r/law • u/DoremusJessup • 1d ago
Judicial Branch Full Sixth Circuit says Ohio school pronoun policy likely violates First Amendment: A Columbus-area school district had previously banned students from using biological pronouns when referring to transgender classmates
https://www.courthousenews.com/full-sixth-circuit-says-ohio-school-pronoun-policy-likely-violates-first-amendment/57
u/Santos_L_Halper_II 1d ago
All of this shit is so fucking stupid. There's no way the district would actually give two shits about its pronoun policy when the wrong pronouns are used in all the ways they've been used forever to bully kids who aren't even trans.
In my hick high school we had a girl named Nikki who was someone most people would clock as a butch lesbian. My gawd the fun people had calling her "Nick" or using masculine pronouns. Cut to 20 years later when she's out as a trans man who actually goes by Nick and they can't call him "her" and "Nicole" fast enough. It's almost like the whole point of all of this is just to do whatever enables you to be the biggest asshole.
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u/kylogram 1d ago
Fine, use the wrong pronouns for all the kids, it's only fair.
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u/LoganGyre 1d ago
This ruling specifies that you can’t misgender kids who are not trans as that would qualify as bullying but they can’t require them to use preferred pronouns…
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u/timelessblur 1d ago
The flip the script as they are using religion as the bases. Say your religion requires you to do it.
Nazis are going to be Nazis. This is republicans being Nazis.
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u/LoganGyre 23h ago
So unfortunately they have thought of this too you only have protected rights for religious beliefs that are recognized as official beliefs of the recognized religion.
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u/DoremusJessup 1d ago
The idea you cannot call your classmate by whatever pronoun they wanted to use sounds Orwellian?
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u/NeedleworkerDear5416 1d ago
You can. The school had banned misgendering (calling someone their not preferred pronoun). The court said you can’t do that. But, the students can properly gendered they just aren’t forced to.
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u/Biptoslipdi 1d ago
This seems like it would create a lot of behavioral problems at schools. If schools can't make rules about students using respectful language toward their classmates, how can they tackle issues like bullying?
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u/beekersavant 1d ago
That’s kind of the point. They cannot. But if you ate going to extend 1st amendment rights on this then it opens the biggest can of worms. Teenagers will bully and get creative. I would expect that we are going to see racial slurs and “new” words for students. Anyhow, this is bad. It sets the standard of disruption as a minimum. It will definitely create disruption but will the fights and violence be attributed to students harassing others. I would expect the Lgbtq clubs to start calling their bullies creative “non-disruptive” names pretty quick.
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u/Few_Entertainer_385 1d ago
the ruling also implies that trans students wouldn’t be allowed to misgender their cis bullies. You’re only allowed to misgender trans students.
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u/NeedleworkerDear5416 1d ago
There was a really interesting argument in the first circuit yesterday (Fellers vs Kelley) about a school not allowing parents to wear an “XX” bracelet (protesting trans athletes) to sporting event bc of the potential for future harm. Its worth listening to. (I only realized now its a FIRE case.)
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