*An Ohio teacher will receive $450,000 in a legal settlement after claiming she was forced to resign for refusing to use transgender students’ preferred pronouns, citing her religious beliefs.
Vivian Geraghty, an English teacher at Jackson Memorial Middle School in Massillon, resigned after district officials demanded she comply with policies that conflicted with her religious ideology. She believes that gender is determined by biological sex rather than personal identity. She reportedly argued that supporting a student’s social transition would go against her convictions and compel her to convey messages she considers false and harmful.
“No school official can force a teacher to set her religious beliefs aside in order to keep her job,” said Logan Spena a legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, the organization representing Geraghty.
“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 continued.
“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 settlement followed an August ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, which found the school’s pronoun policy amounted to “compelled speech.”
The conflict began in 2022 when two students requested to be addressed by names matching their gender identities, and another student asked for different pronouns, in line with school policy. Geraghty declined, citing her “religious beliefs and constitutional rights,” leading the school to force her to resign.
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