Public School District Pays $650k Settlement for Firing Teacher over Trans Students’ Preferred Pronouns

For the second time in less than two years a small public school district is paying over half a million dollars in damages to settle a case involving a teacher it fired for declining to use students’ preferred pronouns inconsistent with their biological sex. It is yet another troubling example of how publicly funded entities have wasted precious taxpayer dollars to accommodate transgender people, which make up just one percent of the U.S. population according to an extensive report issued by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) school of law. People who identify as transgender suffer from gender dysphoria, according to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which defines the diagnosis as “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.”

Under the Biden administration transgender rights took center stage at many government agencies and American taxpayers were even forced to provide costly gender dysphoria treatments, including sex reassignment surgery, breast augmentation, facial-feminization, permanent hair removal and other procedures for jailed felons. The trans rights movement inevitably spilled into other areas of the public sector including education with public schools across the nation adopting policies to accommodate transgender students, even when it violated the rights of others. About a year and a half ago Judicial Watch reported about a tiny public school district that paid a hefty settlement for firing a teacher over a transgender student’s preferred pronouns. The high school French teacher, Peter Vlaming, worked in Virginia’s West Point Public Schools for about seven years and was fired back in 2018 because he would not use masculine pronouns when referring to a biological girl who identified as a boy.

With the help of a conservative nonprofit, the teacher sued and in the fall of 2024 the district with an enrollment of around 813 students agreed to pay him $575,000 in damages as well as attorneys’ fees. Vlaming’s lawsuit was initially dismissed by a judge in King William County Circuit Court, but he appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court, which reinstated the case and led to a settlement. In its ruling the appellate court wrote that Virginia’s Constitution contains robust free speech and free exercise protections for public employees like Vlaming. “Absent a truly compelling reason for doing so, no government committed to these principles can lawfully coerce its citizens into pledging verbal allegiance to ideological views that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs,” the opinion, issued in December 2023, states. The teacher’s lawsuit was not just about pronouns, according to his complaint. It was about whether the government can force him to express ideas about human nature, unrelated to the school’s curriculum, that he believes are false. If so, he would be forced to communicate that gender identity, rather than biological reality, fundamentally shapes and defines who we are.

In the latest case, the same conservative group represented a music teacher in Indiana forced to resign for declining to refer to students using terms inconsistent with their biological sex, in violation of his religious beliefs. The veteran educator, John Kluge, taught orchestra and music theory at Brownsburg High School in the Brownsburg Community School Corporation around 10 miles northwest of Indianapolis for several years before the district mandated that he use trans-friendly terminology that violated his religious beliefs. To cooperate, he agreed to address students by their last name like a coach and the district with an enrollment of around 10,550 agreed until a few students and teachers complained and the school revoked his accommodation. In his lawsuit the teacher argues that the school district’s actions violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, a federal law prohibiting discrimination against employees based on religion. This month Brownsburg Community School Corporation officials agreed to pay Kluge $650,000 to settle the lawsuit. The settlement confirms what the law has always said, according to the teacher’s attorney at the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF): “Public schools cannot force teachers to violate their religious beliefs.” The settlement shows teachers that they do not have to bow the knee to ideological mandates that violate their religious beliefs, the group says.