A Virginia high school French teacher who was fired for not referring to a transgender student by his preferred pronouns is now suing the school board.
Toward the end of the 2017-2018 school year, Peter Vlaming, then a French teacher at West Point High School in Williamsburg, Virginia, learned that one of his students would begin identifying as male, according to a press release from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit Christian legal group that is aiding Vlaming. Despite Vlaming’s efforts to accommodate the student, he claims, he was fired by the school board in December 2018 for refusing, based on his religious beliefs, to refer to the student using male pronouns.
The complaint filed by Vlaming’s attorneys Monday outlines steps he says he took to make sure the student was comfortable in the class. He met with the student, the student’s mother, and a guidance counselor prior to the start of the new school year, and used the student’s new preferred name. The complaint also states Vlaming “did not ever intentionally use female pronouns to refer to the student when in her presence after meeting with her and her mother” and added he typically referred to students by their first names during class.
There were no issues for the first few weeks of school, but in late October the student reportedly complained to Vlaming because he heard Vlaming had referred to him with female pronouns when the student was not present. The two met, and all seemed well, according to Vlaming, but when he called the student’s parent to mention the conversation and say he would not refer to the student with female pronouns in class, the parent allegedly told him to forego his beliefs and refer to the student as male.
During a meeting with the school’s assistant principal soon after, Vlaming explained that using male pronouns to refer to a woman violated his religious beliefs, and the complaint notes he believes “both as a matter of human anatomy and religious conviction that sex is biologically fixed in each person and cannot be changed regardless of a person’s feelings or desires.” He was told that his “personal religious beliefs end at the school door” when they conflict with school board policy, although the assistant principal did not specify the nature of that policy.
A week after that meeting, Vlaming oversaw a class activity involving virtual reality goggles. Realizing that the student was about to bump into a wall, Vlaming said, “Don’t let her hit the wall!” He put his hand to his mouth upon realizing he used the female pronoun, and at the end of class the student reportedly told him, “Mr. Vlaming, you may have your religion, but you need to respect who I am.” Vlaming apologized and told the principal about the incident.
The situation spiraled, leading to a hearing before the school board that resulted in his termination just over a month later for his refusal to refer to the student using male pronouns. To protest his termination, some of Vlaming’s students participated in a walkout the day after his firing, with one student telling a local paper, “Everyone has rights, the student has rights, but so does Mr. Vlaming.” A GoFundMe account was also set up to support Vlaming, who is in his late 40s, his wife, and their four children, and it has accumulated over $50,000 in donations.
The complaint argues the case is about “far more than pronouns,” extending to “whether the government may force Mr. Vlaming to express ideas about human nature, unrelated to the school’s curriculum, that he believes are false.”
“Peter went out of his way to accommodate this student as he does all his students; his school fired him because he wouldn’t contradict his core beliefs,” said Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Caleb Dalton, one of Vlaming’s attorneys. “The school board didn’t care how well Peter treated this student. It was on a crusade to compel conformity.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom has been deemed an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a label that has met fierce criticism, in part due to the Alliance’s respected position as a litigator in important Supreme Court cases. The Alliance Defending Freedom was involved in the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court ruled on narrow grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission violated the religious freedom of a baker who refused to provide a wedding cake to a gay couple.
