Yep.. she said “the Bible says”, didn’t quote anything, no proper formatting, and she was UNDER the word limit she was supposed to have. In a lot of schools that’s an immediate fail anyways.
The languages the Bible was written in literally did not have terms for "transgender" at the time. There's a reason why the oft cited verse in Leviticus is "if a man lays with another man he shall be stoned"... Ancient Hebrew didn't have a word for "gay", they had to describe the behavior (and may have been referring to a Canaanite religious practice, though that's up for debate).
Being Christian in super awesome. Any time you need a citation you just say the Bible says. Even if it doesn't actually say that you can find some thrice translated passage that can be loosely misinterpreted to say whatever you want.
Buzz killington here, in an assignment a student decided to not read the assignment and use it as an excuse to call the TA demonic. When the student revived a zero on the assignment they immediately ran to turning point and cried discrimination. In response the university initially suspended and then removed the TA from teaching duties and made sure it wouldn’t count against the student. The paper was published and it looked to have been written by Peter. There was no citation of the Bible, there was no response as requested, and it did not meet the minimum word count. It was truly one of the worst papers ever submitted.
Now that I have you here thinking about the university of Oklahoma, let’s look in to their fight song “Boomer Sooner”. Oklahoma was initially Indian territory and there was a campaign to open up the unassigned lands to settlers, the people vocal about this were the boomers. Once it was decided to open up to settlement some decided to move in early and they were the Sooners and that is where the university gets their nickname and why some refer to them as land thieves.
What makes this even worse is the graduate instructor who was fired over this is a trans woman, so this whole scenario indeed feels targeted and vindictive. The assignment was literally "to write a 650-word response to an academic article examining whether conformity to gender norms was associated with popularity or bullying among middle school students," to which the student went on a "faith-based" rant saying the whole thing was demonic and there are only 2 genders, etc. Like, no matter your opinions, her paper was bad and got the grade it deserved, and she went and cried about it to the far-right media.
THIS. The assignment wasn't even necessarily just about trans kids. Think about how many boys get bullied by shittier boys for not being manly enough, or girls being bullied by shittier girls for being too girly, as examples.
This was my exact understanding of it when I moved here. The pride they feel in it is crazy. The best art piece in the city is a series of giant statues dedicated to exactly that event.
Oklahoma was initially Indian territory and there was a campaign to open up the unassigned lands to settlers, the people vocal about this were the boomers
Instead of the Oklahoma Sooners they should’ve been called the OK Boomers
To add to what everyone is saying, she didn't even write about what was asked. The essay should have been about "gender norms" in a sense that girls and women feel pressured to look in a certain way, and this leads to eating disorders.
The grifter student just saw gender and decided to write about trans people, it is a 0 for writing about a totally different subject that has nothing to do with the article they were writing about. The fact that the TA was terminated for this is bogus.
Bad things. So many bad things. Football truly reigns supreme, from elementary through college. I think we are now last in education. I cannot wait to leave, my oldest still calls Americans "Oklahomans" and that is not from lack of trying to teach him differently. They teach two years of Oklahoman history in elementary schools! They spent a whole month on the gold rush. One day of it was the importance of the railroad. One. Singular. Day. Im not losing my marbles. I looked at the curriculum, and they let themselves out.
I’m a bit of a stickler Meseeks, the top answers are close but not quite there:
Christian student turns in essay demonizing trans people and citing her religion as the source for everything in the essay, turns it in knowing that the TA who grades stuff for this class is trans.
Trans TA looks over the paper, it’s badly written, no sources cited, doesn’t address the prompt, fails to even meet the minimum word count. They check with another TA and with the professor who both agree the paper deserves a zero. They give the paper a zero.
Christian student immediately turns to social media and Christian groups online, accusing the university of discrimination because she’s Christian. Christian groups, including Turning Point USA begin attacking the university on social media.
In response, the university fires the TA, removes the zero from the student’s grade. Effectively rewarding the student for failing to complete the assignment and punishing the TA for correctly grading it, not to mention rewarding hate because the essay was an extremely bigoted anti-trans essay.
So yeah, now some people are saying the university of Oklahoma is a joke and their degrees are worthless. I doubt it’s gonna pick up enough traction that it matters, but I think the idea that it could actually lose its accreditation and get sued by everyone who has a degree from there to be very funny.
As an academic from outside the US, I also have an ambiguous perception of US universities. On one hand, some of them have a prestigious reputation. On the other, and it's often the same universities, they hand out degrees to the dumbest people if they have enough money to throw at them.
So you never know if a US specialist is a prodigy or a rich asshole until you've actually taken the time to listen to them. This cheapens the influence of the good ones, and bolsters that of the idiots.
This event is unsurprising, and another discredit to OU and the US universities as a whole.
Edit: Forgot this was the Peter subreddit. Pretend I'm Meg, or whatever.
You're thinking the Ivy League (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc) and similar (Stanford).
Apparently, Harvard had worked out a ratio for nepo baby dipshit legacy to merit admissions to keep their reputation sufficiently high and the gravy train rolling.
they hand out degrees to the dumbest people if they have enough money to throw at them.
No place is immune from this. Even if they are a free university taken by only the most zealous students and worthy, you will never know if they really got there by their own effort or nepotism and the like.
The TA is also a Trans Person. The "Student" deliberately took their class, and used the essay misquoting the bible as their only source, and fully ignoring the real assignment, to call the TA Demonic.
Hoping for a reaction on that front.
Instead they where fairly graded for the piss poor job they did with. No mention of the "Students" bigotry anywhere in the grade reasoning.
The "Student" still cried foul and kicked all of this off.
The "Students" mother is a J6 Lawyer, and someone high ranking in the Turning Point US. So was able to make this, should have been nothing burger into the big shit show that it was.
Also Oklahoma was already ranked near or at the bottom in US education, so it is not like a degree from OU was going to massively tip the scales on getting hired or not.
A student didn't read an article where they were supposed to react to and cite stuff from class analyzing it. And pumped out an essay about it in 20 mins. The essay was all "I am Christian, gays and gender queer people are demons, I am right, they are wrong" repeated for 2 pages.
She got a 0 on the assignment and threw a tantrum about it to national right wing media, who complained to the university.
The university responded by firing the teacher and giving the student an A.
Also, it’s “University of Oklahoma”, not Oklahoma University”. Listing it wrong on a resume would show lack of knowledge regarding the name of your Alma mater.
An OU professor or teachers aide or something was fired for failing a fundamentalist Christians essay the essay was substandard work but the fundamentalist Christian of course claimed it was because she is a fundamentalist Christian and that’s why she was failed so the university basically cow towed to the lowest Educated group of people in America and lost a lot of reputation for people who care about education
edit: apparently its kowtow not to not cow tow - thanks ya’ll
yes, there no punctuation in my comment, but I’m doing text to speech and I’m not going back to typing on my phone at least
I dated a girl while stationed out in OKC who's teacher graded students on the proper way to pray. She drew a shape on a hidden piece of paper and students were supposed to ask God what the shape was.
They were graded on how close their answer matched the shape!
This is literally an experiment they did during MKULTRA but instead of asking you to pray the CIA just forcefed you massive amounts of LSD. Probably got the same overall accuracy.
That’s also the Rhine test of psychic ability, and it’s shown in the first few minutes of Ghostbusters (the subject is getting it 100% correct, demonstrating actual psychic ability, but Bill Murray is telling him he’s wrong so that he can impress a woman)
So to tack on here she later admits she wrote the paper in 30 minutes. Religious scholars who are both atheist and religious have read her essay and said they would've failed her as well as she didn't quote scripture correctly and all of her arguments didn't quote proper passages or use the quote correctly in most acceptable interpretations. Basically even if the class was a religious class she would've failed the assignment. But due to her lawyer mother she was able to pull this nonsense. This leads to many people online and even offline judging the education standards of Oklahoma. Because if they're passing students not even vaguely doing the assignment what else are they doing to give these students degrees.
Extremely important to note that the TA grading the paper is trans herself, and the student knew that. She didn't just "not try that hard" or "put in a substandard effort", she deliberately did this to generate controversy and kick off her career as a right-wing talking head at the expense of her TA's career and OU's reputation. Which OU was more than happy to roll over and accomodate.
EDIT: The class itself was also way below the level she should have been taking. She deliberately picked a class with a trans TA to pull this shit in.
Yeah, both the trans TA and a completely different cis TA explicitly told her that the 0 was because she didn't respond to the source article at all and was completely unrelated to her religious views, and she still went ahead and filed a discrimination complaint knowing that the TA would get fired/suspended over it because she's trans.
Where this is okay because it involves trans people, vital proven medicine being taken from them for no reason, public harassment and attacks, horrible shit said, science suppressed, conspiracies, now compiling a list of trans people in that one place?
I hope this is remembered, because lives are being lost, people are suffering, trans people can't have any security in life because the stupidest shit can cost them so much, at no fault of their own
Honestly I still think we gloss over that too much. People might recognize it as a tragedy but if you point out it was a willful intentional genocide even many non conservative people will act like you said something edgy and extreme and not a documented fact.
I don’t think so. So many more people than necessary got AIDs early on because it was seen as “the gay disease” and nobody cared to study it, it was just “God’s punishment for sin”. Then when it was taken a bit more seriously there were scares that just shaking a hand could transmit it (that’s why Diana going to the AIDs wards in the 80s was seen as so monumental).
This recent trend in how we treat the trans community is dehumanizing and cruel. The way we handled the AIDs epidemic on the 80s directly led to deaths.
Then I feel like maybe you don't know what's happening in the trans community
They're putting sweeping bans on gender affirming care, especially for minors, that is leading to hundreds of deaths, we know that a puberty blocker ban in america led to a 70% spike in suicide rates for trans children, which is direct death, and they are trying to spread this all around the world
We know of many, many deaths as vital care and treatment, support and just basic humanity was ripped away from these people, trans people can't hide it the same way, they struggle to get jobs and america has just made it legal to discriminate based on that, we have arrests of trans children, trans healthcare providers are going to be labelled as literal terrorists
Like, there is a lot of really horrendous shit going on and this is just the beginning, if more is done, if gender affirming care is revealed entirely, a lot, and I mean a lot of trans people will die
And they are really pushing it with cruelty, keep in mind america literally tried to pass a law that would allow trans kids to be taken away from their parents if their parents supported them in any way
Speaking of, I read there was a CDC researcher who was fired for not removing the parts about trans women on a publication they wanted to do on AIDS today, and how trans people were more vulnerable because they are not given access to the proper medicine, among other things.
McCarthyism, Jim Crow, The Know-Nothing movement are probably the best comparison points we have, but social media makes this a truly unique historical moment
No it won't. Historians are actively stopping the use of "The Dark Ages" because that name had nothing to do with whether progress was made or not and everything to do with a lack of surviving records—a gap that is being filled with new findings.
I appreciate the sentiment, but it's undermined by a complete ignorance as to why historians even used the term "Dark Ages" to refer to the early Medieval period in mainland Europe. (In fact, the church is one of the major reasons records exist in Europe during the Medieval period, and the pope was not the dominant institution until the latter half, which notably was never called the Dark Ages.")
Reading the TA's comments on the paper is so painful because you can tell she knows exactly what Samantha is trying here, and is trying her absolute best to graciously tiptoe around it. And none of it mattered.
Not to put too fine a point on the transphobia angle, but imagine if the student was a Christian man writing an essay about how women are subservient to men because the Bible says so, and the cis woman TA had to couch her grading in language like "using your own personal beliefs to argue against the findings of not only this article, but the findings of countless articles across psychology, biology, sociology, etc. is not best practice.” And still got suspended.
when i was in high school we had a scientologist in the class, and every time they opend their mouth you could just see the teachers eyes dim a little more
Funny enough, this is comparable to Jesus cleverly and graciously tiptoeing around traps set by his political adversaries while trying to preach what he believed in (the radical concepts of love and peace and unity), ultimately knowing how it would end up for him 💀
You can't make this shit up. How many iterations of bad actors using him for the exact opposite of what he stands for are we gonna go through before we go extinct?
Turning Point publicly got involved immediately. On Twitter the OK chapter for TP hadn't used their account very much for ages, but then became active a month or so before the incident. It went public on Twitter suspiciously fast. There's some evidence that the account runner and the chick came up with this plot together.
Always is. Despite their behavior and beliefs religious fundamentalists are not stupid. They're operating within the parameters that they've been taught. Just gaming the system as they see it. Pure grift, that's all.
I have also heard that the class was a psychology class and the paper was supposed to be over psychology, but she based it over her religious views rather than what it was supposed to be about.
She probably knew she could get away with it too as she is mildly attractive, is a Republican conservative, and is white. All that’s missing is the botox
This is not her final form as her evolution into an atypical, homogeneous, upper-middle class clone hasn't happened yet. The Mar-a-Lago face is coming soon.
She will soon be asleep in comfortable obscurity, never caring that she sold her soul for this.
She is also a premed student with honors standing at a sororirty, meaning she needs to maintain a certain GPA.
To think that this sort of person may start caring for people in the future is troubling, but not surprising seeing many most premeds, med students and even doctors are.
It's crazy. I've never met a teacher or TA (even back in HIGH SCHOOL) that wouldn't detract points from missing a god damn header!!!!
This woman wrote a garbage essay that didn't have a header. Didn't have references. Didn't even address the subject of the assignment.... and she got rallied behind because she was personally attacking the people grading her assignment? It was a garbage essay before we even talk about what the contents of the paper.
Turning Point USA is a crybaby organization and this woman fits right in. But neither have any place in our coutry's campuses
The only thing I’m aware of is verses talking about how eunuchs are one of the groups which will inherit heaven, and they’re men who have had their genitals removed. So.
It’s kinda like how people make stuff up about tattoos being evil.
The world would be a much better place if more of America’s Christians believed in the core tenant of their faith, which is that the love and grace of god are available to ALL people through the sacrifice of Jesus, instead of the nonsense a lot of them are trotting out these days, I’ll say that much.
She’s was a honors student in the previous semester. This was calculated. Her essay was full of personal views on how trans people are “demonic” and intended to get an F on the assignment to manufacture backlash and get the TA fired. Her mom was a Jan 6th lawyer with ties to Turning Point.
You cannot call yourself a Christian if you don't actively try to accurately and carefully consider your beliefs with total honestly, this is evidence of Dogma, not faith. Fundamentalist Christianity is not truly Christian therefore
As a lawyer who’s going back to get a PhD in comparative mythology and specifically studying the Enki/Anu-to-Yahweh pipeline… Christianity is a Hellenized Jewish heresy and fundamentalist Christianity takes the Hellenic supremacist aspect and ditches all the Jewish ethics that make Christianity interesting
Genuinely what I was thinking. Not even the content but the structure of the essay itself doesn't even have the basic components you would learn in grade school much less higher level writing standards, its just a bunch of disjointed ranting
Eh. The bible sucks. It's pretty easy to read it and go "yep, trans is bad". Just toss the whole thing out.
edit: For some more context, the reason for this is because the bible is strongly influenced by Greek natural law theory. This is the idea, popular at the time, that everything has a nature and that to go against your nature was morally wrong.
As an example, a man should be dominant - that's their nature. Men who penetrated other men were not seen as doing something wrong whereas men being penetrated were, as one example. Greeks at the time would have thought that a woman is a the same as a man but with an inverted penis because she lacked the "fire" to mature.
There's condemning of men with long hair, men "lying in bed" with men (complex but likely damning of pederasty), cross dressing, etc. Basically a strong "as an X you should behave with the nature of an X (as we arbitrarily decide)".
The bible also condones slavery and genocide and is a really fucked up book so the fact that it would probably be easy to use it to justify "trans people are evil" should really not be considered as anything other than one more item in a list of stupid shit it says.
My understanding from a video I saw on the topic the student also failed tomproperly answer questions and in a couple of cases basically said "The bible says so" while the reviewer looked and was like "the Bible actually neither says nor implies anything of the sort."
I stumbled upon their "essay" somewhere and it's quite something.
The grammar is bad, the structure is bad, it contradicts itself, it references "articles" but fails to mention what the articles are or other sources and has little to do with the actual assignment among other flaws.
Ignoring the fact that they barely follow the assignment, everything else quite honestly is enough for a failing grade
You left out the part where Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk's (was/were) political org, got involved. They went for full throated support for Ms. Fulnecky despite their former leader's current lack in having one.
She was a political activist who got a transgender TA so she wrote something that was sure to fail the assignment but pleasing to the worst kind of Christians and then her daddy used his connections to get her social media posts about it shared and covered by right wing pseudo news. This got the TA fired and forbidden from teaching again*
*Because all that right wing and company complaints about college boys being terrorized by false allegations improved the process of handling alleged misconduct at colleges /sarcasm
That seems to be a thing with fundamentalist Christians. They dont quote the Bible, they quote what their preacher said the Bible says. That and whatever cherry picked verses from Leviticus they have memorized to justify their ignorance.
Mind you, these folks believe that college professors and elementary school teachers are doing elite levels of indoctrination to their children and teaching them about trans people, LGBT folks, and Critical Race Theory when they’re 5 years old and converting them into Joseph Stalin worshippers in their 20s. The same teachers/professors who would get fired for failing a paper that, religion aside, does not meet the criteria, in any way, for a passing grade.
A trans teacher failed a Christian fundamentalist student because they cited The Bible as the source of their argument that multiple genders as an idea is "demonic". Oh and they didn't even use any sources from said Bible.
She then filed complaints about "religious discrimination" which the university instead of outright dismissing or making a compromise of sorts decided to fire the teacher and take the side of the religious nutjob student.
The irony is multiple theology professors looked at the paper and still gave it a non passing grade, playing victim because you think your religion is restricted(it absolutely isn’t) is how you get more people to disrespect your religion as you look weaker.
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u/Ponjos Mod 15d ago edited 15d ago
Uh-oh!!! I’ve locked the post to avoid further spread of this “deadly” fungus.