Campus Reform: A public university in Ohio is requesting that a federal judge dismiss a lawsuit filed by a professor who was disciplined for calling a transgender student “sir.”
Shawnee State University argues in a January court filing that addressing students by their requested pronouns is included in Professor Nicholas Meriwether’s job description, and is not considered speech protected by the First Amendment, according to the Ironton Tribune.
Meriwether’s lawsuit states that the professor “has always used the titles and pronouns that refer to a student’s biological gender,” adding that he “has never knowingly used feminine titles and pronouns to refer to men or masculine titles and pronouns to refer to women.”
The lawsuit claims that during a class in January 2018, a student “demanded” the professor properly use the correct gender pronoun in any conversation in which the student identified as a female. When the professor refused to refer to the student as a female, the student told the professor, “then I guess this means I can call you a c**t,” according to the court filing.
As for disciplinary matters, Shawnee State issued a “written warning” to Meriwether in June, and placed it on his personnel file. The acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences additionally told the professor to refer to transgender students by the pronoun they prefer “to avoid further corrective actions.” more here
F’ Him/Her,,,
Unfortunately, this lawsuit may not be crafted particularly well, as it entwines “religious freedom” with what should be a purely free speech issue. Hear me out.
We have a language; the language has certain protocols; and it’s burdensome on both speech and thought to subject anyone to having to alter his properly spoken language based on the even daily whim of others as to what words may be used to address the person directly or by reference. Or to require the utterance of any other kind of noncommercial speech.
What must be emphasized is the reality-based recognition that people don’t have “genders” (only words do) — and that pronouns do not refer to the make-believe concept of a person’s “gender” but to the person’s SEX. This has nothing to do with “religion” or anyone’s religious beliefs. The “religious convictions” angle thus should not have been brought up. It confuses the main point, and it confuses the matter of free speech with freedom of religion.
The best argument is that these title and pronoun requirements are burdensome violations of freedom of speech, inasmuch as the English language as it exists and as it is used, is to use titles and pronouns that accord with others’ apparent biological SEX. (The continual reference to an individual’s “biological ‘gender'” is nonsensical.)
The lawsuit also incorporates additional, minor reasons either to find the public institution in violation of the professor’s employment rights, or conversely that the professor was unreasonable in simply not acceding to the one student’s request. The professor was not faced with multiple students all regularly changing their “gender” regularly and making requests that they be referred to by make-believe pronouns.
People don’t have “genders”. The whole mistaken notion that they do was a deliberate construct by the conniving. That’s why you don’t hear about “transsexualism” any more and “transgenderism” was substituted.
I wish the lawsuit and the issue had been framed more cleanly and circumspectly, and in the future, I also dearly wish that “religion” be kept out of it. In addition to the deliberately inculcated confusion with the words “gender” and “sex”, carving out an exception for religion does not forcefully make the case against unreasonable SJW demands, be they that ANY baker bake a cake with any slogan on it he finds personally offensive, for ANY reason, or that ANY person be subject to having his speech regulated with burdensome demands.