AKRON, Ohio (LifeSiteNews) — Jackson Local School District (JLSD) agreed to pay $450,000 to a Christian English teacher it tried to force to recognize “transgender” names and pronouns of confused students after it was found to have violated Vivian Geraghty’s First Amendment rights.
Geraghty filed a lawsuit in 2022 against the district, Principal Kacy Carter, Superintendent Christopher DiLoreto, and curriculum director Monica Myers after she was forced out of her job following an incident in which two students asked to be addressed by opposite sex “gender identities.”
According to the lawsuit, when she asked Carter how to handle this situation, he “was initially unable to tell Ms. Geraghty exactly what her obligations were” but said “his own practice was to refrain from using any pronouns to refer to students who express gender identities inconsistent with their sex.” Myers later got involved and told her to put her “religious convictions aside,” and Carter eventually ordered her to write a resignation letter.
In August, U.S. District Court Judge Pamela Barker sided with the teacher, finding that JLSD “compelled Geraghty to use the students’ preferred names and pronouns,” forcing her “to utter what was not in her mind about a question of political and religious significance” in violation of the First Amendment’s guarantees to freedom of speech and free exercise of religion.
On December 18, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which represented Geraghty, announced that JLSD agreed to pay the teacher $450,000 in damages and attorney fees to settle the case.
“No school official can force a teacher to set her religious beliefs aside in order to keep her job,” declared ADF attorney Logan Spena. “The school tried to force Vivian to accept and repeat the school’s viewpoint on issues that go to the foundation of morality and human identity, like what makes us male or female, by ordering her to personally participate in the social transition of her students. The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power, and Jackson Local School District officials have learned that comes at a steep cost. Vivian resisted this unconstitutional demand and explained that her Christian faith made her unable to participate in her students’ social transition, and she has received just vindication for taking this stand.”
A significant 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 fail 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.
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.