Ryan Walters has resigned as Oklahoma state superintendent of public instruction to take a position with a group that fights teachers’ unions. He leaves an almost unprecedented record of anti-LGBTQ+ and especially anti-transgender statements in just two years in office.
Here are some of the worst.
’27 genders’
“You’re not going to come in here and teach that there’s 27 genders,” he said in July while announcing a test to be given to teachers who come to Oklahoma from liberal states to make sure they’re not “woke.” Most likely, no one believes there are 27 genders — or teaches that.
Using bullied trans student Nex Benedict’s death to attack ‘the woke mob’
“They wanted to use the death of a child to support a political agenda, and I think it’s absolutely disgusting, and you are going to hear these groups, this woke mob, continue to push an agenda and lie to further the most radical agenda this country has ever seen.” This was Walters’s statement in March 2024 on the death of bullied trans student Nex Benedict the previous month. He did not mention Benedict’s name.
Using Benedict’s death to attack the margnalized
“There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us,” Walters told The New York Times in his first interview about Benedict’s death, denying that nonbinary, intersex, or transgender people exist.
Banning LGBTQ-inclusive books
“We’ve found awful books and textbooks in our schools that [have] pornographic material, push transgenderism. We’ve gotten those books out,” Walters said in a February 2024 interview with Crisis in the Classroom, a right-wing group. This is an accusation often made — falsely — to justify bans on LGBTQ-inclusive books.
Forcing the resignation of a gay principal who did drag
“I insisted on the removal of this person from Oklahoma schools from the beginning,” Walters told The Washington Post in February 2024 about forcing the resignation of a gay principal who performed in drag outside of school. “I will not allow the radical left to use our schools to indoctrinate our kids and promote the most extreme forms of sexual deviancy in the classroom and beyond.” The school received bomb threats after the principal’s drag work was publicized. Walters also said he would push for a regulation that would let school staffers be fired for “acts that excessively promote sexuality” outside of work “in the presence of a minor or in a manner available to a minor online.”
Pushing his anti-trans agenda under the guise of protecting women’s rights
In a November 2023 memo to textbook publishers after Gov. Kevin Stitt issued the so-called Women’s Bill of Rights, which does not promote women’s rights but denies the existence of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people, Walters wrote, “Radical gender ideology has no place in our classrooms, and that includes all teaching materials. The radical left’s attempt to diminish women will not work in Oklahoma. If textbooks contain any language that runs contrary to the Women’s Bill of Rights, they must be revised before being submitted for consideration in our state.”
Litter boxes!
While running for superintendent of public instruction in 2022, he repeated the debunked idea that schools are letting students identify as cats and use litter boxes — something right-wing extremists posit as the next step after accommodating trans people, just as they said marriage equality would lead to legalization of incest and polygamy. “Have you heard about the litter boxes stuff?” he asked attendees at an event in Stillwater, then shared what he claimed to have heard from a former colleague: “This was a legitimate faculty meeting where the counselors and administrators were talking to the staff ― are you ready? ― about whether they should allow litter boxes in the bathrooms for kids that identify as cats.”
This article originally appeared on Advocate: 7 of Ryan Walters’s most heinous anti-LGBTQ+ quotes