Was kindergarten teacher fired over gender lesson? Here's the truth

Claim: A video authentically shows a kindergarten teacher saying she was fired for helping students discover their gender identity. In late August 2026, people shared a video allegedly showing a kindergarten teacher saying she was fired for helping students discover their gender identity. The video trended (archived) on X with the caption "Kindergarten Teacher's Gender Lesson Video Prompts Firing Debate." Under the trend, a popular post (archived) from Aug. 28 featured an earlier clip as well as the video in question. The earlier clip (archived), captioned "Helping My Students Discover Their Genders," shows the alleged teacher saying she asked her students, "Who wishes that they were born a different gender?" She says half her class raised their hands, leading her to tell the other children to sit in a corner. The post's caption includes the words, "Might be parody." The second video (archived), featured on top in the post below, has the same caption as the first clip with the addition of "Update (I Was Fired)." In the second video, the purported teacher says, while appearing to cry, "I got fired. This is like the worst day of my life. I lost my teaching license, so now these children will never be able to discover their true selves." Other users shared the purported firing video on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), X (archived) and YouTube (archived). Snopes readers searched this website to investigate its legitimacy, leading us to first perform reverse image searches of both videos. Those searches led us to determine the clips' source was TikTok account named phoebe! (@bhoepe), whose bio — "do i appear to be joking?" — hinted the user shared satire and parody. In sum, the video originated as satire. The user in both videos, who told us in an email we could reference her simply as Phoebe, originally posted the first video (archived) on Aug. 21 with a caption containing the hashtags #skit and #satire. The caption jokingly features the words, "next step is reassignment surgery in the nurse's office." The second video (archived) from Aug. 28, which received more than 15 million views, also had the #skit and #satire hashtags, as well as comments from users appearing to believe the story was real. Some of those comments received hundreds of thousands of likes. Phoebe confirmed to Snopes her videos are skits. She also told us she's not a teacher and has "never worked in a school in any capacity." Other videos on her TikTok account show her saying she's a kindergarten teacher and keeps cat litter boxes in her classroom (a reference to a debunked conspiracy theory), lost her job as a school nurse and fought a funeral procession — all jokes. "None of my skits are based on real events and are exaggerated for comedic purposes," she said. "Humor has always been a huge aspect of my personality, and even as a kid I wanted to be a comedian." She continued: I made the video as sort of an experiment; I intentionally told a bizarre story. I made the whole thing up. I also put "skit" and "satire" in the caption of the video. I wanted to see if the majority of viewers would go through the trouble of reading the caption or looking at the other satire/skit videos on my account, and, astoundingly, most people seemed to just take everything I said at face value. There were also quite a few larger creators who clipped my video and covered it and intentionally hid the "satire" disclaimer, presumably to get more engagement. I think context matters, but even with context some people still believe it! It's as if I could tell them to their face that it was a joke and it wouldn't change their mind. So, the overall reaction to my video is honestly very concerning, especially with AI advancing and the internet being full of widespread misinformation. I feel I did my due diligence by labeling it as satire, and I think ultimately anything can be clipped and taken out of context by people with ulterior motives, particularly if it fits their agenda. For further reading, we previously investigated a video allegedly showing a mother tearing down a teacher's LGBTQ+ Pride flag.