Melissa McCoul’s recorded conversation with the unnamed student, who was told to leave the class, kicked off a political firestorm in The Lone Star State and ended with her termination over her course materials.
The controversy pulled in state Sen. Brian Harrison, who shared the video on social media and demanded her termination. It also got noticed by other Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who also demanded she get shown the door for her behavior.
McCoul was eventually terminated by the now-former university president, Mark Welsh, who had terminated other department heads before firing McCoul, too. Welsh himself eventually stepped down over backlash for the terminations.
After her firing, McCoul vowed to explore her legal options after Walsh said she was terminated for keeping the course content despite numerous instructions to change it.
McCoul’s 14-page course syllabus was indeed filled with radical LGBT-themed ideology, which Sen. Harrison obtained and shared in numerous screen shots on X. The course topics include race and racism, toxic masculinity, DEI, critical race theory, gender pronouns, queer theory, and sex versus gender.
“Childhood is the time for figuring out how to be a boy, girl, man, woman, or another gender,” one of the classroom documents states.
Those screen shots and the undercover video shared by the state senator have accumulated 5.7 million views on X.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit states that the class in question "uses children's literature as a lens through which various aspects of society are examined.
Sherry Sylvester, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, has followed the controversy since last fall. Reacting to the lawsuit, she says the issue if not free speech but the radical gender ideology that didn’t belong in an English course.
"This teacher was teaching a class to impart this ideology to elementary school teachers,” Sylvester warns, “so they would be teaching it to elementary school kids."
Named in the lawsuit as defendants are Welsh; the interim president, Tommy Williams; Texas A&M University System Chancellor Glenn Hegar; and the Texas A&M System Board of Regents.
