She asked students their pronouns. Locals called her a “groomer.” Now she’s suing. She was placed on leave for her own safety after local conservatives used increasingly violent rhetoric to denounce her.

People born and speak English, but do not understand English…. what a time to be alive. /s

>Mardy A. Burleson is a computer sciences teacher at Hilton Head Island Middle School (HHIMS), located in a South Carolina coastal community of 38,069 that is predominantly white, Christian, and over the age of 45. Burleson has a transgender son whose friend died by suicide years ago because they couldn’t come out to their family. So, to help support her own students, Burelson began giving them a beginning-of-term survey entitled, “Who is behind those eyes?”

>Around January 9, 2023, an HHIMS student showed the survey to her father, David Cook, a local self-described “Dad-vocate who has supported recent efforts to ban “pornographic” books from school libraries.

>On his podcast and social media posts, Whittington accused Burleson of being a “predatory” teacher “indoctrinating 8th graders” by giving “secret surveys about sex to literal pre-teens and children” and then telling them to “keep [it a] secret from administrators and parents.”

>During the last week of school on Facebook, Cook posted, “If you’re in support of giving sexually explicit material to children, it’s important to remember……Dead Pedophiles Don’t Re-Offend.”

>Other teachers began warning Harper about Cook’s presence on campus. Escorts would accompany her to her car. School officials compiled Cook’s harassing social media posts and filed a harassment report with the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office .

>“[School officials] told me to watch my back in public,” Harper told the *Packet*. “They told me he is dangerous and they’re concerned for me. They encouraged me to file a police report, which I did that day.”

The mental gymnastics conservatives do to believe what they believe are astoundingly weird to me. They think somehow that pronouns means “grooming” children to becoming LGBTQIA+, as if cisgender people don’t have pronouns, somehow. That is just bizarre. And the teacher facing that kind of death threat for wanting every kid to be happy and accepted at school is so bizarre.

The Christian nationalists should be the ones ashamed of themselves for trying to bully everyone into their hateful cult.

I hope Mandy wins, and it sets a precedent in the process. The “groomer libel” is sick and wrong on all levels. These Anita Bryant wannabes belong to the Crusades, not to a free society.

Legend had it that Danes wore yellow stars to defend Jews in Nazi occupation. My internet profile is genderless for the same reason. I am they.

“Democrats need to tone down the violent rhetoric that they keep making us use”

Standard maga behavior

Imagine being in a world where being polite and considerate is considered a reason to threaten violence. Unreal.

Dad-vocate is a red flag. Kindly sir, fuck right off

This very brave woman has done the exact right thing – turn the lawyers loose on these despicable bigots. Make them pay for their hypocritical discrimination. And march the case up through any appellate route the bastards want to follow.

A teacher is trying to learn about her students and the local bigots go off on their tyrannical hate trips, spreading lies and false statements. She has them by the balls and she needs to squeeze hard.

More power to her.

My favourite thing is there are cis people who use “non-standard pronouns” too, you can be perfectly happy in your assigned gender, match up with the expected appearance/expression for it, and still request other pronouns because you like them better.

Prefer they/them even though you aren’t non-binary? Cool, that’s easy enough to do. You rather be called he/him as a woman? I don’t really get that, but I also don’t get astrophysics and that doesn’t suddenly make it fake.

If she gave surveys that were secret and told not to tell parents or administrators because they were sexual in nature she deserves the boot. I guess we wait for the truth to come out first.

Very, very cool! I hope she destroys him!

MAGA fuckwads trying to make life miserable for anyone and everyone? No way.

What is wrong with people!? She was being respectful, and the consequence for her turns out to be the ultimate disrespect.

>“Do you want me to use your pronouns in class and in messages home or is it private between you and me?”

Let’s not normalize secrets between teachers and their students.

Bullying, violence, threats of this nature–each one should be a *CRIME*.

Good. Bankrupt the fuckers who made her and her families lives hell.

the district my kid goes to has altered theirs to say something along the lines of “is there a special nickname you go by? tell me how you got it and anything else you think I should know”

the kids who need to read between the lines are smart enough to do so and it isn’t explicit enough to cause outrage (yet)

I hate that this is how things are now and I hope this teacher wins for so many reasons

I’ve had conservatives say they worry this trend of suing means everyone might be a target since humans make mistakes. I’ve had to make it really clear to them that it’s entirely normal to make mistakes when getting used to something new— a name you’re not familiar with, a term you’ve mispronounced for years, a person’s new surname after they get married, etc. what matters is that we make the effort to get it right, apologise if we mess up, and just do our best. Same with pronouns. Just do your best and be mindful, because we just want to be kind to one another.

Being belligerent or purposefully being mean is what gets you into trouble. Unfortunately a major symptom of lead exposure to the brain is stubbornness when wrong, and a refusal to do things differently.

>located in a South Carolina coastal community of 38,069 that is predominantly white, Christian, and over the age of 45.

You can just predominantly bigots.

Bully as a kid, terrorist as an adult. The conservative way.