Seventeen States Side With Teacher Fired for Refusing to Follow School’s Transgender Pronoun Policy

Seventeen States Side With Teacher Fired for Refusing to Follow School’s Transgender Pronoun Policy

An Indiana music teacher fired for refusing to follow his school’s transgender pronoun policy has gained the support of 17 states in his long battle against the school.

The states say the school’s “social transitioning” policy is based on unscientific, activist guidance from the widely discredited transgender health group, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).

The teacher, John Kluge, is an evangelical Christian who objected to addressing transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns on religious grounds. The school granted him an accommodation in which he would call all his students by their last names, to avoid singling anyone out. But they later revoked it after students and faculty complained, forcing him to resign in 2018. In 2019, he sued the school in federal district court.

After years of litigation in which most of Kluge’s claims against the school were denied, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals sent his case back to the district court to reconsider his religious accommodation claim under Title VII in light of the new Supreme Court precedent.

Once again, the district court rejected his claims, finding he had caused “substantial student harm” by refusing to follow the school’s transgender policy. Kluge appealed earlier this month.

In their amicus brief asking the 7th Circuit to reverse the lower court’s decision, the states argue convincingly that the WPATH guidance underlying the school’s transgender pronoun policies lacks a scientific basis.

Over the past few months, we’ve learned how politics, not research, drive WPATH’s policies, the states say:

The faulty assumption underlying most of the school’s argument and the lower court’s decision is that children are harmed when schools don’t affirm their gender identities. … For years, WPATH’s standards of care have said that children should be supported in their “social transition”—including the use of their preferred pronouns. … [But] recent disclosures reveal that WPATH pushed activist policies unsupported by scientific studies. Because these inclusivity policies appear to be products of political preferences seeking to influence students, it is not at all clear that the policies even help the students who vigorously claim they must trump every other interest, religious ones included.

The states have laid out recent reports on unsealed court documents and leaked internal files that show the seamy underside of policymaking at WPATH. These include reports that WPATH removed age limits for child sex changes “not because the science supported it, but at the ideological insistence of Admiral Rachel Levine, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services,” as seen on X:

Biden's trans HHS assistant sec Dr Rachel Levine pressured WPATH to eliminate age guidelines for child sex changeshttps://t.co/7WmeewrlsZ

— Libby Emmons (@libbyemmons) June 26, 2024

The landmark Cass Review, an independent study of transgender care in England released in April, also condemns WPATH’s guidelines for lacking “developmental rigor,” the states point out in their brief.  The advocacy group “routinely ‘overstates the strength of the evidence in making [its] recommendations,'” according to the report.

Any policy based on WPATH’s recommendations “should be suspect at best,” the states say, “especially when children are involved.”

Meanwhile, the states say doctors have warned that social transitioning of gender dysphoric youth sets them up for serious emotional and physical harm down the road. And that harm is permanent:

“Though it may seem harmless to call a child by a different name,” such social transitioning is actually “associated with the persistence of gender dysphoria as a child progresses into adolescence,” the states assert [emphasis added]. And when it does, “children may eventually begin using puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones which have been known to “permanently disrupt physical, cognitive, emotional and social development.”

In other words, social transitioning is the gateway to medical transitioning, ending in life-altering surgeries and sterilization.

As we’ve recently learned from detransitioners‘ first-hand accounts, from detransitioner lawsuits, and, just last week, from parents who’ve lost their children to “gender-affirming care,” what starts out as social transitioning can end in personal tragedy.

If there’s any upside to Kluge’s long drawn-out legal battle it’s that these stories—and the misplaced reliance on the transgender health advocates behind them—have since come to light.

And now, the court should focus on what the states say doctors have known all along: More often than not, children naturally resolve their conflicting feelings over their biological sex “after experiencing the normal developmental process of puberty”—if only the adults in their lives would just let them.

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