It’s about making trans people unemployable

The playbook here is familiar. Find a trans person in a position of minor institutional authority. Manufacture or amplify a confrontation. Blast it through the conservative media ecosystem until it becomes national news. Watch as institutions capitulate.

The throughline in all of these cases is Libs of TikTok, an account run by Chaya Raichik that has become a kind of targeting system for the anti-trans movement. Raichik reposts content from LGBTQ people and their allies, often with mocking commentary, and her millions of followers do the rest.

Schools, children’s hospitals, and libraries featured on the account have reported receiving bomb threats. Teachers have resigned or been fired. Medical providers have faced death threats. The pattern is consistent enough that critics have called Raichik a “stochastic terrorist” — someone who publicly demonizes people in ways that predictably inspire supporters to commit violence, while maintaining plausible deniability about any specific act.

In January 2024, the state’s then-Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, appointed Raichik, who has no connection to the state and does not live there, to the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee — giving the person behind Libs of TikTok an official role in deciding what books Oklahoma students can read.

A month later, a 16-year-old nonbinary student named Nex Benedict died. Just one day after being beaten in a school bathroom at Owasso High School — the same district where, in 2022, a teacher “greatly admired” by Nex had resigned after being targeted by a Libs of TikTok post. According to Nex’s mother, the bullying had started after Stitt signed the bathroom bill.

Nex’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide. The climate in which Nex lived — a climate shaped by the very people now celebrating Samantha Fulnecky as a “warrior of Christ” — is not incidental to this story.

In 2023, the Leadership Institute — a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit that trains conservative activists and counts Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence among its alumni — launched the Riley Gaines Center with the goal of “protecting women’s sports.” The organization is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and serves as a member of Project 2025’s advisory board. The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation donated $100,000 to the center in 2023. In the first five months of its existence, the Leadership Institute paid Gaines more than $126,000 as director.

And it’s not just Gaines. The infrastructure is growing. The Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS), a nonprofit that describes itself as “not political,” went from about $100,000 in revenue in 2022 to over $1 million by 2024. ICONS is now funding three major lawsuits against the NCAA, arguing that trans athletes should be banned from women’s sports entirely. Chloe Cole, the 20-year-old detransitioner who demanded OU defund itself over the Fulnecky essay, testified in court that she earns upwards of $200,000 annually for opposing gender-affirming care — money that flows through speaking engagements, donations, and her employment with the far-right organization Do No Harm.

This is an industry now. There are jobs, salaries, speaker bureaus, and career tracks. The right is always looking for new faces to put on this movement — young, photogenic people who can be positioned as victims of trans overreach. The detransitioner who regrets her surgery. The swimmer who tied with a trans woman. The Christian student whose essay got a bad grade.

Somewhere, right now, a trans person is teaching a class, or coaching a team, or working at a library, or providing health care. They’re doing their job. They’re probably good at it. And at some point, someone is going to have a problem with them. Maybe a parent, maybe a student, maybe a coworker. The problem won’t really be about job performance. The problem will be that they’re trans.

This is not a guess. This is a pattern. We’ve watched it happen over and over again, and we will keep watching it happen until the institutions that capitulate to these campaigns start recognizing them for what they are: coordinated attempts to purge trans people from public life, dressed up as individual controversies.

Oklahoma University had a choice. They could have looked at the essay, looked at the rubric, looked at the feedback, and said: this grade was justified. They could have noted that two instructors independently reached the same conclusion. They could have pointed out that Curth had just won a teaching award. They could have said, simply, that they don’t put instructors on leave for doing their jobs.

Instead, they folded. They issued a statement about protecting religious expression, as if the issue were ever about that. They gave the machine exactly what it wanted: another trans person removed from a position of authority, another signal sent to every other trans person watching.

The next time this happens, and there will be a next time, the institution will face the same choice. Most of them will make the same decision Oklahoma did. They’ll calculate that the cost of standing firm is higher than the cost of sacrificing one employee. They’ll tell themselves it’s just one case, one person, one controversy. They won’t see, or won’t admit, that each capitulation makes the next one easier.