(LifeSiteNews) — A three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has declared that Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland was within its rights to require teachers to refer to students by “transgender” names and pronouns, rejecting substitute teacher Kimberly Polk’s First Amendment lawsuit.
The Washington Post reports that, in November 2022, Polk requested a religious accommodation exempting her from the district’s “gender identity” mandate, which she said violated her religious beliefs as a Christian. A compliance coordinator initially proposed options, such as having her only teach preschool and elementary classes, but the request was denied a month later, prompting her to stop substitute teaching entirely.
In 2024, she filed a lawsuit accusing MCPS of violating her constitutional rights to free speech and religious exercise. She requested a preliminary injunction allowing her to teach elementary classes while the lawsuit progressed, which a lower court rejected while dismissing “most of Polk’s claims, stating that when she was hired by the school board, the board paid her to speak on its behalf as her employer.”
Polk appealed, the 4th Circuit panel heard arguments in October, and now it has affirmed the lower court’s decision.
“Be it choosing curriculum or placing administrative requirements on how teachers deliver that curriculum, those decisions are entrusted to the Board, not to judges,” Judge Robert King wrote for the majority. “And it is the Board – not individual teachers – which is democratically responsive. If, as Polk says, teachers and parents disagree with the Guidelines, then democratic means exist to address their concerns.”
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III dissented, finding the MCPS policy did constitute compelled speech and set a “dangerous precipice.” He wrote, “do not indulge affronts to speakers’ dignity simply because they, like Ms. Polk, stand in the minority.”
Polk’s attorney Rick Claybrook said they are currently considering their options on where to appeal the decision.
“A teacher does not lose her own free speech rights when she goes through the schoolhouse gate,” he said. “You’re forcing her to speak words she doesn’t want to speak. You’re forcing her to hide from parents things she doesn’t want to hide.”
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
This is not the only legal controversy over LGBT ideology that MCPS has found itself in. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against the district in allowing parents to opt their children out of a mandatory list of pro-LGBT reading materials for kindergarten through fifth grade, including “Prince and Knight,” a fairytale about a male knight and a prince who get “married,” a book on 50 “LGBTQ+” historical figures titled “Rainbow Revolutionaries” – including accused child abuser Harvey Milk – and the pro-transgender book “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope.”