Florida teacher fired for using gender-neutral honorific ‘Mx.’
Florida teacher fired for using gender-neutral honorific ‘Mx.’
The teacher has filed a discrimination complaint alleging that their termination is a violation of federal civil rights law.
I am glad someone is calling the Florida school system on their bullshit. Being non-binary hard and being treated like the coping mechanisms you use for avoiding hating the experience of dealing with people and existing in your body are somehow a delusion, some sort of sexual kink or deliberately confusing is like trying to go about your day with weights strapped to you. It makes dealing with every social interaction so tiring. It really feels like everybody else in the room is obsessed with your sex organs and characteristics like complete perverts that they don't see the question is about how happy you are and how you feel about all the people in your life and whether you feel anxious and isolated being around them or just comfortable and able to express your full range of personhood.
This teacher is standing up because they know there's others much worse off who aren't secure enough to do it. Pretty admirable I think.
Thank you for sharing how thus affects you. It’s important for people to see that this is affecting actual people and not some strawman concept they don’t understand.
It's something even a lot of my friends don't even really get. I ended up going to a Birthday party where across the street from the restaurant there was a 250 plus rally of anti-trans protesters with zero counter protesters. We didn't realize the thing would be there. I ended up not being able to eat because the stress from proximity made me throw up everything.
I know we get called sensitive snowflakes but having that level of outright hate shoved in your face can easily make anyone feel very small and very vulnerable and at some level it's visceral.
This isn't calling out Florida schools, this only calls out Florida employers. A teacher can be directed not to talk about gay in matters of education, and can be fired for not following such direction, but they cannot be discriminated against for their own sexual identity as a matter of their employment.
US law is shite.
A lot of people do not draw the distinction between talking about things in an educational context versus it being a way they express themselves for their own needs. Laws like this make people afraid to do so until it is contested because the act of contesting it is itself punitive. The cooling effect is implicit in the design of the law because it recognizes law removes people's ability to support themselves in a society before it has a chance to be tested meaning only the secure of a minority under extreme fire can contest it and that means becoming very visible in circumstances where one's safety often relies on being invisible.
This teacher is likely under extreme fire right now by a mob of people telling them they are a pedophile, delusional, harmful and trying to exploit every shred of exposed weaknesses to gendered nonsense one naturally lets be known when one comes out as non-binary.
Where legal protections are shaky schools will fire teachers under concerns for that teacher's physical and mental safety if enough parents are valued at being a threat by feeling empowered by their interpretation of the law or the idea that a school is operating outside the law. Ultimately running a school is government money that needs to be paid so an employee going up against a school board for wrongful dismissal will not impact the individual school as much when the main currency for the school board employees is time and complexity of a bunch of individual parents suing because their little darling asked them what someone calling themselves Mx. means when they came home.
That's a good point. Gorsuch's surprising cross over to rule with the liberal justices in a recent supreme court ruling (Bostock vs Clayton County) allowed gender and sexual identifies to be protected by current federal employment law. The very logical conclusion that comes from, any discrimination on the basis of sexual or gender identity revolves around a person' s assigned sex at birth, which is definitely prohibited, and you can't discriminate on those things without it being an illegal discrimination test based on sex. Basically if you fire someone assigned male at birth for wearing a dress but not someone assigned female at birth for wearing a dress, this is sex discrimination, already protected by current federal law. Similarly if you're firing a male for marrying a male but not firing a female for marrying a male, than that's sex discrimination already prohibited by current law.
Unfortunately I don't know if the current Supreme Court reasoning would extend the existing federal law to protect non binary honorifics, since the school could argue it would fire anyone using a non binary honorific regardless of that person's assigned sex at birth. Though maybe if you could get the school to admit they'd allow a non binary honorific for an intersex individual that would open up the door for non binary protections too via current law? But this is why we need a real updated federal law explicity protecting against discrimination on the basis of sexual and gender identifies, including non binary identities. In the meantime the states that do have explicit protections in their state laws are going to be much better places for non cis and hetero people to work in.
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Title VII of the Civil Rights Act explicitly prohibits discrimination because of sex in matters of employment. Florida is free to prevent teachers from teaching things, but they cannot fire people for their own sexual identity, per federal law.
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Meanwhile, Title II of CRA covers interstate commerce and prohibits discrimination because of race, color, religion, or national origin - but not sex. Under Federal Law, if your business has a lot of out of state customers (primarily hospitality) or includes supply chains that cross state lines, you can't discriminate on race, etc but you can discriminate on sex.
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The 14th Amendment states that the law must apply to everyone equally. However, this only applies to governments (and their contractors) - a black person cannot be refused to be heard in court and a gay person cannot be refused a marriage.
The way US law is supposed to work is that states can set their own laws where Federal Law doesn't cover it. However, they must do this within the bounds of Federal Law. This is why we have 1st Amendment challenges against state laws that fill in the gaps of federal law - a business can discriminate based on sex, or any other reason (so long as they don't fall under Title II), even if state law says otherwise.
US law is so shit. It's unnecessarily hard to read, distributed across multiple yet interwoven jurisdictions, and full of holes. But hey, at least it isn't financial regulations - reading those will cause a sane person to lose the will to live.
TL;DR This should be a slam dunk for the teacher, per Federal Law: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which overrules anything the states write. However, who knows how the current Supreme Court might try to spin it - if they even opt to hear it (they absolutely should).
The teacher will make millions from the settlement, paid squarely out of the pocket of working Floridians. And despite that, half the state will continue voting for politicians and supporting police whose actions have no real consequences for them - the tax payers will foot the bill for their actions. Until we start hitting these people in their own pocket books and pensions, their behavior won't change.
This may not be the slam dunk you think it is. To the best of my understanding, the current coverage under title vii for gender and sexuality has only been extended so far as "would this behaviour be unacceptable for the opposite sex?"
Florida could argue (within the scope of existing supreme Court decisions) that the use of certain "new" titles are never acceptable, regardless of the person's sex.
As written, the rule is illegal, but it could possibly be upheld in the context of this specific case.
They would have to argue that sex and gender are not the same thing in court, under oath. It's been a longstanding argument for the GOP that they are the same. And if they argue biological sex and gender are not 1:1, then they're acknowledging that a different gender identity than one's birth sex is possible, and setting that precedent immediately takes the wind out of a lot of their arguments on transgender folk.
This may not be the slam dunk you think it is.
Yeah, that's why I said "should".
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However, regular guys from Florida succeeded in being waaaay worse than the memed Florida Man, good job guys
"Florida Man" is a representation of all the US. The only difference is that Florida allows the publication of personal information about people for merely being arrested, let alone accused or even actually convicted of a crime. This gives a disproportionate view of how bad Florida is - it isn't that much worse than most other US states.
But it is worse. The whole state is literally a swamp, and Ron DeSantis is a war criminal, alongside his criminal actions as Governor (eg using ringfenced state money to benefit other states and his friend who owns a chartered airline business).
Florida Mx if you want to lose your job.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.Just wait until Mike Johnson allows a convention of the states (state governments are predominantly Republican, in contrast to the majority of state and national population) where they rewrite state adherance to the Constitution and every federal civil rights law they don't want states to have to adhere to - but not the ones you hold dear.
We call people what they want to be called. (Credit for this to Charlie Worroll from Crimelines and other podcasts)
Repression has historically always won... right? !
Online Public School, what's that?
My brother did Florida Virtual School and graduated in 2011 or so. It was actually pretty great, and what they should have switched all the students to during COVID. It's exactly what it sounds like, online coursework, just like if you've ever taken a college class online, but its a public high school option meaning its free. Some stuff doesn't work quite as well, the lab kit they sent my brother to use wasn't quite as good as my in person lab classes. Florida actually invested the time and money to make it good because a lot of child actors and some of the kids training at sports schools use it.
Edit: to clarify, "public" in the US means state government funded, I'm aware that some places mean the opposite when they talk about public/private schools.
It's a public school that's attended primarily online.
When I was enrolled in one, they had us do 99% of our work at home, and we could do the work at our own pace, but we had to come in to the building to take the more important tests to move to the next semester-equivalent. That was to make sure that we weren't cheating like we were fully able to do for the regular tests, because this was before spyware was the norm.
It was great for anyone who could stay motivated to do school work and would go out of their way to interact with other students, and it was the worst possible method of schooling for my lazy, unsociable ass. I'd likely not have graduated if my high school hadn't started giving what basically amounted to a GED test for seniors who couldn't pass their classes in time. I knew the stuff, I just refused to actually do the stuff. Highly recommend for extraverts. Cannot recommend for introverts.
How about we come up with a better term rather than use a stupid one that someone has to tell you how to pronounce.
To be fair Mrs. (And to a lesser extent Mr.) Don't have an obvious pronunciation from the spelling either. You've just been hearing them said out loud for most of your life.
It takes 10 seconds to learn its pronounced mix. Its not difficult in the slightest
Anyone with an S lettered last name is gunna sound like Mc S
I just tried it with my last name lol.
Mc Steele, makes me feel like a McDonald's meal item.
I'm not saying it's difficult to teach or learn, but if you first encounter it in a book are you going to know it's pronounced "mix?" And if you hear is are you going to know it's spelled "Mx?" You can argue difficulty all you want but if you have something that is spelled how it sounds and pronounced how it looks it's still easier and there will be less confusion.
I don't see anything stupid about this, but if you have better ideas, let's hear them.
The better idea is not to make up terminology that only suits you and an exceptionally small minority and then expect everyone else to adopt it.
By all means, define yourself as you like - but don't expect others to immediately recognise that definition without reasonable explanation.
This case has nuance. On the one hand, a teacher in Florida is not allowed to talk about gay people or anything about alternate genders, per state law. On the other, Federal Law states that no one can be fired over matters regarding sex. Federal law overrules any laws states make, hence the ruling in 303 Creative vs Elenis, however the question is what "sex" covers in the Federal domain.
How do you even say that? "Mexico Smith, can I get a hall pass?"
Here in Spain you see X or @ a lot.
Like senorxs or señor@s. Where the X or @ means 'o' or 'e' (male) or 'a' (female). I like the way they do this.
This has some issues as it doesn't include non-binary options. I think it's also more of a protest against the patriarchal nature of the Spanish language which always defaults to the male version in the case where the gender is unknown or a mix.
How is pronounced I don't really know. People don't really speak it in practice. It's more used written.
Spanish is my first language. Spanish defaults to masculine of words, but so do all Latin based languages. Here in the states we see Latinx. In Mexico and South America, "latine" is becoming prevalent.
Linguistically speaking, it's absurd. Polls in the USA, where Latinx was invented by uncomfortable, uninformed white people to try and be inclusive, show that 93% of the latino / hispanic population either disapprove of or don't care about it.
Edit: putting this up higher for visibility.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248/hispanic-latino-or-latinx-survey-says
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-preference-trnd/index.html
It's still entirely non-standard, and not explicitly protected under law.
By all means, push the bounds; and I would hope you establish legal precedent. However, there is little that offers prior circumstance; you are still arguing how things should be, rather than how things are right now. Because of that, courts are not a sufficient venue, it must be argued at the political level.
I agree that Mx is made up bullshit, much like "Latinx" is nonsense in Spanish, but the law does not make any such distinction. You cannot be discriminated against in your job based on your sexual identity, even if you identified as an Apache helicopter ("oh yes daddy, let me fuck you in your missile tubes" - "hah, as if you'd even touch the sides").
I agree that Mc is made up bullshit
Boy do I have bad news for you about every other word that exists in every single language. There is no word tree we harvest fresh ripe new words from, everything is made up. We are just meat squirting air through our various holes because we like the sounds they make and wish to communicate thought.
Like "mix". It's fairly simple to most people who have common sense and aren't actively trying to be offended over nothing.
Your version of "common sense" in this situation only applies to a small minority that naturally extrapolates beyond the meaning of the statement alone.
"Mx." as a prefix is not in any way established in common vernacular, nor does it easily make sense unless you assume they're doing something specific that most people don't do.
However, the law says that anyone is free to do so as they please; you can sexually identify in any way and must not be discriminated against for that in terms of your employment.
It's not "fairly simple if you have common sense". The known abbreviations have been in use for a hundred or more years and are widely known. Everyone knows how to pronounce them, the only curveball is Mrs being misses since it was originallymistress but that word later became associated with cheating and "ladies of the night".
Mx was made up recently, it stands for nothing AFAIK. They just took the standard M beginning and slapped X on it because X tends to mean "unknown".
It's akin to asking you to address me as "Zf. Cat" because that's what makes me feel comfortable.
You don't need to have kids call you weird names, it's really not necessary. Just be normal.
“Just be normal” is the first step toward “just be straight” then “just be white” then “just be Christian” then “just be our version of Christian”. Why can’t people just be who they are? Like, literally no one is hurting anyone in this scenario, yet your absolute paper thin fragile porcelain toilet of an ego is hurt because the teacher isn’t exactly how you picture the ideal person your children think the world is filled with.