Public school teachers can no longer demand that staff and students refer to them as the opposite sex, an appeals court has ruled.
A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled 2-1 that Katie Wood, a high school math teacher who is a man but identifies as a woman, could not require the use of feminine pronouns or the honorific “Ms.”
At issue was a state law passed in 2023, known as Florida Statute § 1000.071, which reads that “[a]n employee or contractor of a public K-12 educational institution may not provide to a student his or her preferred personal title or pronouns if such preferred personal title or pronouns do not correspond to his or her sex.”
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Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom, a Trump appointee, authored the majority opinion, concluding that “Wood hasn’t shown a substantial likelihood that” the state law “infringes [his] free-speech Rights.”
Specifically, Newsom took issue with the conclusion of the lower court that Wood’s self-declared pronouns were speech from a “private citizen” rather than a “government employee.”
Newsom wrote that “a teacher’s right to speak is not without limits” and that Wood “cannot show, with respect to the expression at issue here, that she was speaking as a private citizen rather than a government employee.”
“When a public-school teacher addresses her students within the four walls of a classroom — whether orally or in writing — she is unquestionably acting ‘pursuant to official duties,’” wrote Newsom.
Newsom contrasted Wood’s situation with that of Joe Kennedy in the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which the high court ruled 6-3 that a public high school football coach could lawfully pray on the football field after games.
“When Kennedy was praying, his official duties as a football coach had ceased — he was off the clock, so to speak,” he noted. “Here, by contrast … when Wood addressed her students in the classroom, she was very much on the clock, discharging the very obligation the state had hired her to discharge.”
Circuit Judge Adalberto Jordan, an Obama appointee, authored a dissenting opinion, writing that “Wood has substantially demonstrated that [his] use of her preferred personal title and pronouns constitutes private speech on a matter of public concern rather than government speech.”
“The preferred personal title and pronouns of a teacher are, like her name, significant markers of individual identity. They exist outside of, and do not depend on, the school or the government for their existence,” continued Jordan.
“Stated differently, [Mr.] Wood would still have [his] own preferred personal title and pronouns, and would still use them to identify [himself] to others, even if [he] was not a public school teacher.”
