Teachers Monica Gill of Loudoun County High School and Kim Wright of Smart's Mill Middle School have together filed an amended complaint against the Loudoun County School Board in Virginia to block a newly passed policy that requires school faculty and staff to use the preferred names and pronouns of trans-identifying students.
The Loudoun County school board passed "Policy 8040: Rights of Transgender and Gender-Expansive" after a vote of 7-2 last week despite intense criticism from parents and school teachers alike.
According to the Christian Post, Gill and Wright, who teach history and English respectively, proposed to be added to a pre-existing legal challenge involving the Loudoun County school district's treatment of gym teacher Bryon "Tanner" Cross of Leesburg Elementary School, who was famously suspended for openly criticizing the then-proposed transgender policies of the district during a school board meeting.
Gill and Wright on Monday filed the amended complaint, which argues that Cross, Gill and Wright are in opposition of the transgender policies of the Virginia school board because they believe these policies "[communicate] that gender identity, rather than biological reality, fundamentally shapes and defines who we truly are as humans, that our sex can change, and that a woman who identifies as a man really is a man."
In addtion, Gill and Wright's complaint allages that if they were to comply with the transgender policies of the Virginia school board, "they would be forced to communicate a message they believe is false."
The amended complaint read, "[I]f they refer to students based on their biological sex, they communicate the views they actually believe - that our sex shapes who we are as humans, that this sex is fixed in each person, and that it cannot be changed, regardless of our feelings or desires."
WTOP News reported that Tyson Langhofer, Senior Counsel at the organization representing Cross called Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), argued that the Virginia school board is taking sides in the "national debate over competing views of human nature and compelled conformity to, and support for, only one view."
Langhofer argued that teachers or anyone for that matter should not be forced to "promote ideologies that are harmful" to students and other ideologies that they know are factually false, such as that a man can be a woman and vice versa.
The East Coast is continuing to see the fight between transgender and religious rights. In July, Politico reported that a federal judge in Virginia's neighboring West Virginia temporarily blocked a law that prohibits transgender women and girls from competing in school sports teams that match their preferred gender identity.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Becky Pepper-Jackson, an 11 year old middle schooler who sought to try out for his school's cross-country team. Pepper-Jackson's lawyers argued that the West Virginia law violates both the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and Title IX for discriminating on the "basis of sex" and "transgender status."
Laws that protect women's rights by prohibiting transgender athletes in women's and girls sports have taken effect in Mississippi, Montana, Florida, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama.
