Teacher Received $450K For Refusing To Use Preferred Pronouns

A school dstrict in Ohio was forced to pay US$ 450,000 to a middle school teacher who resigned for refusing to address two transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns.

Jackson Local School District reached a settlement in December with the teacher, Vivian Geraghty, after she claimed in a 2022 lawsuit that her First Amendment rights were violated when she was told to resign from a middle school language arts position.

The agreement follows a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio in August that said forcing Geraghty to use students’ preferred names amounts to "compelled speech" and that the school’s "pronoun practice was not neutral."

"The school tried to force Vivian to accept and repeat the school’s viewpoint on issues that go to the foundation of morality and human identity, like what makes us male or female, by ordering her to personally participate in the social transition of her students," said Logan Spena, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization that represented Geraghty.

"The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power, and Jackson Local School District officials have learned that comes at a steep cost," Spena added.

Jackson Local Schools said in a statement the district "remains dedicated to navigating complex and changing legal environments in a manner that prioritizes student safety and well-being."

On the first day of the school year in August 2022, a week before Geraghty resigned, two of her students asked that she refer to them using names different from their names on the school’s roster. The filing states Geraghty knew these requests were "part of the student’s social transition" but disagreed because of her religious beliefs and "wanted those students out of her classroom."

Geraghty continued to refer to the students using their deadnames, the name a trans person was assigned at birth but that does not align with their gender identity, even after one of the students sent her a follow-up request through email. That student then reached out to a school counselor about "one of my teachers dead-naming me all the time in class."

The language arts teacher then met with the middle school’s principal, Kacy Carter "to seek an accommodation so that students would not continue to feel uncomfortable."

Geraghty told the principal that her religious conviction would not allow her to agree with the students' requests, and that she "wouldn’t be comfortable using preferred names or pronouns because she would know what was behind it."

She was later called into a second meeting with Carter and Monica Myers, a district employee, who said if Geraghty wouldn’t comply with the students’ preferred names, "it was going to be a problem," the filing states. From this point, the three individuals' accounts of the meeting differ, but Geraghty was sent back to her classroom after she reaffirmed that she would not comply.

The district at the time said in a statement that it does not have a policy that requires teachers to use preferred names or pronouns, but it does follow the Department of Education’s Title IX ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.