The teachers union has been running American schools like a political machine for decades.
Now one of its longtime enemies just became their newest target.
The reprimand came a week later, buried in a questionnaire, and the union's fingerprints are all over it.
Colorado Teacher Targeted for Challenging Teachers Union Control
Stacy Adair is an award-winning Colorado teacher named Teacher of the Year at the 2025 Teacher Freedom Summit – the kind of educator parents beg to have their children assigned to.
Earlier this month, Adair showed up to a routine back-to-school professional development training wearing one of her "word" shirts – the same kind she has worn for years without incident.
The shirt read: XX ≠ XY.
Nobody said a word to her that day.
A week later, her district called her in, handed her a questionnaire demanding she explain why she wore the shirt, and ordered her never to wear clothing with "controversial messaging" again.
"They get an anonymous complaint — nobody said anything that day," Adair told Fox News. "I would say people don't even know what it means, honestly."
"I told one of my friends that yesterday about getting in trouble, and she goes, 'That's math,'" Adair said. "I said, 'Well, no, it's actually genetics.'"
Stacy Adair Helped Break the Teachers Union Grip on Her School Board
Adair says she has expected retaliation for years – and it has nothing to do with a T-shirt.
In 2021, she helped drive two union-backed school board members out of office in her district.
Without them, the board allowed the teachers union contract to quietly lapse.
"It basically dictated how the administration could run the school district," Adair said of the old contract. "So, if the superintendent wanted to pay teachers extra money for having better scores or outcomes, he had to ask the union first."
The union controlled the school while the elected board sat on the sidelines.
"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," she said. District security had her file a police report.
"You don't mess around with the union," Adair said. "So, am I surprised? No. Yes, I'm afraid. I know this is the beginning of them coming after me."
Teachers Union Gender Ideology Silences Biological Facts in Classrooms
Ryan Walters, the former Oklahoma State Superintendent who now leads the Teachers Freedom Alliance, says what happened to Adair is playing out in school districts from Colorado to Florida.
"It's not an isolated incident," Walters told Fox News.
"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."
Walters left his Oklahoma post in late 2025 specifically to build a national organization that could fight back – and cases like Adair's are exactly what he is fighting.
"You tally up these types of incidents across the country over two decades and guess what you've got?" he said. "You've got a lack of other viewpoints in the staff and the employees. And so that's where we've seen this ideology being pushed in schools, even in red states."
This is not new. In 2023, a Texas biology professor was fired from St. Philip's College in San Antonio after students complained he taught that sex is determined by X and Y chromosomes – the same fact Adair's shirt states.
Dr. Johnson Varkey had taught human anatomy for 20 years without a single complaint before administrators ended his job.
The union playbook runs the same way every time – wait for an anonymous complaint, then bury the teacher in paperwork until she quits.
Stacy Adair has spent five years refusing to quit, and she is not starting now.
"I just wear these shirts because they're facts," she said. "I just feel like someone has to be stating the truth."
The NEA and AFT have spent decades making sure teachers like Stacy Adair understand the cost of disagreeing with them.
Sources:
- Leo Briceno, "Teacher who battled union fears she's being targeted after shirt complaint: 'I'm afraid,'" Fox News, August 22, 2026.
- Ward Clark, "Colorado Teacher Now Targeted for Wearing Biological Truth Shirt," RedState, August 22, 2026.
- "Biology professor fired for teaching chromosomes determine sex reinstated," Fox News, February 2024.
