There are two things that I find it difficult to wrap my mind around. The first is that the state that ranks first in education wants to ban its teachers from referring to students by their preferred pronouns. The second is that the state ranking first in education is Florida. How the hell did that happen, US News?! Not sure how a state that ranks 43rd in literacy even managed to crack the top 10! The aside aside, teachers are understandably filing a lawsuit to fight the preferred pronoun ban. From The Hill:
Three Florida teachers filed a lawsuit against the state Wednesday for its law banning teachers from using their preferred pronouns in school, which the plaintiffs argue violates their constitutional rights.
The lawsuit takes issue with Subsection 3 of the Florida statutes that went into effect in July. This subsection states that any 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.”
Before we even get to the highfalutin arguments, can we just take a moment to realize how vague the phrase “correspond(s) to his or her sex” is? Name assignment is pretty arbitrary — hearing a name and determining if it’s supposed to be matched up with balls or a uterus can be hard to do. Hilary is feminine, right? You must not be familiar with math or philosophy. And how in the hell do you rationalize which set of genitals the name Apple belongs to? Or what about Seven? Because at first glance, those names are about as non-binary as Sock is. X Æ A-12 corresponds less to a sex than it does to a high-performance computer component at Best Buy.
Second, let’s assume the issue isn’t over an apparently gendered name that’s actually gender neutral like Alex, Parker, or Quinn. Have any of these lawmakers actually taught in a damned classroom? Because trust me, the last thing some kid disrupting your class will do is calm down if you keep deadnaming them in front of their peers. Want to build rapport and refer to a student by their nickname? Do you really expect teachers to consult Subsection 3 before they can know if they can refer to one of their students as Tommy? What happened to Florida being a right-leaning, no governmental interference state?
Florida Teachers Sue Over Preferred Pronouns Law [The Hill]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.