The legal attack on trans teachers’ free speech is a much broader warning

[Jessica_Rose]

The legal attack on trans teachers' free speech is a much broader warning

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-legal-attack-on-trans-teachers-free-speech-is-a-much-broader-warning/ar-AA1I9owM?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=5ca70132cc294c14a371f4b6c3948f50&ei=108

Opinion by Katelyn Burns (7 July 2025)

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that a trans teacher in Florida has no right to refer to herself with the gendered honorific "Ms." or ask to be referred to with the pronouns she/her under what critics have called Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law.

The trans algebra teacher, Katie Wood, sued her employer, the Hillsborough County School Board, in 2023 soon after Florida's anti-LGBTQ law was enacted.

According to the law, teachers are explicitly forbidden from providing students with their honorifics or pronouns if they do not correspond with the words most closely associated with their assigned sexes at birth. Josh Block, senior counsel with the ACLU LGBT Project, explained to MSNBC that there are different levels of protected speech in certain government-sector professions, including teachers.

Block notes that other conservative-leaning courts have begun ruling that teachers have an inalienable free speech right to misgender their trans students, because conservatives have claimed that being required to respect a student's pronouns would essentially be the state's forcing teachers to express a political and/or religious belief that they do not hold.

But the same should be the case for a trans teacher referring to themselves. If a conservative teacher is allowed to misgender their students as a matter of political speech, so, too, should a trans teacher be allowed to gender herself correctly. But conservatives do not really care about legal consistency — they want to have their cake and eat it, too.