Teacher who battled union fears she’s being targeted after shirt complaint: ‘I’m afraid’

Stacey Adair, an award-winning teacher from Colorado, is facing scrutiny after a complaint that accused her of spreading anti-transgender messaging by wearing an “XX ≠ XY” chromosome t-shirt to a professional development training event earlier this month.

“They get an anonymous complaint — nobody said anything that day,” Adair, who was named teacher of the year at the 2025 Teacher Freedom Summit, said. “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.’ I said, ‘well, no, it’s actually genetics.’”

A week after the meeting, Adair was called in, given a questionnaire about why she had worn the shirt and was instructed not to wear clothing with controversial messaging going forward.

The reprimand has made Adair fearful for her job and worried that she might receive heightened scrutiny down the road. But beyond her individual case, onlookers like Ryan Walters, the CEO of the Teachers Freedom Alliance (TFA), an organization advocating for alternatives to teacher unions, believe her situation is emblematic of larger power struggles in schools over ideology.

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“It’s not an isolated incident,” Walters said.

“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.”

Adair’s case began when she selected one of her many “word” shirts to the professional development event — a routine training for teachers during the back-to-school season.

She noted that her shirts aren’t out of the ordinary for her. In fact, she threw on a “Math facts” t-shirt to meet a member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet — Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.

She noted that the school district has a policy against apparel that is political or “disruptive to the educational environment.”

But Adair said she didn’t see her shirt as overtly political or disruptive — especially as there were no students present at the training event.

“I mean I just grab a shirt I feel like wearing that day,” Adair said.

“I just wear these shirts because they’re facts. I just feel like someone has to be stating the truth,” she added.

Asked why she thinks she might face future repercussions for the XX ≠ XY shirt, Adair said she’s been expecting this for some time.

Long before the write-up, she helped strip the teacher union’s grip on her district.

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In 2021, she helped topple two members of her school board who were backed by the union. Without them, the board allowed the district’s contract with the teachers union to lapse by not voting to renew it.

“It basically dictated how the administration could run the school district,” Adair said of the 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 basically controlled the school district rather than the elected board.”

Since helping flip the seats and speaking out against the union’s influence, Adair said she has felt like there was a target on her back — sometimes literally.

“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 said. “And I got to school, and district security had to have me file a police report.”

“You don’t mess around with the union. So, am I surprised? No. Yes, I’m afraid. I know this is the beginning of them coming after me,” she added.

Adair noted that she doesn’t have evidence that the teachers unions are behind the anonymous tip that sparked the review.

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Even so, Walters, the CEO of the Teachers Freedom Alliance, said it is emblematic of some of the pressure he’s seen firsthand in other cases across the country applied to teachers who question their authority. He believes cases like Adair’s are a key reason he says schools have become proxies for political control.

“It’s like, well, you tally up these types of incidents across the country over two decades and guess what you’ve got? You’ve got a lack of other viewpoints in the staff and the employees,” Walters said.

“And so that’s where we’ve seen this ideology being pushed in schools, even in red states where people go, ‘how did this happen?’ Well, take this incident, multiply it by a thousand and apply it on a daily basis.”