Court Dismisses Oklahoma Teacher’s Libel Suit Against State Official, Stemming from Debate Over “Gender Queer” in School Libraries
From the April 10 decision by Judge Bernard Jones (W.D. Okla.) in Boismier v. Walters:
This action stems from certain public statements made by Defendant Ryan Walters during his tenure as Oklahoma’s Secretary of Education. {After making the statements underlying this action, Walters was elected as Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction and assumed that office in 2023.} Plaintiff Summer Boismier, the target of Walters’s remarks, maintains that these statements amounted to actionable defamation….
The court recounts the following undisputed facts:
In May 2021, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed House Bill 1775 (H.B. 1775) into law…. [T]he law prohibits Oklahoma schools from teaching certain concepts related to race and sex. Unsurprisingly, its enactment sparked significant public controversy and debate, one in which Boismier would later become entangled.
At the time of H.B. 1775’s enactment, Boismier was a high school English teacher for Norman Public Schools in Oklahoma. On the first day of the 2022–2023 school year, her students arrived to find the classroom bookshelves covered in red butcher paper with a handwritten message that said: “Books the state doesn’t want you to read.”
A QR code affixed to the paper directed students to the Brooklyn Public Library’s “Books Unbanned” project, which, upon obtaining a digital library card, provides access to books—like Gender Queer and Flamer—that Oklahoma schools have removed in response to H.B. 1775. Before the first day of class, Boismier posted photos of her classroom setup to her public Twitter account, accompanied by a message referencing H.B. 1775 and noting that Oklahoma leadership had labeled the covered books—particularly those by “BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and/or gender non-conforming authors”—as “pornography” and “indoctrination.” She later admitted that her decision to provide the QR code was in response to incendiary comments by Walters about Gender Queer.
{Sometime before July 28, 2022, Walters discovered that Gender Queer and Flamer were accessible to students in Tulsa Public Schools and posted images from the books—describing them as “inappropriate sexual material”—on Facebook. When Facebook quickly removed his post, Walters expressed displeasure that the site had “higher standards than … Tulsa Public Schools.” And Walters was not alone in criticizing the availability of Gender Queer and Flamer in Oklahoma public schools. On July 27, 2022, then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister publicly condemned “the presence of two obscene graphic novels potentially available in Tulsa Public Schools.” In her written statement, Hofmeister described the novels as “inappropriate, sexually explicit material” and “pornography that does not belong in any public school library.”}
After a concerned parent complained to school officials about Boismier’s classroom setup, the school removed her to investigate. Within days, she resigned.
Boismier’s resignation was swiftly followed by a series of [local and national] news stories … covering her departure from Norman Public Schools and opposition to H.B. 1775 (along with the Oklahoma politicians who supported it)…. In them, Boismier was directly quoted as saying:
- “I have made the decision to resign from my position at Norman High School. I will say that the district did offer me back my job, allowing me back in the classroom as of tomorrow morning. However, there were some fundamental ideological differences between myself and district representatives that I just couldn’t get past. HB 1775 has created an impossible working environment for teachers and a
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