In his time as state superintendent for Oklahoma’s public colleges, Ryan Walters, a former highschool historical past trainer, has remodeled himself into probably the most strident tradition warriors in a state identified for sharp-edged conservative politics.
Following the dying earlier this month of a 16-year-old nonbinary pupil a day after an altercation in a highschool women’ toilet, homosexual and transgender advocates accused Mr. Walters of getting fomented an environment of harmful intolerance inside public colleges.
In his first interview reacting to the dying of the coed, Nex Benedict, Mr. Walters advised The New York Instances that the dying was a tragedy, however that it didn’t change his views on how questions of gender needs to be dealt with in colleges.
“There’s not a number of genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us,” Mr. Walters mentioned, saying he didn’t imagine that nonbinary or transgender individuals exist. He mentioned that Oklahoma colleges wouldn’t permit college students to make use of most popular names or pronouns that differ from their delivery intercourse.
“You all the time deal with people with dignity or respect, as a result of they’re made in God’s picture,” Mr. Walters mentioned. “However that doesn’t change fact.”
Mr. Walters, who’s in the end in control of Oklahoma public colleges and has been mentioned as a doable candidate for larger workplace, has been one of many loudest voices within the state looking for to forestall dialogue and promotion of L.G.B.T.Q. points in colleges. His fellow Republicans within the Legislature have backed a wave of latest and proposed legal guidelines aimed toward homosexual and transgender individuals.
In interviews, transgender college students mentioned 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 schooling 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 introduced it on,” he mentioned, addressing Mr. Walters immediately.
Questions remained in regards to the bullying that members of the family mentioned Nex had skilled at Owasso Excessive College earlier than the toilet altercation on Feb. 7, and what connection it may need needed to their dying. The police on Wednesday mentioned that Nex had not died from trauma, a discovering that Mr. Walters reiterated.
“We’ve been advised dying wasn’t immediately associated to the struggle at college,” he mentioned, cautioning that the investigation was ongoing.
Late Friday, the Owasso Police Division launched a number of movies exhibiting Nex strolling beneath their very own energy after the altercation and, individually, talking within the hospital with a police officer.
Nex advised the officer they poured water on a number of women who have been making enjoyable of them contained in the woman’s toilet, and that three women then knocked them to the ground and “began beating” them up.
“I blacked out,” Nex advised the officer.
Investigators had but to find out what brought about the coed’s dying, mentioned Nick Boatman, a spokesman with the Owasso Police Division.
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of the advocacy group GLAAD, referred to as the dying “a tragic, mindless and surprising assault that ought to by no means be forgotten” in an Instagram publish this week.
Mr. Walters mentioned the tragedy had been compounded by outdoors advocates looking for to make a political level.
“I feel it’s horrible that we’ve had some radical leftists who determined to run with a political agenda and attempt to weave a story that hasn’t been true,” he mentioned. “You’ve taken a tragedy, and also you’ve had some people attempt to exploit it for political acquire.”
Officers have carried out interviews with college students and workers at Owasso Excessive College. The college district has mentioned that the altercation lasted lower than two minutes and that the scholars concerned have been in a position to 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 mentioned. They went dwelling that day. The next day, Nex was rushed again to the hospital by native medics and was pronounced useless. The state health worker’s workplace declined to touch upon the post-mortem or any toxicology outcomes however mentioned its ultimate report would ultimately be made public.
A lot of the criticism Mr. Walters has obtained has targeted on his current 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 surroundings for trans, two-spirit and gender-nonconforming college students,” mentioned Nicole McAfee, the manager director of Freedom Oklahoma, which advocates for transgender and homosexual rights. Since Nex’s dying, they mentioned, “I’ve seen extra instances than I can rely people share a picture that Ryan Walters put out throughout his marketing campaign of oldsters in a rest room with language villainizing trans youth particularly.”
Mr. Walters, 38, has been an unapologetic lightning rod in Oklahoma, mounting direct verbal assaults on faculty districts, academics’ unions and sometimes particular person academics whom he has accused of selling “pornography” or “radical gender concept” in public colleges. He was appointed to the cupboard place of secretary of schooling by Gov. Kevin Stitt in 2020 after which gained election as state superintendent in 2022.
He has pressured educators in a number of districts to resign, together with a trainer who mounted a protest over the banning of sure books, and an elementary faculty principal who carried out in drag outdoors of faculty.
Such an aggressively partisan strategy stunned a few of Mr. Walters’s former college students, a lot of whom admired him as an approachable trainer who valued debate. “Walters would exit of his strategy to be apolitical,” mentioned Shane Hood, who took at the very least three historical past courses with Mr. Walters at McAlester Excessive College. As a trainer, Mr. Hood mentioned, he gave little indication of his political opinions, aside from displaying giant cutouts of Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan.
“He was in all probability a schoolwide favourite,” mentioned 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 proscribing the rights of transgender individuals. In Oklahoma, lawmakers have banned gender-transition look after minors and explicitly prohibited the usage of 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 colleges to undertake the coverage that gender is an “immutable organic trait” and bar the usage of various most popular names or pronouns. One other proposal, generally known as the Patriotism Not Pleasure Act, would stop state companies from displaying flags or symbols in help of homosexual and transgender individuals.
“It’s simply extremely dangerous,” mentioned Whitney Cipolla, a board member at Oklahomans for Equality, which advocates for homosexual and transgender rights. “I do know queer educators who’re frightened to be instructing.”
In interviews, transgender and nonbinary youngsters in Oklahoma mentioned the political local weather had made issues harder for them.
“There’s loads of emotions of helplessness,” mentioned Hali, 18, a transgender woman 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 all the time have that little little bit of concern that you would be attacked, that you would be one of many victims.”
Hali mentioned 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 sort and outgoing and a really candy particular person,” Hali mentioned, however added that she didn’t know a lot in regards to the altercation that preceded Nex’s dying.
Requested about how Oklahoma colleges ought to deal with college students who determine as transgender, Mr. Walters mentioned the faculties would “proceed to deal with each pupil with dignity and respect,” however wouldn’t “go into the transgender ideology by accepting all of these premises” and forcing academics to undertake them.
Mr. Walters, who described himself as a lover and reader of historical past, mentioned he noticed the nation at a type of crossroads.
“I actually see there’s a civil struggle happening, the place the left is de facto preventing for the soul of our nation,” he mentioned. “They’re undermining the very ideas that made this nation nice, our Judeo-Christian values and our traditions on this nation.”
Getting again to these values and traditions, he added, “that’s what is going to unify us.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.
