In lawsuit, former teacher tells court she lost her job for refusing to use pronouns contrary to students’ biological sex
KANSAS CITY – A Christian teacher claims she lost her job at a Kansas City public school because she followed her biblical convictions by refusing to use pronouns contrary to her students’ biological sex.
Geri Bachman, who taught at Smith-Hale Middle School in the Hickman Mills School District, has filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, claiming that she faced religious discrimination after refusing to use pronouns contrary to students’ biological sex.
According to the complaint, Bachman “told administrators that her religious convictions prevented her from speaking about girls in ways that would communicate that they are boys.” In turn, the complaint claims that “administrators told the teacher to use whatever names, pronouns, or genders the students demanded.”
The St. Louis Record reported on Feb. 19 that Bachman “filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which issued her a right-to-sue letter, enabling her to pursue legal action.”
Jonathan Whitehead, Bachman’s attorney, told The St. Louis Record, “Hickman Mills broke the law when they refused to accommodate Ms. Bachman’s deeply held religious beliefs. The District tried to force Ms. Bachman to use male pronouns to address female students in her girls’ PE class. The District was inconsistent in its classifications, and allowed other teachers to treat the same students as female.”
Whitehead is a member of Abundant Life Church in Lee’s Summit, a church affiliated with the Missouri Baptist Convention.
According to The St. Louis Record, “Bachman is seeking compensatory and punitive damages.”
According to Neal Hardin of the Alliance Defending Freedom, “teachers and professors have been frequent targets of government pronoun policies” in recent years.
“Public school districts and universities are adopting policies requiring staff to use students’ preferred pronouns or face punishment,” Hardin wrote last fall. “Some policies even require teachers to lie to parents by actively hiding if their child is using a different set of pronouns at school than they are at home. In addition to teachers, parents who are expressing concerns about such policies are being vilified and denied their rights to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children.”
Bachman’s case in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri is Bachman v. Hickman Mills School District et al.