“The worst parts of this are at the beginning.”
That’s what Laney Dicksion mumbled as she angrily flipped through Gender Queer—a graphic memoir about exploring gender identity and sexuality—for a local Oklahoma TV broadcast last month.
But the interview was not about the book the American Library Association ranked as its most challenged (or rebuked) of 2021. It was about one mother’s decision to complain to Norman High School officials about her daughter’s English teacher, Summer Boismier.
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Dicksion suggested the teacher should potentially face criminal charges. Her alleged crime? Providing students like Dicksion’s daughter with a QR code leading them to UnBanned—a Brooklyn Public Library program offering teenagers unlimited digital and audio access to banned or challenged books—on the first day of school last month. Boismier did so after updated guidelines and a restrictive new law inspired her to cover her entire classroom library in butcher paper, which she adorned with the phrase “Books the state doesn’t want you to read.”
“The woman has access to children and to minors,” the Oklahoma mom told Fox 25 after reading parts of Gender Queer out loud and describing it, dubiously, as “pornographic material.” “No one should be allowed to disseminate this to children, much less a teacher in our public school systems.”
Boismier resigned just days after dishing out the QR code. In so doing, she styled herself a defiant champion of free thought in Oklahoma, a state that last year enacted a law—HB 1775—targeting so-called critical race theory. The right-wing bete noire is effectively nonexistent in the classes taught to young American kids, even as rage about it has fed a larger cultural panic over education nationwide.
At Norman Schools, the law was followed by a new policy requiring teachers to review all texts in case they ran afoul of the rules. The QR code—and her comment on the cover bookshelf—was Boismier’s response to all of that.
If giving out the code was intended to cast scrutiny on an education crackdown, Boismier says the reality is that it has landed her in the crosshairs. The teacher told The Daily Beast on Friday that her departure has been followed by a slew of vulgar and threatening messages, including one that prompted her to contact the Oklahoma City Police. Which is to say she’s a new addition to a never-ending roster of targets for right-wing online cranks who do not hesitate to throw around words like “pedophile” when going after people who spread ideas they find uncomfortable.
There is no evidence that Dicksion—who did not respond to a request for comment—has any connection to any threats against Boismier. In a Wednesday incident report obtained by The Daily Beast, the teacher told authorities that “she has been doxed and is worried people may show up to her apartment.” The teacher said that since her story went viral in recent days, she has not stayed in her apartment because she “wants to be cautious and take this seriously.”
Some of the social media messages Boismier received that were reviewed by The Daily Beast encouraged others to post her name and address online, to “throw her corpse in prison,” and misgender her.
“I have been getting messages saying I should be lynched or that I should be sterilized so I can’t breed,” she said. “All kinds of really wild, hateful stuff.”
Not helping matters, according to Boismier, is that she caught the attention of Oklahoma Secretary of Public Education Ryan Walters, who sent a letter to the state Board of Education on Wednesday demanding the revocation of Boismier’s teaching certification.
But Boismier refuses to apologize for her actions and insists that she is going to continue to talk about HB 1775 and the harm she believes it’s doing in classrooms.
“I clearly touched a nerve and I am living rent-free in a lot of people’s heads,” the teacher added. “To them I just want to ask, ‘Who hurt you’?”
The law prohibits schools from “engaging in race or sex-based discriminatory acts…. which result in treating individuals differently on the basis of race or sex or the creation of a hostile environment.” According to The Oklahoman, the bill was pushed as a ban on so-called critical race theory, even though those words do not appear in the legislative text.
For Walters, however, Boismier’s intentions to ensure her students had access to all books has caused “harm and shame for the entire [teaching] profession.” After falsely stating that Boismier had been fired from Norman Public Schools after a parent’s complaint, Walters insisted in his letter that “there is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom.”
Walters, who is now the Republican nominee for state superintendent, went as far as to claim that Boismier provided “access to banned and pornographic material to students.”
A spokesperson for the Oklahoma State Department of Education, the agency Walters was appointed to by Gov. Kevin Stitt in 2020, subtly distanced it from him. ‘We aren’t commenting on his campaign stunts, it would be like giving him a free ad,” the spokesperson added. Neither Stitt’s office nor Walters immediately responded to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Norman Public Schools, the district in which Boismier formerly taught, told The Daily Beast it had no “response to Secretary Walters’ statement” and stressed that “he has not contacted the district.”
“The teacher had not had any disciplinary issues prior to this matter,” the school district spokesperson added. “Obviously we condemn threats or harassment of any kind.”
But there are only a few bona fide allies in the community for the exiled teacher.
Norman Mayor Larry Heikkila told The Daily Beast that he will not “publicly support either side,” suggesting that the Boismier’s actions could be seen as “direct disobedience.”
“My wife was a teacher for 38 years, my older daughter is a teacher. I understand teachers and I also understand that school boards set the standard and we have to abide by those rules,” the mayor said. He noted that neither he nor his city council members have discussed Boismier’s situation, while condemning calls for her harm.
For her part, Dicksion did not hold back during her on-camera debut. "[Boismier’s] been called an indoctrinator, a pedophile, a groomer and that's what these behaviors are. The woman should not have access to children now, or in the future. She should be stripped of her certifications. To be perfectly frank with you, she should have criminal charges against her,” she said.
Boismier said that while she was thrown by Dicksion’s comment about her on TV, she was not exactly shocked given the rhetoric that has swirled around her resignation. Most of all, she said, she blames officials like Walters and the Republican leadership in the state for putting a target on her back.
“I am a high school teacher and this stuff doesn’t scare me,” she said laughing. “You’re going to have to try harder than that.”
