The new school year had not even officially started yet in Colorado Springs when an award-winning teacher found herself in hot water for wearing a t-shirt stating simply that men and women have different chromosomes.
Stacy Adair is a teacher for “English Language Learners” at Wilson Elementary School in Colorado Springs School District 11. When attending a teacher preparation day on August 6th, Adair chose to wear a t-shirt stating a simple biological reality: “XX≠XY.”
The text on the shirt refers to the chromosomes that designate an individual either a female (XX) or a male (XY).
The shirt is made by XX-XY Athletics, a company started by former Levi Strauss executive Jennifer Sey who was forced out of her position at that company when she began speaking up to criticize Covid-related school closures and male participation in women’s sports, among other leftist shibboleths.
Adair, who is a fan of what she calls “word” shirts, thought nothing of wearing the t-shirt to the orientation event. She didn’t consider it controversial and students were not even present on school grounds on the day in question. “It’s just a shirt that I have that I wear,” she explained. “It’s just biologically factual.”
She owns several other shirts with factual slogans including one that reads “Math Facts Matter, 3×3=9.”
Yet a week later, Adair was hauled into the office by school district administrators to defend her fashion choices. She was told that an anonymous complaint was made about her t-shirt.
“I got sat down and read like a reprimand and was asked questions like what was my intent,” Adair described. “I was told not to wear it again.”
The Colorado Springs school district where Adair teaches does have a policy forbidding clothing that is explicitly political or “disruptive to the educational environment.” That district officials view the simple statement of fact on her t-shirt as either of those things reveals much more about the leftist ideological capture of the district than it does about Adair’s conduct.
But Adair says she didn’t see her shirt as overtly political or disruptive — especially since there were no students present at the training event.
“I mean, I just grab a shirt I feel like wearing that day,” Adair said, defending her choice to wear the shirt. “I just wear these shirts because they’re facts. I just feel like someone has to be stating the truth.”
She has also witnessed far more obvious political apparel in school hallways. “Over her decades of teaching, Adair said she has ‘seen it all’ in terms of teachers wearing LGBTQ+ gear to school, including T-shirts, badges and pins with images indicating support for people who identify as lesbian, gay, transgender, queer and related descriptors,” reports the Denver Gazette.
Clearly, in Colorado Springs, as in the WNBA, where two teenage girls were screamed at by a team owner for wearing similar shirts, double standards apply.
Adair has already proven her mettle in standing up against the behemoth far-left teachers’ unions. In 2021, she helped in the campaign to defeat two union-backed members of the district school board. Due to the loss of these two union-preferred members, the school board subsequently voted not to renew the district’s contract with the teacher’s union which “basically dictated how the administration could run the school district,” according to Adair.
Under the prior contract, “if the superintendent wanted to pay teachers extra money for having better scores or outcomes, he had to ask the union first,” Adair explained. “The union basically controlled the school district rather than the elected board.”
These efforts to reform the school board led to Adair being named “Teacher of the Year” by the Teachers Freedom Alliance (TFA), an organization seeking alternatives to traditional teachers’ unions. But, she suspects, it also put a target on her back.
“One time a local plumber wrote me a veiled, threatening email to my district email right after I went against the union during a school speech on a Wednesday night,” Adair told Fox News. “And I got to school, and district security had to have me file a police report.”
“You don’t mess around with the union,” she added. “So, am I surprised? No. Yes, I’m afraid. I know this is the beginning of them coming after me.”
“It’s not an isolated incident,” commented Ryan Walters, the CEO of the Teachers Freedom Alliance. “These are the types of teachers that, when you talk to parents around the country, they go, ‘I want my kids in a teacher’s class like that.’ And yet you see the way that they’re treated by the districts.”
In a school district guided by cowardice and propaganda, Adair’s courage to state the truth shines through.