She asked students their pronouns. Locals called her a “groomer.” Now she’s suing.

A South Carolina middle school teacher filed a defamation and libel lawsuit against five people — including a state representative — for publicly accusing her of “grooming” kids after she gave her students a questionnaire asking for their personal pronouns. The defendants said her “secret sex survey” violated state laws and school policies that should revoke her teaching license.

Mardy A. Burleson is a computer sciences teacher at Hilton Head Island Middle School (HHIMS), located in a South Carolina coastal community of 38,069 that is predominantly white, Christian, and over the age of 45. Burleson has a transgender son whose friend died by suicide years ago because they couldn’t come out to their family. So, to help support her own students, Burelson began giving them a beginning-of-term survey entitled, “Who is behind those eyes?”

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She had conducted the survey for several years without complaints and asked students about their families, preferred learning styles, favorite media, hobbies, and accomplishments. It also asked their “preferred pronouns” and “Do you want me to use your pronouns in class and in messages home or is it private between you and me?”

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“I promise to keep these just between you and me,” Burleson stated at the top of the survey. Parents could view blank copies of the survey on their children’s Google Classroom accounts.

Around January 9, 2023, an HHIMS student showed the survey to her father, David Cook, a local self-described “Dad-vocate who has supported recent efforts to ban “pornographic” books from school libraries.

The next day, Cook complained to the HHIMS principal, and Burleson removed the pronoun questions to avoid further conflict, court documents state. Cook also demanded a meeting with Burleson and school officials, but he claimed the school “hid” them from him.

Cook then allegedly shared the survey with Corey Allen Whittington, author of the right-wing blog The Overton Report. In a post, Whittington accused Burelson of “grooming pre-teen students into an overtly sexualized lifestyle” and said that she “transed her own kid,” a reference to her trans son.

“[Burelson] spent years up to this point transitioning her own daughter into a ‘son’ and has made no secret expressing her own full-fledged support for the controversial ideas behind gender ideology,” Whittington wrote.

For Burleson, Whittington’s post crossed a line by mentioning her trans son. Her son faced increased school bullying because of it, she said.

On his podcast and social media posts, Whittington accused Burleson of being a “predatory” teacher “indoctrinating 8th graders” by giving “secret surveys about sex to literal pre-teens and children” and then telling them to “keep [it a] secret from administrators and parents.”

“Is there any other way to define somebody who encourages that type of thing in children?” Whittington asked on his podcast. “Is there any other way to define them than a groomer? What are you doing if not grooming them to accept kink and fetish at a young age?”

Whittington posted a link to his blog post on Facebook around January 25, 2023. Cook commented by posting a screenshot of an article from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) entitled, “Grooming: Know the Warning Signs” with the caption, “I’ll just leave this right here for you Corey Allen.” The article defined grooming as “manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.”

In subsequent public comments, Cook accused Burleson of violating school district policies and her employment contract for administering a secret survey to students without parental consent.

Another local conservative activist, Elizabeth Szalai—who had previously issued the district superintendent a list of books to be removed from school shelves for “adult” content—called Burelson a “groomer.” On her own Facebook page, she would make school personnel “pay” if they ever kept a secret from her about her child, promising to “exhaust every effort to have their license revoked and ensure that they never have access to children again.”

Michael Covert, a former Beaufort County Council member who joined Szalai’s book-banning campaign, reportedly said on his broadcast, Beaufort House of Cards, that Burleson was a “grooming” “pervert” who is “unfit” to teach. State Rep. Thomas Beach (R), a current member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, joined the pile-on, calling Burleson a “groomer” on Facebook.

Of Burleson’s five main harassers, only Cook has a student in local schools. Two of the harassers don’t even live in Beaufort County.

Burleson explained the reasoning behind her survey and its pronoun question to The Packet. Teachers are taught to be trusted adults that students can confide in, she said, adding, “A trusted adult is not always the family.” If a parent asked her about a student’s pronouns and it seemed like an unsafe situation, she said she’d consult district administrators and professionals first.

Because of the increasing harassment, Burleson was placed on leave in February for her own safety, she said. She and another teacher—Kathleen Harper, the HHIMS literary coach and teacher of 25 years—said all the negative online attention made them and their families feel unsafe at home and in public.

Cook then escalated his harassment campaign. In an April 9 Facebook post, he wrote that schools “teach kids that the only safe people are teachers and admin. Everyone else in their lives are a danger to them, [including] parents and extended family.”

He accused Harper of being “sexually abusive” because one of her district database-sourced texts on modern-day slavery mentioned teenage female genital mutilation.

Cook began appearing on campus, The Island Packet reported. Near the end of the school term, he gave Harper a handwritten note accusing her of indoctrinating students.

During the last week of school on Facebook, Cook posted, “If you’re in support of giving sexually explicit material to children, it’s important to remember……Dead Pedophiles Don’t Re-Offend.”

Other teachers began warning Harper about Cook’s presence on campus. Escorts would accompany her to her car. School officials compiled Cook’s harassing social media posts and filed a harassment report with the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office .

“[School officials] told me to watch my back in public,” Harper told the Packet. “They told me he is dangerous and they’re concerned for me. They encouraged me to file a police report, which I did that day.”

At a school board meeting, Cook said his daughter and other students were “victims” and that Burleson had subjected them to “lewd and vulgar materials.” He claimed the school and teacher “hid” from a meeting with him.

At a June 2023 school board meeting, he threw four bags of chicken feed at the board members because they had reshelved numerous books removed earlier that year over their alleged “pornographic” content, as Cook called it.

“There’s your chicken feed,” Cook said. “I give you this gift as a way to demonstrate mine and many others’ opinion of your lack of action. Chicken. Too afraid. Matter of fact, your behavior gives chicken a bad name.”

After the meeting, the sheriff’s office issued Cook a no-trespass order for all district campuses, though he could still attend board meetings and pick up his daughter from school.

Burleson is now suing the five aforementioned individuals for maliciously making false, defamatory, and harmful statements accusing her of a crime, which damaged her professional reputation and caused significant emotional distress.

Burleson is being represented by Meg Phelan of the Equality Legal Action Fund, a pro-bono legal group dedicated to protecting members of the LGBTQ+ community, educators, and allied elected officials from defamation and harassment. Burleson is seeking actual and special damages, as well as punitive damages, The Island Packet reported. But Phelan says Burleson and her organization’s aims aren’t financial.

“We’re dedicated to fighting this and trying to not only educate the public, but showing the public that no American deserves to be the target of disinformation, defamation, harassment, and intimidation,” Phelan told LGBTQ Nation.

“The goal is for these conservatives and these extremists to really understand that words have meaning and not everything is protected under the First Amendment, so they cannot simply use defamatory language with impunity,” she continued.

Often, conservatives who use “groomer” as an anti-LGBTQ+ slur will claim that they don’t mean that a person is coercing children into sexual abuse, but Phelan says the defendants used the term in that exact way. While not all states have legal definitions for grooming, South Carolina law allows lawsuits over defamation and libel if they falsely and maliciously accuse others of committing a crime.

The Equality Legal Action Fund is now a nationwide network of pro-bono lawyers seeing to protect queers, allies, teachers, and community leaders from anti-LGBTQ+ harassment. If the group’s lawsuit is successful, it would mark one of the first court cases where anti-LGBTQ+ activists face legal penalties for using the “groomer” slur. It might also give some peace of mind to Burelson and other teachers like her nationwide.

“We want these inspiring teachers to continue to create these safe, inclusive spaces for all of their students, particularly in these very conservative and sometimes closed-minded communities,” Phelan added. “So we don’t want them to spend all of their time and money defending both their personal and professional reputations.”

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