An Ohio school district has paid a $450,000 settlement to a teacher who was forced to resign after refusing to address two students by their transgender names and personal pronouns.
Vivian Geraghty was an English teacher at Jackson Memorial Middle School in Stark County from August 2020 until August 26, 2022. Geraghty, a Christian, reportedly neither faced any kind of complaint or disciplinary action about her work nor communicated openly about her religious beliefs while at school, her lawyers said.
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The Stark County School District has a policy requiring teachers to participate in the social transition of gender non-conforming students by using names and pronouns consistent with each student’s gender identity. But her faith believes that God only creates two distinct sexes — male or female — and that “rejection of one’s biological sex is a rejection of the image of God within that person,” her lawsuit against the district stated.
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As such, Geraghty felt she couldn’t use names and pronouns that contradict the legal names and gender assigned to people at their births. Doing so, she felt, would affirm concepts she saw as untrue and violate biblical commands against dishonesty and lying.
On August 22, 2022 a school counselor contacted Geraghty and other teachers, informing them to use two student’s personal names and pronouns. Four days later, Geraghty approached Principal Kacy Carter to find out if she could arrange a compromise to not acknowledge the students’ identities.
Carter and Monica Myers, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction and assessment, approached Geraghty later in the day to inquire why she didn’t want to follow the policy. Geraghty explained that her faith prohibited her from doing so.
Myers reportedly told Geraghty that her non-compliance would “not work in a district like Jackson.” Carter and Myers later told Geraghty that if she could not “set her religious convictions aside,” she should resign. She was given a laptop and told to type up her resignation fewer within two hours of explaining her objection to the district’s policy.
According to the lawsuit, Carter and Myers didn’t ask whether there was any possibility that Geraghty could avoid pronouns or use last names.
She says her forced resignation violated her First Amendment rights to freedom of religion. Her lawyers, the anti-LGBTQ+ Christian nationalist legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said that trans identities are “a matter of national and local public debate and concern,” and that nobody should be forced to facilitate another person’s transitioning when they themselves disagree with it.
To back up their claim about the “debate,” ADF lawyers pointed to the infamous Cass Review, a U.K. medical review that argues against gender-affirming care for trans youth. Trans advocates and medical doctors criticized the review for excluding numerous studies that see gender-affirming care as safe, essential, and effective at resolving gender dysphoria among trans people.
Numerous anti-trans groups have pointed to the Cass Review as “proof” that medical authorities don’t all affirm trans identity or gender-affirming care. Geraghty’s lawsuit says she believes that social and medical transitioning harm children and result in “irreversible and life-changing decisions.” She also believes that trans minors suffer from personal trauma and mental illness, even though this isn’t generally true. The American Psychological Association hasn’t considered trans identity as a form of mental illness since 2012.
The ADF said that Geraghty has suffered ongoing harm from the resignation because she has found it difficult to apply for employment in other public schools without a recommendation from her district superintendent.
The ADF legally challenges any expansion of LGBTQ+ rights and often represents defendants who violate non-discrimination policies on the basis of religious belief.
The ADF successfully mounted a recent Supreme Court case that resulted in a decision ruling that a state cannot force a web designed to create a wedding website for same-sex couples — even if that refusal of business violates state anti-discrimination law — because creators cannot be forced by the government to make messages with which a religious person disagrees.
The ADF also mounted the legal case that resulted in the overturning of abortion rights nationwide.
