In his three years as state superintendent for Oklahoma’s public faculties, Ryan Walters, a former highschool historical past trainer, has remodeled himself into one of the crucial strident tradition warriors in a state identified for sharp-edged conservative politics.
Following the demise earlier this month of a 16-year-old nonbinary scholar a day after an altercation in a highschool ladies’ rest room, homosexual and transgender advocates accused Mr. Walters of getting fomented an environment of harmful intolerance inside public faculties.
In his first interview reacting to the demise of the scholar, Nex Benedict, Mr. Walters informed The New York Occasions that the demise was a tragedy, however that it didn’t change his views on how questions of gender needs to be dealt with in faculties.
“There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us,” Mr. Walters stated, saying he didn’t imagine that nonbinary or transgender individuals exist. He stated that Oklahoma faculties wouldn’t permit college students to make use of most popular names or pronouns that differ from their delivery intercourse.
“You always treat individuals with dignity or respect, because they’re made in God’s image,” Mr. Walters stated. “But that doesn’t change truth.”
Mr. Walters, who’s finally in command of Oklahoma public faculties and has been mentioned as a potential candidate for increased workplace, has been one of many loudest voices within the state in search of to stop dialogue and promotion of L.G.B.T.Q. points in faculties. His fellow Republicans within the Legislature have backed a wave of recent and proposed legal guidelines geared toward homosexual and transgender individuals.
In interviews, transgender college students stated that the rhetoric from officers like Mr. Walters has been seen by their classmates as permission to harass and bully them at college.
And at an Oklahoma board of training assembly this week, Sean Cummings, the vice mayor of a city adjoining to Oklahoma Metropolis generally known as The Village, blamed the board’s anti-gay and anti-transgender insurance policies for the bullying of Nex. “You brought it on,” he stated, addressing Mr. Walters instantly.
Questions remained in regards to the bullying that relations stated Nex had skilled at Owasso Excessive Faculty earlier than the lavatory altercation on Feb. 7, and what connection it might need needed to their demise. The police on Wednesday stated that Nex had not died from trauma, a discovering that Mr. Walters reiterated.
“We’ve been told death wasn’t directly related to the fight at school,” he stated, cautioning that the investigation was ongoing.
Nick Boatman, a spokesman with the Owasso Police Division, stated that investigators have been reviewing video from the highschool and that they deliberate to launch it “at some point.” Investigators, he stated, had but to find out what induced the scholar’s demise.
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of the advocacy group GLAAD, referred to as the demise “a tragic, senseless and shocking attack that should never be forgotten” in an Instagram post this week.
Mr. Walters stated the tragedy had been compounded by exterior advocates in search of to make a political level.
“I think it’s terrible that we’ve had some radical leftists who decided to run with a political agenda and try to weave a narrative that hasn’t been true,” he stated. “You’ve taken a tragedy, and you’ve had some folks try to exploit it for political gain.”
Officers have carried out interviews with college students and employees at Owasso Excessive Faculty. The college district has stated that the altercation lasted lower than two minutes and that the scholars concerned have been capable of stroll to a nurse’s workplace afterward.
No report back to the police was made till after Nex was taken to a hospital by a member of the family, the police have stated. They went house that day. The next day, Nex was rushed again to the hospital by native medics and was pronounced lifeless. The state health worker’s workplace declined to touch upon the post-mortem or any toxicology outcomes however stated its closing report would ultimately be made public.
A lot of the criticism Mr. Walters has acquired has centered on his latest appointment of Chaya Raichik to a state committee. Ms. Raichik, who has posted anti-gay and anti-transgender content material on her X account, Libs of TikTok, is a part of a committee that considers appropriateness of faculty library books.“Ryan Walters has created a devastatingly hostile environment for trans, two-spirit and gender-nonconforming students,” stated Nicole McAfee, the manager director of Freedom Oklahoma, which advocates for transgender and homosexual rights. Since Nex’s demise, they stated, “I’ve seen more times than I can count folks share an image that Ryan Walters put out during his campaign of folks in a bathroom with language villainizing trans youth specifically.”
However for years, Mr. Walters, 38, has been an unapologetic lightning rod in Oklahoma, mounting direct verbal assaults on college districts, lecturers’ unions and infrequently particular person lecturers whom he has accused of selling “pornography” or “radical gender theory” in public faculties. He was appointed to the place of state superintendent by Gov. Kevin Stitt in 2020 after which gained election to a new term in 2022.
He has pressured educators in a number of districts to resign, together with a teacher who mounted a protest over the banning of certain books, and an elementary college principal who performed in drag outside of school.
Such an aggressively partisan strategy shocked a few of Mr. Walters’s former college students, a lot of whom admired him as an approachable trainer who valued debate. “Walters would go out of his way to be apolitical,” stated Shane Hood, who took a minimum of three historical past lessons with Mr. Walters at McAlester Excessive Faculty. As a trainer, Mr. Hood stated, he gave little indication of his political beliefs, other than displaying massive cutouts of Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan.
“He was probably a schoolwide favorite,” stated Mr. Hood, 22, including that Mr. Walters’s present political persona didn’t match with the trainer he knew.
Mr. Walters’s public fights have come as conservative states across the nation have handed legal guidelines limiting the rights of transgender individuals. In Oklahoma, lawmakers have banned gender-transition care for minors and explicitly prohibited using gender impartial markers on delivery certificates.
The Oklahoma Legislature is at the moment contemplating a invoice to ban residents from altering their intercourse designation on delivery certificates, and one other to require public faculties to undertake the coverage that gender is an “immutable biological trait” and bar using various most popular names or pronouns. One other proposal, generally known as the Patriotism Not Pride Act, would forestall state companies from displaying flags or symbols in help of homosexual and transgender individuals.
“It’s just incredibly harmful,” stated Whitney Cipolla, a board member at Oklahomans for Equality, which advocates for homosexual and transgender rights. “I know queer educators who are frightened to be teaching.”
In interviews, transgender and nonbinary youngsters in Oklahoma stated the political local weather had made issues tougher for them.
“There’s a lot of feelings of helplessness,” stated Hali, 18, a transgender lady and highschool senior within the city of Claremore, who requested that her final title not be used out of concern that she could also be focused by anti-transgender activists. “You always have that little bit of fear that you could be attacked, that you could be one of the victims.”
Hali stated she knew Nex after having met them as a part of a program in Tulsa that provides counseling and different help to younger individuals, together with those that are homosexual or transgender. Nex was “very kind and outgoing and a very sweet person,” Hali stated, however added that she didn’t know a lot in regards to the altercation that preceded Nex’s demise.
Requested about how Oklahoma faculties ought to deal with college students who determine as transgender, Mr. Walters stated the colleges would “continue to treat every student with dignity and respect,” however wouldn’t “go into the transgender ideology by accepting all of those premises” and forcing lecturers to undertake them.
Mr. Walters, who described himself as a lover and reader of historical past, stated he noticed the nation at a type of crossroads.
“I really see there’s a civil war going on, where the left is really fighting for the soul of our country,” he stated. “They are undermining the very principles that made this country great, our Judeo-Christian values and our traditions in this country.”
Getting again to these values and traditions, he added, “that’s what will unify us.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.
