The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that Katie Wood, a high school math teacher who is male but identifies as a woman, could not demand the use of feminine pronouns or the honorific “Ms.”
The controversy centered around a state law enacted in 2023, known as Florida Statute § 1000.071, which states that “[a]n employee or contractor of a public K-12 educational institution may not provide to a student his or her preferred personal title or pronouns if such preferred personal title or pronouns do not correspond to his or her sex.”
Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom, appointed by Trump, wrote the majority opinion, which concluded that “Wood hasn’t shown a substantial likelihood that” the state law “infringes [his] free-speech Rights.” He specifically challenged the lower court’s reasoning that Wood’s self-declared pronouns amounted to speech from a “private citizen” rather than from a “government employee.”
Newsom wrote that “a teacher’s right to speak is not without limits” and that Wood “cannot show, with respect to the expression at issue here, that she was speaking as a private citizen rather than a government employee.” “When a public-school teacher addresses her students within the four walls of a classroom — whether orally or in writing — she is unquestionably acting ‘pursuant to official duties,’” he stated.
He contrasted Wood’s situation with that of Joe Kennedy in the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, where the court ruled 6-3 that a public high school football coach could lawfully pray on the football field after games.
“When Kennedy was praying, his official duties as a football coach had ceased — he was off the clock, so to speak,” he explained. “Here, by contrast … when Wood addressed her students in the classroom, she was very much on the clock, discharging the very obligation the state had hired her to discharge.”
In dissent, Circuit Judge Adalberto Jordan, an Obama appointee, argued that “Wood has substantially demonstrated that [his] use of her preferred personal title and pronouns constitutes private speech on a matter of public concern rather than government speech.”
He emphasized that “The preferred personal title and pronouns of a teacher are, like her name, significant markers of individual identity. They exist outside of, and do not depend on, the school or the government for their existence.”
