A TikTok video of a Cedar City substitute teacher in which she said she was causing “political unrest” by discussing her gender pronouns with students and displaying a water bottle with an anti-Bible sticker was featured on the @LibsofTikTok Twitter account Monday. The video has reached nearly three million Twitter impressions and one million views.
In an interview with the Deseret News, the woman identified herself as 21-year-old Audrey Wells. She said many of her comments were an attempt at “humor” and she criticized parents who complained to the district.
In the video, Wells describes her day as a substitute teacher at the southern Utah school and said she is the “political unrest that Cedar City needs.” Besides dying her hair purple and displaying a couple of tattoos, Wells said she introduced herself to the students with the preferred pronouns of “she/any.” The video ends with Wells noticing she left a water bottle with a “I don’t care what the Bible says” sticker on it at the front of the classroom.
Wells said she told a high school 10th grade class she uses the pronoun “any” because she “responds to all genders” and that way no one can misgender her.
Wells told the Deseret News the video is from her substitute teaching experience at Cedar High School last spring. She said she also substituted in elementary and middle school classes in the Iron County School District but only for a total of a few weeks.
The school district could not confirm it had employed Wells last school year. “The district uses an outside temporary employment agency for substitute teachers. We currently contract with a different agency than we used in the spring and do not have access to records of substitutes and jobs they completed last year,” the school district spokeswoman, Shauna Lund, said in a statement.
Lund did verify that Wells isn’t a current employee and that the school district “does not have a policy about sharing pronouns.”
Only a “minimal” number of parents have contacted the school district about the video, and Lund said they have emphasized to concerned parents that Wells is no longer a teacher and that the video was from the spring.
Wells said she was surprised her video was getting national attention eight months later. She had to look up what Libs of TikTok was Monday night after her friends told her what had happened.
What is Libs of TikTok?
The Libs of TikTok Twitter account, which reposted Wells’ video, is run by Chaya Raichik, a conservative activist who aggregates public videos primarily from LGBTQ users on social media working in education. Popular media and political figures have referenced her content when speaking about what they see as “woke” ideology taught in K-12 schools. The controversial account has amassed over 1.8 million followers.
Raichik told the New York Post last year she hopes to expose the “lefty lunacy” of some teachers and the “grooming and indoctrination” of students in schools. In response to her posts, school districts have terminated multiple teachers across the country.
Taken out of context?
Wells said her video was made mostly out of jest and for the benefit of her online LGBTQ friends. “Most of the students didn’t even care,” Wells said, about sharing her pronouns in class.
In the video, Wells said one student asked her to explain why she uses “any” as a pronoun. “Any” refers to Wells identifying with all genders, she told the student. “That way no one can misgender me.”
A student then looked up from the front row and said aloud, “Wow, IQ 1000.” Which Wells said she “thought was super funny,” so she made a TikTok video about it.
Wells was unfamiliar with Libs of TikTok until Monday when her video from last April was reposted to millions of subscribers. After searching through the other LGBTQ videos that Libs of TikTok reposts, Wells said she thought most of the videos are “made by queer people for queer people.”
She said the videos are made with a “queer subculture humor” that is both sarcastic and ironic. Calling Raichik “mean” and “hateful,” Wells said she thought Raichik was “instilling queer fear” in conservatives on Twitter.
When asked about the “political unrest” comment she made in the video, Wells dismissed it as a joke. “I meant that more sarcastically, like, ‘isn’t it funny that people think this was political because it’s obviously not,’” she said.
Despite what she said in the video, Wells said she doesn’t see what she did as political or an attempt to foist her ideology on students.
Wells dismissed the concerns of Cedar City parents who complained to the district about her video, and who may have seen her video as evidence of activism or bringing politics into the classroom. She said they should research the “harm homophobia and transphobia” can cause.
Wells said a number of the complaints she received online were from individuals concerned she was “mocking the Bible in front of kids.” She dismissed these and said she views religion as “indoctrination.” Wells acknowledged that her anti-Bible sticker on her water bottle was at the front of the class, but said she never referenced it in any conversations with students.