Big ruling yesterday from the Eleventh Circuit in another case dealing with transgender rights. A Florida statute forbids public school teachers from asking their students to call them by a name/title that doesn’t correspond to his or her sex (so, if the teacher is a man, the teacher can’t ask students to use “Ms.,” “Mrs.,” “she,” “her,” etc. when addressing him).
A teacher, Katie Wood, challenged the statute, arguing it violated her First Amendment rights. The trial court issued a preliminary injunction in her favor.
The Eleventh Circuit saw things differently and reversed. The court’s ruling hinged on a threshold question courts ask when a government employee’s freedom of speech is at issue: is the employee speaking as a “citizen" or as a "government employee"? If the answer is government employee, the First Amendment claim is dead. If the answer is citizen, more analysis is necessary. In the specific case of Wood, the court ruled that she had spoken as an employee. Critical to the court’s ruling was the location and timing of the speech at issue—Wood wanted students to use her preferred pronouns in the classroom during instruction hours. That, according to the court, meant she was speaking as a government employee, not a citizen.
Judge Newsom wrote the opinion and was joined by Judge Brasher. Judge Jordan dissented. He first said that the majority applied the wrong standard of review (he thinks it should have been abuse of discretion, not de novo). But he also wrote that the majority got the citizen/government employee ruling wrong, noting that “not every word uttered by a teacher in the classroom is the speech of the government.”
That’s a high-level overview, but there’s much more here than just that. If you want to have a read, the opinion is below.
Wood Case by John Byrne on Scribd
