmed parent confused by a grading dispute. She is a lawyer who has spent years chasing conservative grievance cases and attaching herself to whatever culture war storyline keeps the outrage economy alive. She represented a January 6 rioter. She has a public record of anti trans rhetoric. She immediately celebrated calls to ban trans people from teaching. She amplified Turning Point’s posts that misgendered the TA and painted her as mentally unfit. None of this was accidental.

This was not a mother advocating for her child’s education. This was someone who recognized a political opportunity. It was a chance to slide her daughter into the same media slipstream that turned Riley Gaines from a fifth place swimmer into a full time grievance celebrity. There is an entire machine built for moments like this. You take a normal consequence, like a zero on an assignment that failed every requirement, and inflate it into persecution. You cast your child as the innocent victim. You cast the educator as the aggressor. You feed it into the right wing pipeline and wait for the spectacle to take shape.

People like Fulnecky understand that process. They count on it. They benefit from it.

Once they learned the TA was trans, the script wrote itself. The same formula that elevated Gaines into a national figure snapped into place. Conservative strategists have admitted they look for people who can be shaped into the perfect victim for a broader anti trans narrative. This case is simply a smaller version of that machine. A grievance story looking for a headline. A family willing to play the part. A political movement desperate for its next martyr.

When you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it. This was never about a paper or a grade. It was about turning a moment of personal inadequacy into a public crusade by targeting the person with the least protection and the most vulnerability. For people like Kristi Fulnecky, that is not a tragedy. It is the strategy.

Raising the Problem

There is something else this keeps reminding me of. It is the way we have slowly, quietly taught young people that effort should count as mastery and that emotion should count as truth. I saw it in my classroom all the time. A student would turn in something unrelated to the assignment and insist they deserved an A because they worked really hard. Effort matters. Caring matters. None of that changes what was asked.

The harder part has always been the parents. The ones who were told their child’s feelings were sacred and their effort exceptional by default. They believed standards should bend around their child’s emotional comfort. They believed the role of a teacher was to confirm whatever the student already believed. Any disappointment felt like an attack.

We are watching what happens when that belief system grows up. It turns a routine consequence into a moral crisis. It turns a zero into persecution. It turns a trans educator into a threat simply for applying the rubric. It creates adults who cannot imagine being wrong, so they decide someone else must be harming them.

We have built a culture where fragility is framed as virtue and outrage as evidence. We treat our most reactive impulses like civic engagement. We talk to strangers like they exist only to confirm our feelings. The comment section has become the training ground for how people believe conflict should work.

I worry about what happens when that mindset replaces the human part of learning. The part where someone who cares about you can say, you missed the mark, let us try again, and you trust them enough to try. I worry about what happens when connection turns to suspicion. When common sense starts to feel outdated. When students stop learning because they were never taught how to be wrong. When adults stop learning because they were never taught how to be accountable.

Stories like this are not random. They are warnings. They show what happens when effort becomes everything, emotion becomes everything, and responsibility becomes nothing. If we keep moving down this path, the damage will not stop at the classroom. It will ripple into every part of who we are and how we treat each other.

Teachers are expected to do everything perfectly and invisibly. The people who refuse to meet the assignment are positioned as victims with national platforms and sponsorship deals.

I do not know where this ends. I know where it goes if universities keep responding like this, and it is not toward safer classrooms or stronger instruction. It is toward a world where the most fragile, most offended, and least informed voices shape the boundaries of education. It is a world where teachers are punished for telling the truth and rewarded when they repeat a story someone else prefers.

I keep asking myself the same question on loop. What are we doing here?

I do not have a clean answer. I know this is not it.

We owe kids more than a world built around the insecurities of adults who cannot tolerate being wrong. Parents owe them the truth. Teachers owe them boundaries. Communities owe them models of accountability that do not turn every discomfort into a crisis. If we want them to be curious, brave, and resilient, we have to show them what those things look like.

Because if we do not step up, the void will keep getting filled by the whiniest, most fragile voices with the most harmful agendas. And we cannot pretend we do not know what that leads to.