Ohio Teacher’s Lawsuit Over Transgender Names and Pronouns Headed For Jury Trial
The court’s ruling paves the way for the teacher to prevail on her civil rights claims.
A lawsuit filed by an Ohio middle school teacher who resigned rather than participate in her students’ social transitioning is headed for trial, a federal judge has ruled.
The teacher, Vivian Geraghty, objected to using her transgender students’ preferred names and pronouns on religious grounds.
We’ve covered disputes over preferred pronoun use in many contexts, such as the health care setting, government workplaces, and universities.
But when these cases come up in the public schools, they’re not about mere “misgendering.” The subjects are minors, and using their preferred names and pronouns is part of “social transitioning,” the process that facilitates their decision to “become” the opposite sex. It also puts them on the path to permanent, life-altering medical transitioning.
Geraghty wanted no part of it, she told her school principal one morning. According to the lawsuit, the principal suggested a workaround using only the trans students’ preferred names—it would be like calling someone named John “Jack,” he ventured—but Geraghty still objected: She would know that behind the new name was a social transition, something she could not participate in because it was against her religion.
After two more meetings the same morning, Geraghty and the school were at an impasse, according to the record. She resigned and later sued the school in federal court, alleging she was forced to quit because she refused to use the trans students’ preferred names and pronouns, in violation of her First Amendment rights, including free speech, compelled speech and free exercise of religion.
While the dispute will ultimately be resolved at trial, the district court’s ruling paves the way for Geraghty to prevail on her civil rights claims.
The court agreed that the school’s name and pronoun practice amounted to compelled speech. The school allegedly caused Geraghty to resign “not for what she said, but for what she refused to say,” it held.
And it was not part of her ordinary job duties to convey (or refuse to convey) the message that those names and pronouns carried, the court continued:
Geraghty was a middle school English Language Arts teacher. … Her job was to teach English …. It was not her job ‘to teach anything with regard to LGBTQ issues.’ … Indeed, ‘gender identity and sexual orientation’ were not part of the middle school curriculum at all.
And, again, while the parties’ claims and defenses remain in dispute, the court shot down several of the school’s key arguments, one after another.
The school downplayed the use of preferred names and pronouns as a “standard back-and-forth ritual of greeting,” nothing more than a “non-ideological ministerial task,” it argued.
But if the name carried no message, why would it matter what name Geraghty used to address her trans students? “[S]uch a sanitized view of language,” the court said, “ignores the reality that ‘titles and pronouns carry a message.'”
When the school compelled Geraghty to use the students’ preferred names and pronouns, it forced her to “wade into a matter of public concern,” the court determined.
The court also rejected the school’s contention that by refraining from speaking, Geraghty was forcing her religious beliefs on her students.
And it nixed the school’s argument that its name and pronoun policy was necessary to comply with Title IX— a ruling that comes at a time when the fate of the Biden/Harris Title IX rewrite sits in limbo across the country. The evidence that a student “looked uncomfortable” when Geraghty failed to use the student’s preferred name did not “rise to the level” of a Title IX violation. And even if it did, Title IX “likely” will not extend to discrimination based on gender identity, the court concluded based on the Sixth Circuit’s recent ruling.
The court also showed Geraghty’s religious freedom claim a way forward. While the school’s name and pronoun practice “might look neutral and generally applicable,” that’s not how it worked, the court explained:
Before the first meeting, the District’s practice was an ‘implied’ and ’embraced’ ‘best practice,’ and non-compliance with the practice could, or could not, subject a teacher to discipline, to be determined on a ‘case-by-case’ basis.
Yet after three meetings during the morning spanning only a few hours, Geraghty’s refusal to comply with the practice had become a ‘line in the sand,’ which, once crossed, led to Geraghty’s resignation.
The school district was using an evolving policy as pretext for targeting Geraghty’s beliefs, the court said.
Geraghty’s case against the school is far from over. There are genuine disputes of material fact over whether her resignation was voluntary or involuntary. And the parties’ experts disagreed over whether use of students’ preferred names and pronouns creates a “safe and supportive” learning environment. These and other questions will have to be resolved at trial.
For now, though, the court just signaled its willingness to uphold the teacher’s claims, should the jury find the facts in her favor.
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Comments
I hope she LOSES!!
that way the parents of those who prefer NOT TO PARTICIPATE IN THE LEFTY TAKEOVER OF THEIR CHILDREN
MIGHTTTT get the gop to stop the public funding of these places and start paying teachers DIRECTLY and no more of this lefty nonsense
we need the gop to step up and stop the public funding of these places
You’re dreaming. Public education is so firmly embedded in our nation that removal will take civil war.
But its only been since sometime in the past half century that FedGov is so deeply involved with “public education” Before that it was the concern and responsibility of each state, and that’s the way it should be.. NOT a FedGov issue. And using Title Nine or any other FedGov :laws” to enforce or promote any given ideaology is NOT a federal issue, and so mus be stopped.
Schools used to be a local issue run by local school boards. Then, school boards became state organizations with “training” sessions for new school board members. Shortly after being elected to a school board, the district paid to send me to the state convention, where I could see the attempt to indoctrinate us. I remained independent, often questioning budget and policy. Once I objected to the Gun Free School Zone Act for our district, which was a very rural district, where staff and students, parents, and staff often carried guns on school property. I was point blank told I had to vote to implement that policy of the federal government would without federal aid to the district. Since I was only one person, my vote didn’t matter. I will say that several board members and I did see things similarly, but fighting the liberal ideology of staff and administration was difficult. Since then, it has become even more so, with small districts beholden to the federal government for funding, while being required to implement federal policies to receive it. I’m a strong advocate of private schools and home schooling now.
“I hope she LOSES!!”
Me, too!
if she loses, hen we ALL lose.
Government can O FORCE anyone to say or not say anything. First Article of Ammendment establishes that as an inalienable right.. that means, for the less literate, that the right cannot be separated from the individual. Please not carefully: the rights listed in the Bill of Rights are not GIVEN us by virtue or strength of those ammendments, hey are only named and listed to assure everyone can indertand they are OURS and cannot be taken from us.
Your comment makes no sense. How would Ms. Geraghty losing a lawsuit cause the GOP to do anything about teacher funding? I think she is correct in that she should not be forced to cooperate with the brainwashing going on in schools about trans this and trans that. She should be teaching English not participating in this nonsense. I have so-called trans grandchildren and their lives are no better than they were before the injections, breast and uterise removals. It’s GONE TOO FAR.
She objected to the transgender treatment due to religious reasons
I would have objected due to sound medical and mental health reasons.
I can not support the extreme medical and mental health mal-treatment that destroys any possibility of allowing the mentally ill recover and return to a normal life.
I’d claim an allergy to bull$—t.
It is not a proper role of public schools to create an environment that is “safe and supportive” of the delusions of a kid with a psychological disorder. If anything, it should refer them to get the appropriate treatment for that disorder, not to encourage or affirm it.
Your poin is valid and well taken. HOWEVER under the laws as they exis, one’s freedom of religion and of speech are not negotiable nor can they be reasoned away. You start dabbling in
medical” stuff and your ground is no longer solid. As incontrovertible evidence in this direction, simply take a cursory look at what our government and is laws did to us with the silly Vie Russ they contended was their business… they mistakenly hold that “its OUR job to keep people SAYFE.” (no its not.. government’s Job One is to protect our RIGHTS and thus protected WE will then be able to keep OURSELVES safe.
These lawsuits are always filed under the grounds of freedom of religion, rarely if ever freedom of speech. The latter must have been read out of the constitution.
Loose? Doesn’t make sense. Grooming shouldn’t be allowed. Many parents have few options in education of their children. Both typically work in this present economy. Local elections decide school funding – not the GOP. Parents must be involved in the schools policies.
There is only one way around this in our mad world. Assign each PUPIL a number and address each PUPIL only by that number. Perhaps the perverts can be issued odd numbers.
lefty would subvert that too
stop funding them is the only way to get pro american again
Just like in prison. eh? Or the Knot Sea Death camps?
The only possible obligation a teacher might be under, regarding a student’s name, is to use the student’s legal name, if anything – and then, only in the case where the teacher is able to pronounce the anglicized version of any foreign names (as we are in America and no American is expected to even be able to pronounce foreign phonemes).
As to pronouns … the tranny perverts like to claim that one cannot assume the “correct gender” of anyone else, and must be informed by the individual of what gender (out of the tens or hundreds of alleged genders the lunatics like to make pretend exist) he or she is … but that a person can change gender at any moment, for any reason, without changing anything except for their claim to be another gender. What this means is that one can NEVER know another’s gender since that alleged gender is ALWAYS subject to the whim of the moment. Just because some girl claims to be a guy right now does not mean that she will not turn around and decide that she is a girl, again, 27 seconds from now, so you are still “not allowed” to call her “him”, even after she declared to be “him” because in those few seconds she could have turned back into a her. You can only know when she tells you … in the moment … and then, not again. It makes the situation completely impossible and retarded beyond belief.
These are the sorts of problems and issues that a healthy society does not have to contend with, and that would commit/incarcerate anyone proposing such lunacy and trying to force it on children. But, even with the left’s own inane rules, they argue themselves that one can never use pronouns … EVER!! because one never knows, in the moment, what gender someone will claim to be, regardless of what they claimed 20 seconds ago.
All those pushing this deranged perversion on the captive audience of children in public schools BELONGS IN PRISON.
And the kids love it, because it gives them notoriety and power over the teachers.
If we can’t force people to speak English, how can we force people to say false pronouns?
BOOM!!!!! Tenring Shot. Well placed
“The school downplayed the use of preferred names and pronouns as a “standard back-and-forth ritual of greeting,” nothing more than a “non-ideological ministerial task,” it argued.
“But if the name carried no message, why would it matter what name Geraghty used to address her trans students?”
Lefties change the meaning of words precisely so that they can have it both ways, whichever way lets them win.
I’m afraid I’d be in big trouble as a teacher these days. My tendency would be to call most of the kids “dumbsh*t” or “sfb”(sh*t for brains). Especially if they exhibited the signs of gender dysphoria as many students are now showing. But, that’s just me. Don’t got much patience for silliness these days. MAGA.
If some delicate kid who thanks his/her parents for life by telling them the name they gave him/her is insufficient, that’s an insult to the parents and an indicator of the arrogance of a spoiled child.
Your parents named you John? John you are, not “Jane”.
.
And the only thing that “assigned” your sex at birth was a chance combination of sperm and egg at conception.
The doctor had nothing to do with it.
And if your parents named you something weird, or something unpronouncably foreign, are you an ungrateful, arrogant, or spoiled child if you want to be known at school by a name that’s more to your taste, that people can pronounce, and that won’t get you tormented on the playground?!
I was given three names within a short time of my birth, or so I am told. No contrary evidence. I will hold this as true. Front name, Middle name, Back name. For their own particular reasons my parents, without conferring with me (me being a few hours old and as yet illiterate) assigned an order to these three names. They also decided I would be known by the second of these names. Their reason is valid, and I uphold it to this day, some decades on. There is the complete, “formal” form of the name, then an abbreviated short form, the one by which I have been known since that day upin which I took my first breath.
What amazes me is that, up unti maybe five or at most ten years ago, the form of my name has been established, and is on all manner of documents. Birth certificate, driving license, social security card and account, credit cards bank accounts…
but over the recent past it seems every government and business entity has taken it upin themselves to tangle, mix up, reorder, and otherwise mangle my name. I still have the Social Security Card I was issued when I turned sixteen. Yes, the very piece of cheap cardstock issued back then. Today, any correspondence with them or any other state or federal government entity is scrambled, changed, modified.. THEY refuse to use the name I was given at birth, Yes the very governmentt agency which first issued that card and account cannot get it straight in recent time.
If government refuse to use the name I was given at birth, HOW can they punish a teacher for not using the one assigned at birth to their students?
I’m listening to a Columbia symposium on Derrida’s treatment of Nietzsche’s treatment of women, e.g. (Nietzsche)
“Supposing truth to be a woman — what? is the suspicion not well-founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women, that he gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench?”
and Derrida’s first translator, Gayatri Spivak, who was at the time offended by Derrida’s remarks, weighed in with incomplete sentences reflecting her status as a postmodernist feminist, as well as slamming the translator of this work Barbara Harlow for not doing well; and Gayatri offered that it all ought to be extended to LGBTQ+ genders these days. I mean who talks about women.
https://youtu.be/t-TlvGj-_yc?t=925
So there’s carnage in the fish tank.
Somebody did mention that Choreographies, which I mentioned here a few days ago, ought to be discussed to understand Derrida’s apparent avoidance of saying anything firm about feminism.
Nietzsche sees three cases, castrating women, castrated women and nurturing women. He mocks the first two, valorizes the last. As in the above quote.
Derrida’s take is that feminism doesn’t want a castrated man but a castrated woman.
Compelled speech doesn’t seem a good idea.
That’s what Jordan Peterson has been fighting.
“The teacher, Vivian Geraghty, objected to using her transgender students’ preferred names and pronouns on religious grounds.”
But the school was forcing Geraghty to use preferred names and pronouns based on the school administration’s religious grounds.
The government school system ties our tails together and throws us over a clothesline. The clothesline isn’t the problem – education via government bureaucracy is the problem.
correct
and people know this and we want the gop to take the lead and stop the funding
lets go!!!!!
So on top of all the other insulting crap they’re dealing with they expected an English teacher to butcher the English language because someone else is retarded?
“And the parties’ experts disagreed over whether use of students’ preferred names and pronouns creates a “safe and supportive” learning environment.”
The jurors decided what is a ‘safe and supportive’ environment? That does not make sense to me. ‘S&S’ is a legal term of art used to justify whatever policy has been decided. It is useless in any attempt to create a policy.
Scientific grounds should be sufficient to reject this obnoxiously tyrannical, fanatical, misogynistic and anti-science tranny agitprop and bullying.
You shouldn’t have to assert religious grounds as a rationale for rejecting tranny totalitarianism.
It’s my understanding, though her rejection was based her personal Religious beliefs, the case is being litigated under the Constitutional rights of protecting her right to not be subjected to “Compelled Speech” as in the “Freedom of Speech”. She did right by resigning rather than be subjected to their position of compliance to their unauthorized right to force her to submit to their mandates. Should she prevail, this will be a significant ruling.