These Brave Teachers Took A Stand For Biological Reality In 2024

In 2017, Americans were split almost down the middle on the question: “Is gender determined by sex at birth or one’s subjective sense of identity?” Pew Research found back then that the numbers were 53% on the side of biological sex and 45% on the side of “gender identity.” Seven years later, as 2024 comes to a close, that number has shifted significantly to 65% and 34%, respectively.

We’ve seen that play out in a number of ways, one of the most obvious being the 2024 Presidential election. Donald Trump aired ads that called attention to Kamala Harris and her party’s emphasis on gender identity — from men in women’s sports, to using taxpayer dollars to pay for body alteration procedures for prisoners. The New York Times found those ads shifted some voters — especially black and Hispanic men — toward Trump. Political commentators with a finger on the pulse of the culture attribute the unscientific, dangerous focus on gender identity as one of the reasons Trump is now the president-elect.

From my point of view as the Director of the Center for Academic Freedom at Alliance Defending Freedom, gaining momentum toward scientific reality in the face of progressive thought policing has not been an easy task. Especially in the academic realm, where we started significantly litigating in 2018.

In that 2018 case, we represented Dr. Nicholas Meriwether, who was then a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University. Dr. Meriwether declined to use female pronouns for a male student, and as a result, the school punished him for following his convictions. Ultimately, Dr. Meriwether won the case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and settled the case four years after it started.

However, schools at all levels around the country tried to get everyone on board with accepting gender incongruence. ADF has worked to ensure teachers, parents, and students who have a view of human sexuality based on scientific reality don’t lose their voice in the conversation.

In Virginia, high school French teacher Peter Vlaming nearly lost everything because he couldn’t refer to a female student as male in good conscience. Peter was highly respected by the school and well-loved by students. When a female student announced she was male, Peter accommodated her by using a different name and avoiding the use of pronouns. But when the school found out about this, administrators demanded that he use male pronouns to refer to the female student. Peter refused because doing so would violate his convictions about language and human sexuality. The school fired him for his stance, and through years of court battles, received almost $600,000 in a settlement for the school’s violation of his free speech.

Similar to Peter, Vivian Geraghty — a middle school English teacher in Ohio — was forced to resign after she tried to reach a compromise with her school’s officials that would allow her to respectfully decline to use terms inconsistent with the sex of two students. When Vivian raised the First Amendment issue with the school’s principal, he told her that, as a public servant, she must “set [her] religious convictions aside.” Vivian just settled her lawsuit against the school this month to the tune of $450,000.

This fight over language and human sexuality is important, and it’s still not over. The University of Louisville punished, harassed, and ultimately fired Dr. Allan Josephson, who turned the university’s struggling Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology into a well-respected institution, after he spoke — in his personal capacity — at a Heritage Foundation panel about the dangers of buying into gender identity ideology for children. Dr. Josephson’s case started back in 2019, and in September of this year, the Sixth Circuit ruled that the university “should have known that Josephson’s speech was protected and that retaliating against Josephson for his speech would violate his First Amendment rights,” and sent the case back to the lower courts for jury trial.

If the recent trend in views on gender identity is any indication, Dr. Josephson’s stand for truth should ultimately result in further vindication. Teachers should not be forced to lie to their students, especially on something as important as human sexuality. In the medical community, researchers like Dr. Hilary Cass — who was commissioned to study the effects of gender transition procedures for minors by England’s National Institute of Health — are consistently finding there is no benefit to treating a young man or woman as the opposite sex.

These brave teachers are on the front lines of standing up against a dangerous ideology. Through their courage, the rest of America is catching on. This year brought important victories in the arena of thought and language, and in 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court has an opportunity to further protect children from this unproven, unpopular ideology by allowing states to protect kids from dangerous procedures like distributing puberty blockers and removing otherwise healthy body parts. More and more Americans agree it’s the right thing to do.

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Tyson Langhofer is senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom with Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.