Judge rules that challenge to Florida’s teacher pronoun restrictions can go forward

Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker on July 10 denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a Florida statute that bars transgender and nonbinary teachers from using titles and pronouns that express their gender identities and threatens to decertify and fire teachers who do so.

Southern Legal Counsel and co-counsel from Southern Poverty Law Center and Altshuler Berzon LLP filed the lawsuit in December 2023 to stop Florida education officials and school boards from enforcing the anti-LGBTQ+ statute.

Judge Walker also changed his analysis from an earlier preliminary injunction order in regard to the application of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Citing new case law from Muldrow v. St. Louis, Judge Walker wrote that that the Court “concludes that it erred when it previously held that Plaintiffs failed to sufficiently allege that the challenged pronoun policy discriminates with respect to Plaintiffs’ terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.”

Judge Walker had previously issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the state and the school board from enforcing Subsection 3 of the statute against plaintiff Katie Wood, a Hillsborough County high school teacher, saying that Ms. Wood is substantially likely to succeed on the merits of her claim that subsection 3 violates her free speech right under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Subsection 3 prohibits employees and contractors of Florida’s public K–12 schools from providing a student with titles or pronouns that “do not correspond” to the employee’s or contractor’s sex assigned at birth. A teacher who violates subsection 3 could be fired and could lose their state license to teach.

“Judge Walker’s ruling on the motion to dismiss shows that the state’s attempt to ban transgender teachers from using their identified pronouns is unlawful,” said SLC Executive Director Jodi Siegel. “If an employer could dictate to an employee how they can and cannot  express their own identity, then the First Amendment and protections against employment discrimination would mean very little.”

Simone Chriss, director of SLC’s Transgender Rights Initiative, expressed appreciation for Walker's thoughtful and well-reasoned ruling.

“We are grateful for the Court’s thorough analysis in the order denying Defendants’ motions to dismiss, including its reliance on the thoughtful Statement of Interested filed by the United States in support of plaintiffs’ case,” Chriss said. “Despite their best efforts, the state of Florida cannot erase transgender and non-binary teachers, who are among the dedicated educators who play a vital role in our public education system.”

You can read the order in Wood et al. v. Florida Department of Education et al. here.