TPUSA Silences Another Trans Person

Trans people's free speech is under attack.

This week Samantha Fulnecky, a junior at Oklahoma University, got a poor grade on an essay in a psychology class. Normally you wouldn’t think this would be an issue of statewide, much less national, importance. But the TA instructor of the course, Mel Curth, was trans. And, as you may have noticed, we are in the middle of a vicious nationwide campaign to force trans people out of public life by, among other things, stripping them of the right to speak.

Per the usual fascist reversal, the attack on the first amendment rights of trans people and their supporters is justified by claiming that trans people stifle controversial speech. These bad faith accusations are enabled in part by the fact that free speech advocates generally have a poor understanding of whose speech is most under threat. 1A lawyers and experts are accustomed to focusing on the content of speech, and so they rush to protect controversial expression. But in the case of trans people, as throughout the history of the US, the speech that is most threatened is not unpopular speech, but speech by unpopular people.

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Is the Bible the real psychology textbook?

Most accounts of the incident at OSU start with Fulnecky’s 650 word response to an assignment about how social expectations shape gender. Fulnecky did not cite assigned reading or engage with the research. Instead she referenced the Bible, claimed society was “pushing lies” to try to undermine traditional gender roles, and added that trans identities (like the trans identity of her instructor) were “demonic.”

Curth gave her a zero. She explained that she was not failing Fulnecky for her beliefs, but for her failure to cite empirical evidence and for returning a “reaction paper that does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.”

Fulnecky appealed the grade—not just to the school, but to Turning Points USA, the far-aright organization which exists to blacklist, terrorize, and smear progressive, BIPOC, and LGBT professors. TPUSA has only grown in power and influence following the assassination of its founder Charlie Kirk earlier this year. The organization rushed to Instagram to claim that Fulnecky was being punished for “quoting the Bible” and (of course) to target Curth

Soon OU issued a statement saying Fulnecky had filed a claim of religious discrimination and that the school “takes seriously concerns involving First Amendment rights.” Then state Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt chimed in to assert that “The 1^st Amendment is foundational to our freedom” and to urge OU to make sure “other students aren’t unfairly penalized for their beliefs.”

Curth was quickly placed on leave while the school investigated the case. It’s very likely she’s getting death threats. People targeted by the right in this way always do.

Hate speech

As I said, this is how Fulnecky’s narrative is usually related. But I’d argue the story doesn’t really start with her essay. Where it starts is with a now years-long Christofascist hate campaign targeting trans people and trans identity. In 2022, 174 anti trans bills were introduced in state legislatures; in 2023 there were over 500; this year there have already been 1,012.

The legislation is terrifying, but it’s only the tip of the pitchfork. What’s beneath the legislation is a frothing cauldron of hatred. Christofascist churches and communities across the country have whipped their adherents into a frenzy, assuring them that trans women are nefarious abusers infiltrating women’s spaces to assault them while the trans cabal demands that Christians worship pronouns rather than the one true lord.

Fulnecky was obviously well acquainted with this ideology. More, she knew that there were institutions like TPUSA and the Republican party who shared her fascist fantasies of victimization and vengeance, and who would rush to her aid if she lifted a finger and pointed them towards the Enemy.

Fulnecky was no doubt stating her true beliefs. She also was deliberately expressing contempt for the assignment, the readings, and her instructor. She was doing so because she hates trans people, feels they are oppressing her, and feels entitled to hurt them as a way of expressing her superiority. And she was doing so in the knowledge that if her trans instructor downgraded her for her expression of contempt—if, in short, her trans instructor did her job—then Fulnecky could escalate, terrorize her, threaten her job, and silence her.

As journalist Mady Castigan said on bluesky, “TP USA is trying to run a harassment campaign to get a trans TA fired for giving a crappy paper from one of their students a bad grade.” And she added, “Attempts to fire trans people from jobs should be seen for what they are--violent attacks on our ability to feed ourselves and stay housed because of who we are.”

Free speech, but only for cis people

Fulnecky’s defenders have argued her first amendment rights were being curtailed. Even some good faith commenters suggested that Fulnecky may have been the victim of viewpoint discrimination. If she had written a paper equally lacking in evidence, but had expressed vague sentiments of tolerance, would she have gotten the same 0.0 grade?

Instructors should try not to grade students down for their opinions, as opposed to their mastery of the text. It’s certainly possible (probable even!) that not every grad student in OU, or the nation, would have given Fulnecky the same grade.

Fulnecky, though, isn’t the only one with free speech rights. Curth, in her own classroom, found herself the target of a violent hate campaign; her student declared her identity “demonic” and unspeakable. The TA attempted to respond calmly, with empathy and reason. And for her troubles, she was rendered unspeaking, while Fulnecky was granted a national platform to smear her interlocutor. Who is in danger of being silenced again?

You’d think that people who care about free speech would see that the repression of Curth here is exponentially more brutal and exponentially more dangerous than Fulnecky’s poor grade. Many “free speech” advocates are of course simply bad faith fascists, who only say they are in favor of free speech because they want to scream the n-word. But even free speech sorts who are not bad faith fascists often center bad faith fascists as the iconic free speech test. At least since 1977, when the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march in the heavily Jewish city of Skokie, first amendment organizations have argued that the rights of Nazis and racists are of special concern because Nazis and racists say especially offensive things. If you don’t defend offensive speech from the right, the argument goes, you will gut the precedents you need to defend offensive speech from the left.

The problem with this reasoning is that the most vicious attacks on free speech are not on the content of the speech. They are on the identity of the speaker.

I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone else make this argument; it’s certainly not a common point. But I think it’s indisputably true. The most brutal repression of speech in the nation’s history was directed not at suppressing any particular statement, but at the wholesale silencing of dissent of any sort from Black people, who before the Civil War (and in many places long afterwards as well ) could be beaten literally to death for failing to call a white man “sir”, or for daring to learn to read. The notorious “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Clinton-era military policy was directed, again, not at sedition, but at lesbian and gay people who identified themselves as such; it silenced not speech, but a class of speakers. Prisoners are systematically censored in the name of law and order. So are sex workers.

If you understand that censorship first of all targets identities, not opinions, then it becomes clear that the most endangered speaker in the United States right now is not a Christofascist spewing hate. The most endangered speaker right now is a trans person saying, “I exist.”