Three schoolboys are being taken to court in the US state of Wisconsin after allegedly refusing to call a fellow student by their preferred pronouns, reports WLUK local news.
The trio of eighth graders (Year 9 in the UK) from Kiel Middle School in Wisconsin have been charged under Title IX sexual harassment legislation, which usually deals with serious crimes such as rape, sexual harassment and other sexually violent crimes.
One of the boy’s mums, Rosemary Rabidoux, couldn’t believe it when her son’s school rang to make her aware of the investigation:
‘I received a phone call from the principal over at the elementary school, forewarning me; letting me know that I was going to be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against my son.
I immediately went into shock. I’m thinking, sexual harassment? That’s rape, that’s inappropriate touching, that’s incest. What has my son done?’
None of the above. 13-year-old Brayden had refused to use they/them pronouns for his classmate:
‘[The investigating principal] said he’s being allegedly charged with sexual harassment for not using proper pronouns.
I thought it wasn’t real. I thought this has got to be a gag, a joke – one has nothing to do with the other.’
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) is defending the accused boys and claims that misuse of pronouns is not covered by Title IX. WILL Deputy Counsel Luke Berg said in an online statement:
‘School administrators can’t force minor students to comply with their preferred mode of speaking. 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.’
The three boys were charged after declining to use they/them pronouns that a fellow student asked everyone to use a month earlier. Rosemary Rabidoux says her son stood up for one of his friends when he was being verbally abused for misgendering the non-binary student.
‘[The student] had been screaming at one of Brayden’s friends to use proper pronouns, calling him profanity, and this friend is very soft-spoken, and kind of just sunk down into his chair.
[My son] finally came up, defending him, saying ‘He doesn’t have to use proper pronouns, it’s his constitutional right to not use, you can’t make him say things.’
The boys’ families are now attempting to have the charges dropped before the matter reaches court. Obviously people have the right to identify as whatever gender they want, but a sexual harassment charge? Makes you think that maybe there’s more to the story than just three lads refusing to use someone’s preferred pronouns. The alternative – that three teenagers are facing sexual harassment charges for not respecting a non-binary student’s pronouns, just seems too insane to be true. Then again, it’s 2022 – so maybe not that shocking at all.
For the gender-fluid engineer who was awarded £180,000 after colleagues called them ‘It’, click HERE.
