Dive Brief:
-
Three public school teachers are challenging the Florida Department of Education, along with state and district education boards, over a law restricting teachers from using their preferred title or pronouns if they "do not correspond to his or her sex."
-
In a lawsuit filed in federal court this month, the teachers say the nearly 6-month-old law violates the Title IX ban on sex discrimination in education programs, the Title VII ban on employment discrimination, and the First and 14th amendments.
-
Students and families in conservative states have filed a handful of lawsuits against school systems for "Don't Say Gay'' and other laws regulating pronoun usage, curriculum and facility access. But this lawsuit is notable for being filed by teachers over their own pronoun usage.
Dive Insight:
Allegations in the lawsuit — filed Dec. 13 in U.S. District Court in Florida — are similar to others made recently by students and families who say anti-LGBTQ+ laws violate freedom of speech, discriminate against their identities, and have negatively impacted their physical or mental well-being.
"There is no American right more fundamental than freedom of expression and protection from the government that weaponizes their disagreements on that expression," said plaintiff Katie Wood, a self-described transgender teacher, in a statement released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights organization representing the plaintiffs in the case. "Those who support and enforce this law are trying to take my voice away and bury my existence."
Another plaintiff, AV Schwandes, said they were fired in October as a result of the Florida law and that it potentially cost them their career.
"As a high school teacher, I should not have to pretend to be someone I'm not simply because I don’t ascribe to someone else’s rigid ideas of gender," Schwandes said.
The Florida law being challenged took effect July 1. It prevents K-12 employees and contractors from sharing their pronouns with students if those pronouns are different from the ones assigned at birth, or from asking students their preferred pronouns.
The suit says teachers can lose their teaching licenses, along with their jobs, for violating the law.
Advocates of such laws say they violate parental rights to raise their children according to their beliefs.
Pronoun usage has become a hot-button issue in education, with legislative proposals regulating pronoun use introduced in at least half the states by April 2023. Those that became laws have increasingly become the focus of lawsuits.
However, whether the laws regulate only pronoun usage by students or both students and teachers varies.
Pronoun usage has also caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Education.
In July, the department's Office for Civil Rights settled an investigation with Wisconsin's Rhinelander School District, with OCR saying peers and teachers had used "incorrect" pronouns for a nonbinary student. The department found the incidents to be gender-based harassment and, as such, a violation of TItle IX.
The department, meanwhile, was expected to release by October a Title IX final rule that would cement the definition of sex-based harassment to include gender-based harassment. The deadline has been pushed a second time to March 2024, a delay the agency has attributed to the high volume of public feedback on the proposed rule.
If the proposals are finalized as written, misgendering could be officially considered a Title IX violation in some cases under federal regulations — and become the subject of both OCR investigations and lawsuits against districts.
Dive Awards
