Judge tosses lawsuit brought by teacher fired after refusing to use transgender students’ pronouns

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit brought by a former elementary school teacher who was fired after she refused to refer to a transgender student by their preferred pronouns, citing her religious beliefs.

In her 16-page decision, U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said the former teacher failed to adequately support her claims that the school district was hostile to her religion. The teacher’s speech was “not protected," the judge said.

“The argument fails because, even accepted as true, the well-pleaded facts do not plausibly allege hostility,” Beeler ruled.

The plaintiff, former teacher Mirella Ramirez, sued the Oakland Unified School District in 2024, claiming it violated her rights to freedom of speech and free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. As a devout Catholic, Ramirez believes it is against her religion to use pronouns that differ from a person’s “divinely intended gender.”

Beeler also said that the individual school staff members Ramirez also sued were entitled to qualified immunity from the claims. The judge stated that a reasonable school official would not have recognized her firing as a violation of the teacher’s freedom of speech, given the extensive and conflicting case law around teachers’ use of students’ pronouns.

“As a threshold matter, the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit have not addressed whether a teacher’s use of a student’s pronouns is protected speech,” Beeler said.

Besides the lack of guidance from higher courts, the judge said that analogous cases from multiple other circuits have reached mixed rulings, with some finding that similar speech was constitutionally protected and others finding the exact opposite.

As a state entity, the judge also said that the school district was entitled to sovereign immunity under the 11th Amendment, which bars lawsuits against a state or its agencies without the state’s consent.

Although the judge dismissed all claims against the school district with prejudice, she said the teacher could still refile the lawsuit against members of the district’s staff individually.

The lawsuit stems from an incident in August 2022, when Ramirez was asked by one of her kindergarten students to use male pronouns when referring to him, even Ramirez believed that the student was biologically female. After discussing the request with the five-year-old’s parents, who supported the decision, Ramirez said she couldn’t comply because of her Catholic faith.

After multiple complaints from the students’ parents, other teachers, members of the public and multiple meetings with school administration, Ramirez was suspended with pay in January 2023. The district board voted to terminate her in February 2023.

Ramirez is represented by Dhillon Law Group, a law firm founded by San Francisco-based attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a former Donald Trump lawyer and legal adviser to the president’s 2020 campaign. Dhillon was tapped by the president in February to serve as Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

The conservative nonprofit We The Patriots USA, which Ramirez contacted for help after her termination, funded the lawsuit.

The former educator primarily taught Spanish language classes at Melrose Leadership Academy, a dual immersion school in the Oakland Unified School District, which teaches curriculum in both Spanish and English.

“The district’s order placed Ramirez in an untenable position. Spanish is not a gender-neutral language, and it requires grammatical gender for nouns, adjectives, determiners and pronouns,” she argued in her lawsuit.

After a pre-disciplinary hearing with district staff, Ramirez was offered accommodations for her faith, including the options to call transgender students by their first name, call students by their last names, teaching another grade level and teaching at a different school.

Ramirez found these accommodations “unacceptable” and instead requested training on how to use gender-neutral Spanish, which was denied by the district.

Attorneys for both sides did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This case was filed in the Northern District of California.