Transcript
Grapevine
Episode 1: The Girl And The English Teacher
A mother named Sharla publicly accuses a high school teacher in Grapevine, Texas, of using a graphic novel called “The Prince and the Dressmaker” to convince her child to change genders. Reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton set out to investigate the allegation. Sharla’s child, Ren, and Ren’s English teacher, Em Ramser, tell them a different story.
BOARD PRESIDENT: Hi. We’re gonna call the special meeting for August 22nd, 2022, uh, to order, um --
ANTONIA HYLTON: It’s the start of another school board meeting in Grapevine, Texas. Historically, monthly meetings in this small wood-paneled boardroom have been low attendance, sleepy affairs. But, tonight, residents are packed shoulder to shoulder as district staff open the proceedings.
BOARD PRESIDENT: We will start with public comment.
BOARD CLERK: Next on the agenda -- can you all hear me? Can you hear me?
CROWD: No.
BOARD CLERK: Can you hear me now?
CROWD: Nope.
BOARD CLERK: We’re gonna need this microphone tonight. (LAUGH)
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: They’re gonna need that microphone because nearly 200 people have signed up to comment on the school board majority’s new plan for fighting what some of their supporters have been calling “woke gender ideology.”
BOARD CLERK: Can you hear me?
CROWD: Yes.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: After a moment of silence and both the U.S. and Texas pledges, the board president tells everybody to behave.
BOARD PRESIDENT: The presiding officer may request assistance from law enforcement officials to have the individual removed from the meeting.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Things start out cordial.
PARENT VOICE: These ideologies don’t belong in the classroom or the library. Why does it matter what pronouns a person uses?
ANTONIA HYLTON: But, eventually, the gloves come off.
SCOTT WESTERN: There’s only two genders. Guess what? Teachers shouldn’t be forced to use your freaking made-up fantasy pronouns.
BOARD CLERK: Our 111th speaker is --
PARENT VOICE: You do not embrace --
BOARD CLERK: -- Jessica.
PARENT VOICE: -- Christ’s teachings. You do not embrace --
BOARD CLERK: Jess --
RESIDENT VOICE: Christ’s teachings.
BOARD CLERK: Jessica.
BOARD PRESIDENT: Can we have an officer escort her out the room, please?
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ve probably gotten used to scenes like this one. That’s because something was awakened in America a few years ago. The primal anger, fear, and distrust that long defined national politics seeped all the way down to public school classrooms.
ANTONIA HYLTON: On this night in August 2022, dueling groups of parents, students, and activists have come to demand that the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, or GCISD, protect their children. (BACKGROUND VOICES)
RESIDENT VOICE: The biggest job is to protect the kids.
ANTONIA HYLTON: But no surprise, the two sides have vastly different ideas about what “protect the kids” really means.
STUDENT VOICE: Protect your queer students --
RESIDENT VOICE: Protect our children from being indoctrinated.
RESIDENT VOICE: Protect our children.
STUDENT VOICE: Protect us. Stop hurting kids with these politics.
ANTONIA HYLTON: We started covering the beginnings of this story nearly three years ago when conservative parents in the town of Southlake, Texas revolted against a plan that was also meant to protect kids from racial harassment in that case. In our series, Southlake, we documented how that fight started to evolve into a campaign to roll back LGBTQ acceptance in schools, and then watched it spread to every corner of the country, including here to Grapevine, the fast-diversifying Dallas suburb right next door.
PARENT VOICE: You guys are responsible for our kid’s future, and you’re robbing them of that.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Some of the Grapevine parents who are up in arms about critical race theory a year earlier are now just as vocal against policies and library books meant to make transgender kids feel welcome at school.
RESIDENT VOICE: Anyway, I’m happy to say that CRT is no longer a policy here. Parents’ rights, if there’s a book that’s -- controversial, put it in ano -- another section in it and then have parent consent. It just makes sense. It’s parents’ rights. We all -- we all want that.
ANTONIA HYLTON: “Parents’ rights.” “Parent consent.” These are major buzzwords in the new anti-LGBTQ culture war. But for one mom in the audience, they’re not merely an abstraction.
SHARLA: My name is Sharla and I live in GCISD.
ANTONIA HYLTON: About four hours into the meeting, a woman with short blonde hair and wire-framed glasses steps to the microphone. She has a warning for the other parents.
SHARLA: The doctrine of gender fluidity brings disorder, chaos, anarchy, and confusion into our schools and classrooms. A younger teaching generation is pushing and has been pushing that our kids can be any gender they want to be. This is biologically incorrect.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Young teachers pushing their dangerous ideas on vulnerable kids, including, Sharla says, her own. She tries to tell the story in the 60 seconds she’s been allotted.
SHARLA: Certain staff were labeling him, feeding him incorrect information, especially about his unaccepting mom. They gave him and other students unsolicited harmful information from their personal libraries, and doing so, they exploited my son’s gender dysphoria. Instead of the adult influences bringing my son’s issues to me, the parent, they told him I rejected him because he wanted to be female. This was so far from the truth.
BOARD CLERK: Thank you.
SHARLA: I lost my son --
BOARD CLERK: Thank you.
ANTONIA HYLTON: “I lost my son,” Sharla starts to say. And then, her time is up.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: The story Sharla told at this meeting got our attention because it’s exactly the nightmare that Republican politicians have been warning about: teachers going rogue, poisoning the minds of confused kids and convincing them that they should change genders. There’s never been evidence to back up those claims, but here was a mom saying publicly that it happened to her kid. When we heard her make that allegation, whether it was true or not, we knew something significant had happened in Grapevine. So we started looking into it. What we found was a different story: of a transgender child desperately wanting to be heard, a mother determined to honor her religion, and an English teacher caught in the middle.
ANTONIA HYLTON: And we discovered something else. This wasn’t just a story about one broken family. It was a story about a fringe Christian movement wielding newfound power and the revival of a long simmering quest to remake American education in God’s image.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: From the NBC News team that brought you Southlake, I’m Mike Hixenbaugh.
ANTONIA HYLTON: I’m Antonia Hylton.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: And this is Grapevine.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Episode 1. The Girl and the English Teacher.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: (CLOCK ALARMS) 6:00 AM on a school day, Grapevine High School’s most beloved -- and most despised -- English teacher is rushing to get ready. It’s now April 2023. Temperatures in North Texas are starting to climb. Blue bonnets are in bloom. And the school year -- the longest, hardest year of Em Ramser’s life -- is winding down. She used to love her job, but these days, she’s just trying to survive it.
EM RAMSER: I have to be there, like, ever so slightly early --
ANTONIA HYLTON: After brewing coffee and packing her lunch --
EM RAMSER: I make lunch, but then I’ll see if I actually get the chance to eat lunch.
ANTONIA HYLTON: She gets on the road. There was a time not so long ago that Ramser looked forward to heading to school in the morning. Back then, her English classroom was filled with books. Her walls were covered with colorful posters, and every day, she tried challenging her students to view literature and the world from a perspective different than their own.
EM RAMSER: I used to really like the drive in and out of work. Nowadays, it just makes me sad more than anything. And there are times I’m surprised that I haven’t, like, had a complete and utter breakdown. (LAUGHS)
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: At 27, Ramser is part of a generation of young educators whose entire careers have been shaped and disrupted by national politics. Older teachers tell her it didn’t used to be this way. Parents didn’t use to bombard them with angry emails about classroom library books. Administrators didn’t used to review teachers’ lesson plans and reflexively censor any assignments that might draw a complaint. Lately, it’s been a struggle to remember why she ever got into teaching. When she was in college in North Carolina, what Ramser wanted more than anything was to be a writer and a poet.
EM RAMSER: I used to swear up, down and sideways that I would never ever be a teacher.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Then one year, in 2015, she took a summer job at a special program with Duke University, teaching English to high school students. The program took her to Texas where she got to help lead a creative writing course. It was the first time she saw the power of writing to help kids understand themselves and the world around them. One afternoon, during her second summer with the program, the students hosted a poetry slam and some of them read their own writing. One girl seemed emotional as she walked to the front of the room, holding her paper. And soon, Ramser understood why. The teen used the poem to tell her classmates she was gay and afraid of what that might mean for her life. Afterward, the student darted out of the room, crying. Ramser, 20 at the time, followed.
EM RAMSER: I went and I talked to her. I’m like, “Hey, it’s -- it’s okay. Like, it’s okay to be scared, but you also don’t have to be scared because there is a world out there where you can be okay. Like, my mom’s gay. Like, I have a girlfriend. It -- it’s okay.” And that was the first time I’d ever told a student anything about, like, my personal life or my mom’s life because that was also a scary thing for me. But, like, it seemed like the kid needed to hear at that point that their only option wasn’t just to be sad and die, because that’s what they said in their poem was, like, every story they’d ever heard was of a gay person being sad or alone or dying. And, um, so they needed to see that it was possible to be an adult and be happy.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: At the end of that summer, the student handed Ramser a note that she’s kept ever since.
EM RAMSER: “Dear Emily, I’d like to begin this letter by saying how happy I was when you talked to me after I read my slam poem. Until now, I’ve never had a queer role model to look up to. But knowing that you’re almost out of college and you have a writing career, that all is well underway, it gave me a lot of hope. Your poems deserve to touch everyone’s life just like you touched mine. Thank you for being the role model I always needed in life. It meant the world to me.”
ANTONIA HYLTON: Reading that letter made Ramser think back on her own high school years, growing up in North Carolina as a queer student in a state that had recently passed a constitutional ban on same sex marriage. She never had an openly queer teacher. When a high school classmate shoved her to the ground and called her a slur because she had a rainbow ribbon on her backpack, she didn’t have a trusted adult to turn to on campus. The student’s note helped her discover her true calling.
EM RAMSER: I think that was the point where I knew that I wanted to become a teacher. And there was, like, so many pieces with that of, A, like, being somebody who could be there for a student and be that visible representation, but also seeing, like, how much it mattered to have a class where the content gave you some kind of hope for what you were doing or gave you an outlet, or, like, where you actually cared about what you were learning and found a way to make it applicable to your life. And ever since then, I just fell in love with it.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: The teen’s letter helped put Ramser on a path toward becoming a teacher. But something else was happening that year in 2016 that would end up shaping America’s political trajectory, and her future career in education, in ways she could not imagine.
ANTONIA HYLTON: For decades, evangelical Christians in America have felt like a persecuted minority whose power was waning. School prayer went away. “Happy holidays” became a standard Christmastime greeting. And in 2015, the Supreme Court made gay marriage the law of the land. There was a sense that American society was drifting towards something they didn’t recognize and didn’t want any part of: secular, politically correct, godless. And then, an unlikely messenger came along with a different vision.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Early on in the 2016 presidential election, then candidate Donald Trump gave a speech at a private Christian college in Iowa that quietly foreshadowed the political battles now raging through America’s public schools.
DONALD TRUMP: Sit down, everybody. Come on. We have plenty of time.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: This was the speech when Trump, still seen by many at the time as a long shot for the Republican nomination, famously bragged --
DONALD TRUMP: They say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible. (CROWD LAUGHING)
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: But there was another more significant message in his remarks that day. One that didn’t make as many splashy headlines.
DONALD TRUMP: I will tell you, Christianity is under siege, whether we want to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it. There’s nothing the politicians can do to you if you band together. You have too much power. But the Christians don’t use their power. (APPLAUSE) They don’t need your -- they don’t use your power. If I get elected president, we’re gonna be saying “Merry Christmas” again. Just remember. (APPLAUSE) And by the way, Christianity will have power because if I’m there, you’re gonna have plenty of power. You don’t need anybody else. You’re gonna have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.
ANTONIA HYLTON: “Christianity will have power.” Most folks might not have been paying close attention when Trump uttered that line in early 2016, but his evangelical base heard him clearly. A twice-divorced billionaire who bragged about the ease with which he groped women may have seemed a surprising figure to shepherd a resurgence of America’s religious right. But some Christians were emboldened by Trump’s blunt commentary about America’s moral decline and inspired by his willingness to wage cultural wars against their perceived enemies. And as president, Trump would keep up his end of the bargain, appointing Christian conservatives to the Supreme Court and inviting fundamentalist leaders directly into his inner circle. In the process, he breathes new life into an evangelical movement, seeking to return this country to its Christian roots, doing just what Trump said, taking power and imposing biblical values in public life. And they weren’t going to fight this crusade only in Washington or at the state legislatures. They were going to attack the problem at the local level, in the place that they’d identified as the very foundation of America’s moral downturn: inside its public schools.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: As a college senior, Em Ramser wasn’t thinking much about how Donald Trump’s rise to power and the forces it would unleash might shape her future in education. She was full of hope, feeling inspired by the prospect of making a career out of helping kids. It was that same year, in 2016, when Ramser learned from a mentor about a unique program for highly gifted students at a school district in North Texas. The ASPIRE Academy at the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District was the only program like it in the state. It provided special advanced placement courses and a custom curriculum in grades 1st through 12th.
EM RAMSER: It’s kind of one of those programs that’s, like, on the forefront of changing education and doing all of the things right.
ANTONIA HYLTON: After graduating, Ramser rearranged her life to maximize her chances of getting hired at the program. She moved to Texas, enrolled in an education master’s program, and made it her mission to get to Grapevine.
EM RAMSER: Like, that was my long-term goal. I thought, like, to get enough experience, be a good enough teacher, it would take me, like, 10 years to get in there. I did everything I could to, like, do the extra professional development, teach more, et cetera, just as much as I could do to become the kind of teacher that they would want.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Ramser ended up landing the job at ASPIRE much sooner than she imagined in the summer of 2020, just three years after moving to Texas.
EM RAMSER: And then I got in there and I did really, really good work for them. I had three students who got published in a book with the New York Times, uh, from work that they produced in my class. I had kids winning national writing awards. Um, it’s funny, I had a -- had a student describe me as the teacher who you kind of hate the whole time you’re in the class, but then once you leave, you realize how much you learned and how much you did, and you love them.
ANTONIA HYLTON: That student wasn’t the only one saying it. Throughout our reporting in Grapevine, we’ve talked to a dozen teens and some parents who’ve told us Ramser has been their favorite teacher from all of their years at GCISD. She’s the type of teacher who shows up at student theater performances and weekend dance recitals to cheer from the audience. After some of her students found out she has a thing for dinosaurs, they started buying her dinosaur stuffies, and soon they filled her room with them.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Her first year at the district, though, was an adjustment. Grapevine was more conservative than she’d imagined. The town is located at the end of a runway at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The roar of jet engines is part of the soundtrack of life here. Like Southlake, Grapevine’s more elite neighbor to the west, airline execs and other white-collar workers have flocked to the city, hoping to get their kids a topnotch education. Here, like lots of Texas towns, religion and community go hand in hand. Ramser didn’t have a good answer when folks asked, as part of the standard Grapevine welcome, “Have you found a church?” Her hair partially buzzed at that time and her signature colorful pants made her stand out among the other teachers.
EM RAMSER: If we’re blatantly honest, I looked like a gay person in a school where nobody else looked like a gay person. (LAUGHS)
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Plus, she started in the middle of the pandemic. Half of her kids were remote, the other half in person, and a lot of them were struggling. One freshman, in particular, didn’t seem very eager to be there.
EM RAMSER: In some ways, it reminded me a lot of myself when I was in high school, initially, just because, like, I was the sad, kind of quiet kid at times, who’s like, “Please don’t talk to me, I wanna work on my art or go, like, play a video game and I do not wanna talk to an adult.” And that’s the sense that I got. “Just let me sit back, I’ll be fine.” Um, and those are always the kids I pay more attention to at times, because you’re always a little bit worried.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: There was one other thing that made this student stand out. At the beginning of the year, Ramser asked all of her kids to fill out a form, telling her a little bit about themselves. That included what names and pronouns they wanted to use in class. This student, listed as a boy in district records, asked to be called by female pronouns and an alternative name: Ren. Em Ramser was happy to accommodate the teenager’s request, but she had no idea what this shy, cerebral student was going through at home or that Ren’s mother, Sharla, would end up setting off a cascade of events that would lead Ramser to question her career choices and, ultimately, her future in Grapevine.
REN: Well, right now I’m playing, uh, Bloons Tower Defense 6.
ANTONIA HYLTON: This spring, we went to go see Ren, the student from Em Ramser’s first year at Grapevine. Today, she lives near Portland, Oregon with her father, Rich, and stepmom, Grace. Like a lot of teenagers, when she’s not at school, Ren spends most of her time playing video games.
REN: It’s a pretty fun game. I -- I like playing this. I play this with friends a lot.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Ren goes by a different name now. But to protect her identity, we’re not using it. We’re also not using her family’s last names. With all the ugly rhetoric about transgender people these days, Rich is worried about exposing her to harassment.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: At 16, she’s been through a lot. But, lately, she’s been doing better.
REN: Does anyone wanna play checkers?
RICH: Um, I think that needs to happen.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: And she’s gotten really, really good at checkers.
REN: Yeah, yeah. No. That’s exactly -- yeah.
RICH: You know, until now, I’ve just privately gotten my butt kicked.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: It’s clear after only a few minutes --
RICH: No, that would be a bad move.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: -- Rich, a 65-year-old director of engineering at a Fortune 500 company --
RICH: Can you?
REN: Mm-hmm.
RICH: All right. Okay.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: -- is no match for his academically gifted high school junior.
RICH: There it is.
REN: There we go.
RICH: And that’s pretty much the way most of the checkers games go. That’s it. Absolutely.
REN: Yeah. (LAUGHS) All right. Who’s next? (LAUGHTER)
RICH: I’m all right.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Later, Rich told us it warmed his heart to see his child smiling, even if it was just over a board game. Ren hasn’t exactly had the idyllic childhood that he’d pictured when he and his ex-wife, Sharla, brought their first and only child home from the hospital in 2007, albeit with a different name and a different gender on the birth certificate. After years of trying and failing to conceive, Rich and Sharla had all but given up on having a baby.
RICH: Actually, Ren’s middle name has a -- a kind of a biblical reference to a, uh, of somebody that had given up hope.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Rich says those early years, as a family of three in the San Francisco Bay area and later Oregon were filled with joy and wonder, but also heartache. No matter how much he and Sharla wanted to become parents, when they finally did, their relationship changed. Rich says it was hard on Sharla and on their marriage.
RICH: After the baby was born, in retrospect, I think it impacted her emotionally more than I recognized at that time.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: We really wanted to hear Sharla’s perspective on her marriage and everything that’s happened between her and her child. We reached out numerous times with phone calls and emails, but she declined to talk to us. So we only have bits of this story from her point of view, based on messages Rich shared and what she said publicly. She wrote about her and Rich’s divorce in a blog post this year.
ANTONIA HYLTON: After her baby was born, Sharla says she threw herself into motherhood, giving her undivided attention to her child, her miracle. She wrote, quote, “All I wanted was to take care of our son. My husband had become jealous. He didn’t understand me anymore.” Rich was traveling frequently for work, but Sharla had left her career as a software engineer to become a stay-at-home mom. She felt abandoned and alone. She was struggling emotionally, but she says, Rich ignored her pleas for help. When we asked Rich what happened between them, he slouched back in his seat and took a long breath. He saw eventually that his wife was in pain, but he just wanted to get back to the way things used to be, back when he and Sharla were young and carefree.
RICH: I could have certainly done, um, a much better job of -- of giving her the comfort that she needed at that time.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Sharla described a night when she was at rock bottom and God appeared to her. She said a wave of peace washed over her, and she finally understood her purpose, writing, quote, “I now knew God was real and he existed. I believed. I only cared about pursuing him.” Sharla started attending a church near their home in Oregon, but Rich refused to come along.
RICH: A lot of that particular church’s beliefs ran counter to some of my own values. And so, she became more and more evangelical, I -- I think it’s fair to say, and that somewhat put me off, um, because my own beliefs were, you know, much more kind of traditional Catholic.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Rich filed for divorce before Ren’s 5th birthday. Sharla followed with a filing of her own, seeking primary custody, and a few years later, permission to move to Texas where her family lived. Rich fought to stop the move, but an Oregon judge granted the request, turning him into a long distance dad. Rich at least got to keep Ren during the summers and on holidays, and one weekend each month during the school year. As a result, Ren spent a lot of time as an elementary schooler flying solo back and forth between Texas and Oregon.
ANTONIA HYLTON: I hear you got lots of flight miles --
REN: Yes.
ANTONIA HYLTON: -- at a young age.
REN: A lot.
RICH: And upgrades.
REN: Yeah.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Your -- your dad told us a story about how they’d give you Sprite in first class, (LAUGHS) but he didn’t want you to have any sugar. Is that true?
REN: Yeah. I guess you -- you, dad, you had like a -- you were, like, really anti-sugar for some reason. (LAUGHTER) He just, like, hated buying me lollipops in the stores. You hated it.
RICH: (LAUGHS) True.
ANTONIA HYLTON: The arrangement was hard on everyone. But Rich realized he was fortunate to be able to remain a fixture in his child’s life from so far away. Many of their visits were spent outdoors, camping in the Redwoods, or skiing at Mount Hood. It was on one of those outings when Ren, at age 12, gave Rich the first clue that his child’s identity might be more complicated than he realized.
RICH: I remember this very clearly that, um, while we were out hiking, Ren made this one observation that I -- uh, “All my friends are girls,” and I wasn’t exactly sure how -- how to interpret that. In a way, I just let it go ‘cause kids go through different kinds of developments and so forth. And, um, not long after that, she made kind of an observation of, “I wonder if I’m a girl.”
ANTONIA HYLTON: Rich didn’t know what to say.
RICH: I -- I may have responded back with something like, “Why -- why do you think you’re a girl?” And that’s my first kind of memories of her, um, starting to understand that her gender wasn’t the same as a lot of the kids around her. It was about -- I wanna say about 18 months after that, that she came out, you know, demonstratively, where she said, “Dad, I have something to tell you.”
ANTONIA HYLTON: They were on a long car ride. Ren was now 13.
RICH: And she was very, very serious about it. This isn’t Ren’s normal personality. And she said, “Dad, I think I’m a girl.” And, uh -- and then, you know what, as a dad, you get hit with this stuff and it’s like, oh my God, nobody -- there’s -- this isn’t in the instruction manual, what do you do, you know? And so, um, I remember it very clearly, um, ‘cause -- I blundered into the right response ‘cause I had never had any preparation for this, whatsoever. I really hadn’t thought about it very much. I said, “Is that it? Is that what you were so worried about telling me?” I said, what’s important to me is how you treat other people and how, you know, you live by your values. And, uh, if you want -- if -- if you wanted, you know, present yourself as a girl, uh, I -- I don’t see why that makes a difference. What makes a difference to me is how you live your life and I -- that’s what I want, you to grow up to be as somebody that, you know, changes society and is kind to other people and, you know, finishes your homework, and those are the things that matter.
ANTONIA HYLTON: For Ren, that moment was a huge relief. She’d been wrestling over her gender for a while by then. It felt good to finally tell someone other than her best friends at school. Her dad, having grown up in a different era, did his best to understand and accommodate his child, sometimes messing up along the way. Rich, who had since remarried, struggled at first to use the right gender titles around the house. So he and his wife made a pronoun jar and dropped a dollar in every time they said “he” instead of “she.”
REN: It was good. Obviously, my dad is supportive. So it was just nice to be able to, like, get that off my chest, you know? So it was very relieving. It was nice.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: But back home in Grapevine, after coming out to her dad, Ren was, at first, afraid to raise the subject with her mom. For years, the two had attended weekend services a town over in Southlake at Gateway Church. The megachurch, like many other evangelical congregations, teaches that homosexuality is a sin and that it’s immoral for people assigned male at birth to identify as girls.
REN: I didn’t think my mom would be supportive. I don’t know if I was -- I had anything to be certain from, but I just thought that she wouldn’t be supportive just ‘cause of the way she was.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Ren finally built the courage to talk to Sharla later that year, around the time she was entering eighth grade. Once again, Ren sprung the conversation while on a car ride.
REN: I just tried easing into it, like, um, getting her general opinion instead of just outing myself. And I mean, I knew I was kind of outing myself ‘cause no one just says stuff like that just randomly like, “Hey, what do you think about trans people?” Uh, it didn’t go great, obviously.
ANTONIA HYLTON: After Ren made it clear why she was asking about her mom’s views on transgender people, Sharla emailed Rich in the fall of 2019 to tell him she was worried about their child, writing, quote, “I have assured him, I will love him no matter what, and we will get through this together.” But to Sharla, helping Ren get through this meant seeking help to overcome what she’d begun calling her child’s gender confusion. That September, Sharla took Ren to see a Christian counselor, who according to his website, promises to help patients become, quote, “the person they were created to be.” In later messages to Rich, Sharla said she believed this was what was needed to save their child from an eternity of suffering. She wrote of praying for Ren to turn to God and, quote, “flee from immorality” so that their child’s soul would not be lost. But to Rich, the counseling program sounded like conversion therapy, a practice that’s been banned in 21 states, but is legal in Texas.
RICH: You know, instead of affirming your child, you’re -- you’re telling your child that, you know, “I don’t like who you are and I want you to be different.” And of course, this kind of therapy has been proven, you know, to increase, um, suicide, to increase drug use and, of course, runaways, that a lot of kids just wanna get out of that kind of atmosphere and you can’t blame them.
ANTONIA HYLTON: The initial visit with the counselor was unproductive. Ren, still 13 at that time, remembers being intentionally difficult, refusing to fully answer the therapist’s questions. They didn’t return for a second appointment. But Sharla didn’t give up trying to convince her child to change.
REN: She would get really religious about it. Like, she would tell me that, um, that God made me the way I was meant to be.
ANTONIA HYLTON: At the same time, she was sending Rich texts and emails, scolding him for his approach to parenting. At one point, she texted, quote, “You are his father and should be guiding him in moral ways, not accepting whatever sexuality he wants to assign himself.”
RICH: It was funny how two people can speak the same language and not communicate. What she wrote me was, you know, “God made Ren and made Ren, you know, the way God wanted Ren.” And I answered back, “Exactly.” That’s exactly right, you know.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Ren, meanwhile, learned to hide her true identity when she was at her mother’s house. Only at school did she feel free to present herself as female. That was especially true the following school year, during her freshman English class.
REN: Well, a lot of the ASPIRE program teachers were -- were very supportive, um, Ms. Ramser especially.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Ramer didn’t know it at that time because Ren was so quiet, but her English class meant a lot to her.
REN: She just took extra care in -- in getting to know you and making sure that you were comfortable. She just made you feel safe, and she was just kind. She was very easy to talk to, um, and she was a good teacher.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: But even with that support, it wasn’t easy living two lives. Ren, now 14, started to feel suffocated at home. She was losing motivation to keep up the facade and she was getting desperate.
ANTONIA HYLTON: Rich sensed that his daughter was struggling, but he didn’t realize the extent of it.
REN: I felt -- I felt for you so deeply and -- and wanted to take your pain and bring it inside of me, but I don’t know that I ever realized just how deep that pain went. I -- I didn’t realize how entirely hopeless that you felt at that time.
ANTONIA HYLTON: One day, after another argument with her mom, about midway through her freshman year, Ren decided she needed to get out of there.
REN: It felt kind of hopeless just trying to talk to her, be around her, and it always felt like that, you know. She was kind of like a brick wall to talk to at times. So I just -- I don’t know, I -- I felt like I had to do something. I wanted to do something, and then I did.
ANTONIA HYLTON: As Ren slipped out the door for school that morning, in January 2021, she decided she was going to get away from her mother and leave Grapevine for good.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: When Ren didn’t show up for class on the morning of January 20th, 2021, her teacher, Em Ramser, was worried. Ramser asked another freshman if she knew what was up, but the classmate was also surprised by her friend’s unannounced absence.
EM RAMSER: Like, you know you get like that sudden feeling of that -- that drop in your stomach where you know is something is really wrong? That’s kind of what I had in that moment.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Ren rarely missed class and never without a note from home. So Ramser went down to the office and asked whether anyone had heard from her.
EM RAMSER: And they called home for me, and then we found out that Ren had been dropped off at school, but had never made it to any classes. All I knew is that one of my students was missing.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Thanks, in part, to Ramser’s gut feeling, Sharla was able to launch a search for her child. Some of Ren’s classmates also began searching. None of them seemed to be aware that Ren had caught a ride to a Greyhound bus station, where she’d bought a ticket to Denver, as far northwest as $150 could take her.
REN: I didn’t really know where I was gonna go, what -- what was gonna happen. I didn’t know.
ANTONIA HYLTON: She remembers feeling a rush of conflicting emotions.
REN: Scared, excited, sad, happy. It was a lot.
ANTONIA HYLTON: The bus made it 300 miles to West Texas before authorities learned a teen runaway was on board. An officer boarded the bus during a stop, pulled Ren off, and took her to a CPS office, where she spoke with a social worker and waited for her mother and grandmother to come pick her up.
REN: They had to come and get me after I tried to do that, so it was awkward, uh, and it was frustrating, and I wasn’t very happy about anything that happened.
ANTONIA HYLTON: You had just tried to leave. You don’t wanna be there anymore and you’re brought back. What’s going through your mind?
REN: Um, more feelings of complete hopelessness. I just felt like there was nothing to do anymore.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Back at Grapevine High School that evening, Ramser got a message from one of her students. Ren had been found and she was safe. Later, Sharla emailed Ramser to let her know that her child would not be attending school in person for a while. Given Ren’s runaway attempt, that made sense to Ramser. At that time, she had no idea about the conflict at home. Ren mostly kept to herself, she said. They’d rarely discussed anything beyond class assignments or video games. But then, a few days later, Ramser got a call from her principal.
EM RAMSER: “Hey, there’s this mom who’s mad at you (LAUGHS) and, uh, about a book,” and I’m like, “Oh, okay, what’s -- what’s going on?”
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Sharla, it turns out, had found a book in Ren’s room. It was called The Prince and the Dressmaker, and it had Ramser’s name written on the side.
ANTONIA HYLTON: The graphic novel tells the story of a prince who likes to wear dresses. But fearing rejection from the king and queen, the prince keeps his fashion hobby hidden. When his secret is finally revealed, the prince runs away from home, only to return in the end and discover that his mother and father still love him, no matter what he wears. It’s a popular book. Universal, which is owned by the same parent company as NBC News, purchased the film rights in 2018 and was working with the songwriters from Disney’s Frozen franchise to develop it as a movie.
EM RAMSER: This book was one that I had actually done a study on when I was in grad school, and so I really enjoyed it.
ANTONIA HYLTON: The Prince and the Dressmaker was part of a wave of new LGBTQ affirming books marketed to kids in recent years. Teachers and school librarians snapped them up, partly so that queer teens would feel seen and accepted, partly so that straight kids could learn more about their peers, and partly because new research showed that kids read more when they have access to books that reflect their identities.
EM RAMSER: And so I’d given it to a kid at one point and it spread like wildfire through my classroom of -- like the kids would take it, um, home. And then on the weekend, they’d pass it along to their friends who were doing the learning from home, online, and then they would read it and then, like, pass it the next house, and then to the next house. And they were all obsessed with this book.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Earlier that fall, one of Ren’s friends had come into class after finishing The Prince and the Dressmaker. The student handed it to Ren and said, “You need to read this.” Ramser noticed the exchange.
EM RAMSER: You read this, I’m like, “Sure, give it a shot.” I was like, “If you read anything, I’ll be thrilled.” And, um, so Ren had taken it home, and it had been months, and I hadn’t thought of the book, I hadn’t seen the book come back. It was just gone. And you know, when you’re a classroom teacher, you’re like, if a book mysteriously disappears, it’s just a loss you count. Like, you expect it. So I had completely forgotten that, I think, Ren had actually had the book at that point.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Now, according to the principal, Sharla was alleging that Ramser had forced Ren to read the book and that its plot had helped inspire her child to run away.
EM RAMSER: And I was like, “No, I didn’t make Ren read it.” And also, if you notice at the end of the book, it says you should never run away, that that’s never an option. The book portrays it as being like that your family will always love and support you, even though we know that that is unfortunately not always true, it seems. I, you know, explained it to my principal, they did their little investigation, found I did nothing wrong.
ANTONIA HYLTON: At that time in early 2021, parents had not yet started flooding public schools with demands to ban library books and Sharla’s initial complaint didn’t seem like a big deal. Ren spent the rest of the school year attending classes over a video feed, a pandemic era accommodation. Occasionally, Ramser noticed Sharla listening in on her lectures, but thought little of it. Then, on one of the final days of school before summer break, Ramser found her copy of The Prince and the Dressmaker lying face down outside her classroom door. She figured Ren’s mom had finished reading it and changed her mind about the whole thing.
EM RAMSER: I got my book back. Mom must have not found anything wrong with it. I’m sure we’d move on. We’re good.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: But Ramser was wrong. They weren’t good, and things were about to get a lot worse. That spring, a new political movement was emerging a town over in the affluent city of Southlake. The fight there would turn out to be the leading edge of a tsunami that was about to crash into America schools. It would make Ramser’s conflict with a mom over a library book look insignificant. In the coming months, political and religious activists would open a coordinated and well-funded campaign to exalt God in the halls of public schools in North Texas. They were going to teach kids to respect biblical truth and protect them from modern ideas about gender and identity, and that would mean getting rid of, quote-unquote, “poison teachers” like Em Ramser.
ANTONIA HYLTON: That’s next time on Grapevine.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: From NBC News Studios, this is the first of six episodes of Grapevine, a series about faith, power -- and what it means to protect children -- in an American suburb. Grapevine was written, reported and hosted by me, Mike Hixenbaugh.
ANTONIA HYLTON: And by me, Antonia Hylton. The series is produced by Frannie Kelley. Our senior editor is Julie Shapiro, with story editing by Michelle Garcia. We had production support from Emily Berk and Eva Ruth Moravec. Fact checking by Janina Huang. Sound design by Rick Kwan. Original music by Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Bryson Barnes is our technical director. Alexa Danner is our executive producer. Marisa Reilly is the director of production and Liz Cole runs NBC News Studios.
MIKE HIXENBAUGH: Special thanks to Reid Cherlin for helping us get this project started.
