Teacher awarded $450K for refusing to use transgender students' pronouns

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A middle school teacher in Ohio has been awarded $450,000 after being forced to resigned for refusing to use pronouns.

It all started in August 2022, when Vivian Geraghty refused to use the preferred names and pronouns of two transgender students because of her religious beliefs and continued using their birth names and pronouns.

The students emailed Geraghty telling her to stop, then reported her to a school counselor.

That’s when the school forced her to resign from her position of teaching language arts – so she sued the district for violating her First Amendment rights. A U.S. District Court agreed with Garaghty, ruling that forcing Geraghty to call the students by their preferred names was “compelled speech” and that the pronoun policy at the school was not neutral.

The organization that represented Geraghty, the Alliance Defending Freedom said “no school official can force a teacher to set her religious beliefs aside in order to keep her job.”