EXCLUSIVE: Ohio School District To Pay $450K To Teacher Fired For Not Using Trans Students’ Pronouns

An Ohio school district will pay nearly half a million dollars to a teacher who was forced to resign after she said she could not use trans-identifying students’ new names and pronouns due to her Christian faith, The Daily Wire has learned.

English teacher Vivian Geraghty, 26, won a $450,000 settlement from the Jackson Local School District south of Columbus, her legal team announced Wednesday. She will not be returning to work for the district.

Two years ago, Geraghty was unceremoniously fired by Jackson Memorial Middle School when two students asked Geraghty to use new names that aligned “with their new gender identities rather than their legal names.” One of the students also requested that teachers use a preferred pronoun that did not reflect the student’s biological sex, her lawsuit said.

Geraghty went to the principal in hopes of reaching a solution, but the principal and his superior, the director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, told her “she would be required to put her beliefs aside as a public servant,” according to the lawsuit. She was allegedly accused of insubordination and told that continuing to teach without participating in the students’ gender transitions would “not work in a district like Jackson.”

She was informed that if she would not participate, she must resign immediately, her lawsuit said.

Geraghty said she attempted to tell the principal that forcing her to resign was a violation of her right to free speech, but the principal repeated that as a public servant, she must “set [her] religious convictions aside” or resign. The principal’s superior then handed her a laptop and told her to draft her letter of resignation immediately, the lawsuit said.

“Geraghty’s sincerely held religious beliefs and scientific understanding govern her view that a person is male or female based on sex, not personal identity, and participating in a student’s social transition violates those beliefs by forcing her to communicate messages she believes are untrue and harmful to the student,” her legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom said in a press release.

Geraghty and her legal team celebrated her settlement victory on Wednesday.

“No school official can force a teacher to set her religious beliefs aside in order to keep her job,” Alliance Defending Freedom Legal Counsel Logan Spena said in a statement.

“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,” Spena said.

“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.”

The $450,000 settlement covers damages and attorneys’ fees.

Geraghty is not the only teacher to be fired over pronoun use. In September, high school French teacher Peter Vlaming won a $575,000 settlement from the West Point School Board in Virginia. Vlaming had been fired for avoiding using pronouns to refer to one trans-identifying student. The school district also changed its policies.