Federal Court: Ohio School District Compelled Teacher to Use Students’ ‘Preferred Pronouns’

An Ohio school district compelled a Christian teacher’s speech by telling her to use the “preferred pronouns” of transitioning students, a federal court ruled this month.

In 2022, middle school English teacher Vivian Geraghty resigned from her position after the Jackson Local School District insisted she use the names and “preferred pronouns” of transgender students. Geraghty, an apostolic Pentecostal, subsequently filed a lawsuit against the district, alleging violations of her First Amendment rights. She specifically said using “preferred pronouns” would force her to embrace the concept of gender identity against her religious belief that God created two unchanging sexes, male and female.

In an August 12 order, district court Judge Pamela Barker said that “Geraghty’s compelled speech was not pursuant to her ordinary job duties.” Barker further noted that the district forced her to “wade into a matter of public concern” when they “compelled Geraghty to use the students’ preferred names and pronouns.”

“By compelling Geraghty to use students’ preferred names and pronouns, Defendants sought to force [Geraghty] to utter what was not in her mind about a question of political and religious significance. Accordingly, the speech at issue was compelled speech,” Barker wrote in an order on August 12.

Barker wrote that while the school district sought to “reduce the compelled speech at issue to a non-ideological ministerial task…such a sanitized view of language ignores the reality that titles and pronouns carry a message.”

“For Geraghty, using the students’ preferred names and pronouns carried the message that she affirmed the student’s identity, which was against her religious beliefs and her understanding of biology and basic human function,” Barker wrote. “For the school, using the students’ preferred names and pronouns carried the message that it supported its students. And, most importantly, for the students, using their preferred names and pronouns carried the message that the speaker respected their gender identity.”

She continued: 

So, the question is not whether using preferred names and pronouns was part of Geraghty’s ordinary job duties, but whether it was part of her ordinary job duties to convey (or refuse to convey) the message that those names and pronouns carried. It was not. Geraghty was a middle school English Language Arts teacher. Her job was to teach English to the appropriate state standards. It was not her job to teach anything with regard to LGBTQ issues.

But the case is far from over.

Barker ordered the case to go before a jury so that other details may be ironed out at trial. At issue are disputes between Geraghty and the district over whether she involuntarily resigned, as well as the “diametrically opposed” expert opinions brought by both parties on the efficacy of supporting a minor’s self-proclaimed gender identity. Barker wrote:

[The order] withholds deciding whether the Pickering balancing test and strict scrutiny weigh in Plaintiff’s favor or Defendants’ favor until a jury makes factual determinations regarding the alleged interests at stake. Further, the Court concludes that there are genuine disputes of material fact about whether Geraghty involuntarily resigned and, if she did, whether her protected conduct (if there was any) caused her to resign. Lastly, the Court grants Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment as to Geraghty’s due-process claim, but it denies their request to dismiss Geraghty’s official-capacity claims against the individual Defendants. 

The district court is the most recent of many to weigh in on the First Amendment implications of government gender identity policies.

Just this week, the Supreme Court blocked a pro-transgender rewrite of federal discrimination law by the Biden-Harris administration. The rewritten rule asserted that a school’s refusal to accept a youth’s claim to transgender status would count as an illegal violation of the 1972 Title IX law against sexual discrimination. The rule would allow private law firms to sue and penalize schools where teachers and students refuse to redefine a boy as a girl once he declares he is transgender.

The case is Geraghty v. Jackson Local School District, No. 5:22-cv-2237 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.