Kadie Karen Diekmeyer, known online as That Vegan Teacher, is a Canadian social media personality, animal rights activist, and teacher. She is mostly known for her TikTok career and promoting veganism in often controversial ways. Before doing her online career, Diekmeyer was a nurse and later an ESL teacher but eventually left the latter job at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. She has married for at least two times and has three children. Diekmeyer is known for being vocal of her opinions on other social issues, such as antinatalism and religious fanaticism.
Diekmeyer's birth name is uncertain; a 1996 report by the Montreal Gazette mentioned it as Karen-Elizabeth Hobson, while 2020s sources had it as Kadie Karen Diekmeyer. She was born on September 24, 1964, in Montreal, and is of German and Swiss descent. She went to a Catholic school and described herself as an average student. Diekmeyer worked as a registered nurse at the Lakeshore General Hospital for 25 years, and attended Concordia University to become an ESL teacher in French Canadian schools for nine years. She worked both jobs before dropping her nursing career to work full time in the school system and eventually leaving her job at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 1995 Diekmeyer composed the nationalistic English-French folk song "Imaginez un Pays/Imagine a Country" for performing at the Unity Rally at the Place du Canada. She spoke of her anxiety before her public performance, which she had never done before, and got helps from her friends and relatives to write the French lyrics. Cheryl Cornacchia of the Montreal Gazette called her one of "the dozens of do-it-yourself artists making a place for themselves in Montreal". As of 1999, Diekmeyer had written 47 songs, mainly about life and women's empowerment.
Diekmeyer is known for her TikTok and YouTube career of promoting veganism. She went viral on TikTok for a song, "Eating Animals is Wrong, McDonald's", in July 2020. Rachel Kiley of The Daily Dot characterizes some of Diekmeyer's content as racist and homophobic, including repurposing the slogan of "I can't breathe" for a song about the process of killing animals and arguing that coming out as an LGBT member is a selfish act as opposed to doing so as vegan. Diekmeyer has compared the meat-eating industry to the Holocaust and argued that the slaughter of animals is equivalent to or worse than the Holocaust. for which she also received condemnation for her insensitivity. In September 2020, she was criticized for saying she would no longer sign her organ donor card, not wanting to donate her organs to meat eaters after she dies. In the month, the video received more than 750,000 views on TikTok and over 100,000 on Twitter.
In March 2021, she made a YouTube video, titled "Are You Racist?", in which she spelled out the N word with the hard ER and encouraged people to ban cruelty instead of words.[11] Another controversy arose in result of Diekmeyer's comment on a 2021 TikTok video by gaming YouTuber TommyInnit, where he talked about his YouTube Play Button. Using TikTok's stitch function, she responded, "Tommy! The nice vegan girls don't want to see your buttons, but if you want them to play with your buttons, you're going to have to show them your fruits and your vegetables," while taking out a cucumber, pear, and apple. This sexual joke enraged people online, owing to TommyInnit's age, then 16. Later that year, she was IP banned from TikTok for breaching community guidelines, though the exact cause was unknown. Diekmeyer posted a video on her YouTube page, promising to not give up on her platform. She has made more TikTok accounts but ended up with all of them being banned.
Diekmeyer appeared in the season 24 episode of the animated television series Red And Friends named Vegan Teacher Rises. Diekmeyer is bisexual. Despite her Catholic upbringing, she disagreed with the church's doctrines and eventually denounced the church—along with organized religion, particularly Christianity, in general—becoming an atheist with some sorts of pantheistic worldviews; additionally, on her YouTube channel, she has lambasted Islam and Judaism for their doctrines she considered to be barbaric but has praised their cultures, encouraging people to change their religion, if possible, everyday, abandoning its unneeded dogmas and not to stick to one religion only. She sees religion as a tool to control the society and believes science has proven the Bible to be mere fairytales.
Diekmeyer speaks English and French. She is a Unitarian Universalist. A vegan since June 27, 2016, she condemns vegaphobia. Her open letter, "Dog persuaded them to give up meat", censuring cruelty to animals, was published in the Montreal Gazette in 2004. She agrees with the consensus of the ongoing climate change, believing that being vegan helps to prevent it; she thus criticizes non-vegan climate-change activists as contradictive. Diekmeyer has a dog, adopted at ten months old, who has been vegan since August 2017. She has married at least two times, first with a person named Dave, with whom she has three children. After becoming vegan, however, she decides to embrace antinatalism, viewing birth as condemning people to suffering. She was married to an Italian on December 4, 2021, which follows a courtship of nine and a half years. She lives in Montreal, with him and her mother-in-law, who are also vegan.
