AZ Bill Would Outlaw Gendering Trans Students Correctly While Making Misgendering Free Speech

The hypocrisy around anti-trans legislation is in full swing in the new Arizona bill that says you cannot gender a trans student correctly without parental permission, but you CAN gender incorrectly.

A new bill has been introduced in Arizona that governs how pronouns will be used for transgender students. The bill is simple and takes up only 16 lines of new law, but no other bill released in the last year highlights the hypocrisy around conservative views of free speech and transgender people. It codifies into law an argument that misgendering transgender students is a matter of “free speech” because it goes against the “employee’s religious or moral convictions.” In the same breath, the law bans gendering transgender students correctly without parental permission. It appears the "free speech" crowd literally believes that teachers should be able to have the "freedom of speech" to misgender their trans students if they disagree with being trans, but they should not have that same freedom of speech to gender their trans students correctly. If they argue that non-affirming teachers should have the right to use a trans student’s “biological sex” pronouns and old name, how can they argue that affirming teachers do not also have that same right? Bills and decisions around this issue have popped up in Oklahoma, Florida, Virginia, in court cases, and more - this issue threatens to become a major issue in the 2022-2023 legislative cycle.

How teachers gender trans students first blew up in the summer of 2021, when a PE teacher Tanner Cross was suspended for misgendering trans students consistently. Cross filed an appeal with the Virginia court system, arguing that he had a free speech right to misgender his trans student. He claimed that gendering transgender students correctly was akin to child abuse: “I’m a teacher, but I serve God first and I will not affirm a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it’s against my religion, it’s lying to a child, it’s abuse to a child, and it’s sinning against our God.” Shockingly, Virginia’s supreme court agreed and reinstated him, allowing teachers in Virginia the right to misgender their students.

Following this, there have been several more lawsuits filed. Vernadette Broyles of the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, a spinoff from the anti-abortion and anti-trans group Alliance Defending Freedom, has filed multiple lawsuits in Florida and Massachusetts. Her most recent lawsuit in Massachusetts goes a step farther than the Virginia lawsuit that “protected a teacher’s right to misgender.” These lawsuits seek to strip away the rights of teachers to gender transgender students correctly by mandating that teachers cannot gender their trans students properly without parental permission. Broyles has also filed lawsuit in Leon County, Florida attempting to do the same thing:

Part of the Prayer For Relief from Broyle’s Leon County, FL Lawsuit

Conservatives were quick to catch on to the fight. Multiple right wing outlets published stories in defense of Tanner Cross and his “right to free speech” to misgender trans students while also jumping to the defense of Broyles and her “right to parental consent” banning gendering transgender students correctly. The case made it all the way up to the governors office in Florida and even became a campaign issue. During the signing of the now famous Don’t Say Gay bill, Ron DeSantis appeared beside January Littlejohn, the parent in the Leon County, Florida case. These two conflicting rights that conservatives were arguing for hit mainstream news during a major election.

Ron DeSantis (right) appearing by January Littlejohn (center).

In 2022, state legislatures began to take up the issue. Legislatures immediately began attempting to codify a right to misgender in state law. Early attempts did not contain the flat contradiction of not allowing affirming teachers to gender trans students correctly and instead focused on allowing teachers to misgender their trans students. Tennessee and Oklahoma both have considered bills codifying a right to misgender among teachers. Tennessee’s bill passed the Tennessee House, but neither bill was signed into law.

Things escalated further when Governor Glen Youngkin of Virginia released a comprehensive set of school guidelines titled “2022 Model Policies On The Privacy, Dignity, and Respect For All Students And Parents In Virginia Public Schools.” The guidelines hijacked a law meant to protect LGBTQ+ students by releasing state school guidelines designed to discriminate against them. This set of guidelines was the first that contained the outright contradictory set of values that misgendering is a matter of “freedom of speech” but gendering correctly is about “parental consent.” The guidelines state that teachers must use the pronouns of the student’s sex in school records, erasing their “freedom of speech” framework. The guidelines later say that teachers who misgender have “constitutionally protected rights” to do so. The Virginia policy has been the subject of protests and massive student walkouts and is currently pending taking effect.

If the Arizona bill takes into effect, it will contain two hypocritical applications of two different principles and will selectively apply them against transgender students. Trans students will have no protections in schools for their name and gender, and will lose their dignity in the process. Teachers who accept trans students will be forced via compelled speech to misgender them unless their parents are fully onboard. Teachers who do not accept transgender students do not have to listen to the parents at all and can claim moral conviction to misgender them. Teachers who accept trans students would be barred from the same claim of moral conviction.

This new Arizona bill is the first bill that outright contains the contradiction that conservatives have been leading up to. There are other “pronoun bills” that are currently in the works, including the one in Oklahoma. I expect several more pronoun bills to be introduced this year, and it remains to be seen how conservatives will justify selectively applying “freedom of speech” when it comes to transgender students and teachers.