Public schoolteacher blocked from promoting his feminine pronouns to students

A federal appeals court has yanked the reins on a public schoolteacher who wanted to use his captive students to promote his own gender ideology.

It is the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that said the teacher is not entitled to a preliminary injunction that would allow him to promote his feminine pronouns to students, an agenda in violation of state law, while the fight continues.

Mat Staver, chief of Liberty Counsel, which has handled multiple cases involving demands from the transgender community, said, “Florida law is clear that employees, contractors, or students of a public K-12 educational institution may not be required to refer to other people using their preferred personal titles or pronouns if it does not correspond to their biological sex. In this case, the teacher’s speech was government speech, not private speech, and there is no First Amendment claim against the law.”

The appeals court vacated a lower court’s preliminary injunction and sent the case back.

The case, Wood v. Florida Department of Education, involves a teacher at a public high school in Hillsborough County, Florida. He challenged the state law that prohibits him from using pronouns not consistent with his biological sex in the classroom.

“Wood was born a biological male but now identifies as a woman. Wood argued the law violated his First Amendment right to free speech and sought a preliminary injunction to prevent its enforcement,” Liberty Counsel explained

A judge in an entry level court to the federal judicial system granted him that injunction, but that was reversed.

The appeals court “held that Wood had not demonstrated a substantial likelihood that the law infringed free speech rights. The court concluded that when Wood used preferred pronouns in the classroom, it was as a government employee, not as a private citizen. Therefore, Wood’s speech was not protected under the First Amendment in this context,” the report said.

“The First Amendment’s protections extend to public school teachers and students, ‘neither of whom shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.’ But a teacher’s right to speak is not without limits. One reason is that ‘in addition to being a private citizen,’ a teacher is ‘also a government employee paid in part to speak on the government’s behalf and convey its intended messages,'” according to Judge Kevin Newsom’s majority opinion.

In 2020, Wood began insisting on pronouns including, “she” and “her,” and included that in communications with students. But then in 2023, Florida adopted a law regarding that issue.