Eleventh Circuit Panel Approves Florida Law Barring Teacher From Using Transgender Pronouns

In a divided panel ruling yesterday (in Wood v. Florida Department of Education), the Eleventh Circuit ruled that a public-school teacher in Florida was not entitled to a preliminary injunction against a Florida law that provides that a public-school employee “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.” In his majority opinion, Judge Kevin Newsom emphasized that the law applies only to an employee acting within the scope of his employment duties, and, further, that the teacher challenged only the law’s application to speech in the classroom. The speech at issue therefore was government speech, not private speech, and the teacher had no First Amendment claim against the law.

One regrettable feature of Judge Kevin Newsom’s majority opinion (joined by Judge Andrew Brasher) is that it continues the unsound practice among many conservative jurists of adopting the semantics of transgender ideology. In particular, it states in its first sentence that “Katie Wood is a transgender woman,” and it proceeds to use feminine pronouns to refer to Wood.

There is a reason that GLAAD includes “Transgender Man” and “Transgender Woman” in its transgender glossary of terms. In ordinary English usage, a “transgender man” would be a man (such as Wood) who identifies as female (i.e., a man who is transgender), and a “transgender woman” would be a woman who identifies as male (i.e., a woman who is transgender). But GLAAD is intent on dictating its imposing its gender confusion on everyone, so it instead uses the term “transgender man” to refer to a woman who identifies as a man. The result is that judges like Newsom fall into the sloppy practice of using feminine pronouns for men, even in a case in which a law prohibiting that pronoun usage is at issue.

To be clear: I am not maintaining that Newsom necessarily had to use masculine pronouns to refer to Wood. My point instead is that it is ideologically biased to use transgender pronouns. It would be much better to avoid the use of any pronouns, even at the cost of some repetitive and awkward use of proper nouns.