Students in Wisconsin are under investigation for referring to fellow students with incorrect pronouns. | Unsplash/Kenny Eliason
Students in Wisconsin are under investigation for referring to fellow students with incorrect pronouns. | Unsplash/Kenny Eliason
A Wisconsin school district is investigating students for violating federal sexual harassment laws by using "incorrect pronouns," when addressing classmates, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL).
The district has accused eighth grade boys of sexual harassment under the federal Title IX law, WILL said.
“School administrators can’t force minor students to comply with their preferred mode of speaking," WILL deputy counsel Luke Berg said. "And they certainly shouldn’t be slapping eighth graders with Title IX investigations for what amounts to protected speech. This is a terrible precedent to set, with enormous ramifications."
Three eighth grade students in the Kiel Area School District of Wisconsin were notified of a Title IX complaint and investigation, according to a May 12 press release from WILL. The complaint was filed over sexual harassment allegations for using what WILL calls "a biologically correct" pronoun when referring to a classmate, instead of the student’s preferred pronoun of “they/them.” The school district holds the position that once a student informs others of their preferred pronouns, any subsequent “mispronouncing” automatically constitutes punishable sexual harassment under Title IX.
The WILL website says both Title IX and the Kiel Area School District’s policy defines sexual harassment as incidents such as rape, sexual assault, dating violence, stalking, inappropriate touching and quid pro quo sexual favors.
The WILL attorneys hold the opinion that the mere use of a "biologically correct pronoun," without significantly more, does not qualify as sexual harassment under Title IX or the District's policy, and if it did, it would violate the First Amendment.
The attorneys' letter to the Kiel Area School District administrators urges the district to immediately drop the complaints, stop the investigation and remove the complaints from the eighth graders' records.
Berg and Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel for WILL, wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that a Virginia-based school board is also considering adding a policy to prohibit “malicious misgendering.”
Esenberg and Berg also wrote that the Biden administration is reportedly preparing to release updated Title IX regulations. They predict that, given the president’s "pronouncement that transgender discrimination is the civil rights issue of our time, it wouldn’t be surprising if the new rules call for the policing of pronouns."
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