Wood v. Florida Department of Education
What’s at stake: Whether Florida can ban transgender teachers from using pronouns and titles that best express who they are.
Summary: Katie Wood is a 10th grade algebra teacher in a Florida public school. She is also a transgender woman. Her students have always addressed her as “Ms. Wood” and referred to her with she/her pronouns.
But in 2023, Florida passed a law that banned transgender public-school teachers from using the pronouns and titles that match their gender identities. Soon after, school administrators told Katie she had to refer to herself as “Mr.” or “Teacher.” After the meeting, Katie missed several days of work and became physically ill. When she returned, she erased her feminine pronouns and titles from her classroom whiteboard and replaced them with “Teacher.” The change confused students and disrupted her classroom, forcing her to spend time responding to students who did not understand the changes.
Along with other Florida teachers who are transgender and nonbinary, Katie sued Florida in federal court in Tallahassee. The court ruled that Florida’s law violated Katie’s rights under the First Amendment. The state appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. There, Public Justice and Lambda Legal filed an amicus brief to support Katie. The brief explains that the law not only violates the First Amendment, but also harms both students and teachers.
Core legal question: The appeal asks whether Florida can force a teacher to misgender herself simply because she works for the state. As the Supreme Court recently explained, the First Amendment protects a teacher’s speech at school when she speaks for herself (rather than the state) on a matter of “public concern,” and when her interest in the speech outweighs the state’s supposed need to ban it. By censoring how Katie expresses a core aspect of her personal identity because Florida disagrees with the message it thinks her pronouns contain—that transgender women are women—the law fails that test and strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. And in doing so, it creates hostile school environments for both teachers and students, especially those who are transgender.
