A university professor is bragging that students come to her with their sexual and gender identity struggles — and CNN published the whole thing as a Pride month celebration, not a red flag about the classroom as an identity pipeline.

Carolyn O'Laughlin, a self-described "openly queer woman" who has taught college students for more than 25 years, wrote in a CNN essay that she introduces her sexual identity on the first day of class each semester, complete with photos of her wife and teenage sons on the syllabus slides. The result? Students linger after class to confide in her — and CNN frames this as collective liberation rather than what it looks like: a professor using her authority to steer vulnerable students toward identity exploration.

"Each semester, in the first class, I introduce my whole self," O'Laughlin wrote. "My slides about the syllabus and classroom expectations flip, and a few photos appear: a camping trip, a baseball game, somebody's graduation." She calls her "boring" and "ordinary" middle-aged life "extraordinary" to students because she is "the first openly queer educator many of them have ever known."

One student told her: "I've been really distracted. I kind of started seeing someone and they're nonbinary, and now I'm trying to figure out what that means about me." Another lingered after class to say, "I think I might be gay." O'Laughlin's response: "I am honored that you told me. I'm proud to have earned your trust."

CNN and the syndicated ABC17News carried identical text, both framing the essay as wellness content — no critical distance, no questioning of whether a professor's classroom identity disclosure functions as an invitation for students to re-evaluate their own. Neither outlet raised the obvious question: when an authority figure opens the door, how many students walk through it who otherwise wouldn't have?

O'Laughlin's own history is telling. She came out in the late 1990s at a Midwestern Catholic college by weaving her closeted experience into a communications paper on self-disclosure. The professor gave her a D and called the source novel "an inappropriate text." O'Laughlin's reaction — "The hell I didn't. The paper itself was self-disclosure" — reveals the mindset: the personal is always the academic, the classroom is always the confessional.

That a professor was once penalized for this doesn't make the pendulum swing virtuous now that the institution rewards it. The old wrong was grading a paper on ideology, not quality. The new wrong is building a classroom culture where students feel compelled to bring their sexual confusion to the person grading them.

O'Laughlin says "no matter how proudly queer a student may become, in this moment they are almost always scared." Maybe that fear deserves honest inquiry — not a professor's validation and a national platform calling it brave.

The question isn't whether students should be free to come out. It's whether the campus coming-out pipeline is education or indoctrination — and why only one answer is permitted.