A federal judge has ruled in favor of a lawsuit against a Florida law requiring teachers to refer to students by their biological pronouns. The law also restricts teachers’ usage of preferred pronouns for themselves. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker sided with the plaintiffs, two Florida teachers, who alleged that the law violated their civil rights.
The law in question was passed in 2023 by the Florida legislature, and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis. It required that teachers in public schools use the gender pronouns that align with individuals’ biological sex, as opposed to their gender identity in cases where the two differ.
The Newest Ruling
One of the plaintiffs was Katie Wood, a teacher in Hillsborough County. Wood, a transgender woman, said that she had to stop using ‘Ms’ in her name. This, she claimed, violated protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The fate of Florida’s law will now likely hinge on the Lange v. Houston County case in Georgia, which is being heard in the higher 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
No damages were awarded in the ruling, and no injunction was issued. Walker did state that Florida’s pronoun law altered the existing and agreed-upon terms of teachers’ employment. In July 2024 he allowed the lawsuit to continue by declining to toss it out, ruling that the plaintiffs’ allegations were sufficiently legitimate for legal scrutiny.
Judge Mark Walker was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida in 2012 by President Barack Obama. The U.S. Senate confirmed him 94-0 in a fully bipartisan vote. In June 2018 he became the district’s chief judge.
What Florida’s Law Says
The law being challenged is HB 599, titled ‘Gender Identity Employment Practices’, introduced to the legislature by Marion County Republican Rep. Ryan Chamberlin. The text of the law says: “It is the policy of the state that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex.” A person’s sex is defined in the bill as their classification in accordance to chromosomes, sex hormones, and genitalia.
Also established in the law are protections against discipline to employees or contractors based on their “deeply held religious or biology-based beliefs”, specifically as it pertains to “traditional or Biblical views of sexuality and marriage, or the employee’s or contractor’s disagreement with gender ideology”.
Civil Rights and Gender Pronouns
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the U.S. Congress that year, and later signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In Title VII, the law explicitly made it illegal to discriminate against employees “because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin”. Current litigation over Florida’s pronoun law is testing whether this protection applies to gender identity, a concept much less widely understood in 1964.
Walker wrote in his opinion that Florida’s law specifically violates the portion of the Civil Rights Act that protects against discrimination based on sex. “[B]ecause compliance with [the law] is a condition of plaintiffs’ employment, and because [the law] discriminates based on sex with respect to the terms and conditions of plaintiffs’ employment, it violates Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act],” Walker said.
Where Do Americans Stand on Gender Pronouns?
Polling data shows Americans are divided on the usage and acceptance of non-traditional gender pronouns. A 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 65% of Americans believed there are only two genders, a number that rose slightly from the previous two years. 35% of respondents said there are ‘many gender identities’, as described by the poll.
Acceptance of gender nonconformity was also found to vary considerably on demographic lines. The same PRRI poll found that 90% of Republicans believed in two genders only, compared to 66% of independents and 44% of Democrats. Each generation polled also had a majority affirming two genders: Gen Z at 57%, millennials at 60%, Gen X at 71%, baby boomers at 68%, and the silent generation at 69%.
The poll did seem to indicate slightly more openness toward those who choose to use ‘they/them’ pronouns. 35% of respondents indicated they’d be comfortable with a friend who identified as gender-neutral, on top of 23% who said it would be irrelevant to them. 40% said they’d feel uncomfortable.
Another poll, conducted in 2021 by Pew Research Center, showed that an increasing number of Americans either know someone who’s transgender or know someone who uses gender-neutral pronouns. That poll indicated that younger respondents were more likely to be comfortable abiding by those pronoun preferences (a majority ages 18-49 were comfortable), and that most adults ages 18-29 felt gender could differ from one’s sex as assigned at birth. Also relevant, 54% of Americans who know a transgender person stated they believed people could be men or women even if they were assigned differently at birth.
