(LifeSiteNews) – Texas A&M University has fired three staff members in connection with a student’s removal for objecting to a professor’s promotion of LGBT ideology in the classroom.
The Daily Wire reports that Texas Republican State Rep. Brian Harrison released leaked footage of a class examining children’s literature in which the lecturer, Dr. Melissa McCoul, argued that “queerness” is not automatically inappropriate for young ages. “Thinking that homosexuality or queer people are always ‘x-rated’ is an effect of heteronormativity, the idea that heterosexual or straight is normal as well as normative,” one of her slides said.
The video shows that one anonymous student objected that the lesson “also goes against, not only myself, but a lot of people’s religious beliefs. And so I am not going to participate in this because it’s not legal” (presumably referring to the Trump administration’s executive order against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content in higher education.
McCoul claimed that her position was “biologically true” and that she was the one with “the legal and ethical authority [and] professional expertise in this classroom. It’s time for you to leave.”
🚨CAUGHT ON TAPE: TEXAS A&M STUDENT KICKED OUT OF CLASS AFTER OBJECTING TO TRANSGENDER INDOCTRINATION… and A&M President defends “LGBTQ Studies.”
I’m referring @TAMU to the Trump Administration for investigation… and asking Gov @GregAbbott_TX to fire the A&M officials… pic.twitter.com/J6IWsfw62I
— Brian Harrison (@brianeharrison) September 8, 2025
Video: Texas A&M Professor to student who objected to transgender indoctrination: “YOU’RE FREE TO LEAVE!” pic.twitter.com/c9eabNdo9X
— Brian Harrison (@brianeharrison) September 8, 2025
Audio of Texas A&M President defending the need to teach LGBTQ courses… to train future “school superintendents.” pic.twitter.com/eJCMutmrQj
— Brian Harrison (@brianeharrison) September 8, 2025
In a recorded phone conversation between McCoul, the student, and Texas A&M President Mark Welsh, Welsh said the course would be reviewed but “there’s not a problem” with LGBT-themed literature instruction provided its presence in a class is made clear in advance, said McCoul would not be punished, and that the student’s inquiry about firing her was just “picking a fight.”
Harrison referred the matter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Secretary of Health & Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, writing, “Since the Texas government has not ended this taxpayer-funded liberal indoctrination, I am writing to respectfully request that you or other relevant divisions or agencies take any appropriate action(s) to ensure that Texas universities receiving federal funds are complying with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
“We are aware of an isolated incident in which a summer course’s content was misaligned with the course curriculum,” a university spokesperson later told the Wire. “The college took steps in collaboration with faculty to ensure all course content aligns with the course curriculum moving forward.”
The Western Journal subsequently reported that Welsh later changed his tune from the phone call, announcing that he has “directed the provost to remove the dean and department head from their administrative positions, effective immediately,” because “key leaders in the College of Arts and Sciences approved plans to continue teaching course content that was not consistent with the course’s published description.”
McCoul herself was ousted as well, reportedly because she refused to “align with the catalog description and the course description that was originally submitted and approved.” The College Fix adds that McCoul has appealed her termination, with her attorney maintaining that her “course content was entirely consistent with the catalog and course description, and she was never instructed to change her course content.”
It is a dictate of progressivism that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But according to biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically-based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as school homecomings and athletic competitions.
Critics warn that their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
President Donald Trump has issued executive orders to deny federal funds to medical and educational entities that promote gender ideology, which so far have gotten numerous major hospital systems to cease “transition” procedures on minors.
