Seventh Circuit Allows Teacher to Pursue Title VII Claim Against School for Requiring Him to Use Chosen First Names of Transgender Students
In 2021, in Meriwether v. Hartop, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that a university professor could pursue First Amendment free expression and free exercise challenges to Shawnee State University’s policy that required professors to use students’ desired pronouns. Eugene blogged on the case, and I participated in an Academic Freedom Alliance webinar discussing it.
This past week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit considered some similar claims in Kluge v. Brownsburg Community School Corp. As with Meriwether, Kluge concerned a teacher’s challenge to his school’s policy as it relates to how teachers should refer to transgender students, but there are also some significant differences.
First, the claim in Kluge is that the school is violating Title VII by failing to accommodate Kluge’s religious beliefs. In Meriwether, by contrast, the claims were largely constitutional.
Second, whereas Meriwether involved pronouns, Kluge involves names. The policy at issue requires teachers to refer to students by their chose first names (as opposed to by their last names). Kluge objects to this policy because he believes referring to a student by a first name that conflicts with their biological sex violates his religious commitments. he was initially granted an accommodation under which he could refer to students by their last names, but the school ultimately decided this accommodation was not reasonable and rescinded it.
Third, Kluge arose in a high school, not a university. This is potentially significant both because academic freedom interests are less pronounced in a high-school setting and because accommodations that might be reasonable in a university setting might not be reasonable in a grade school.
As in Meriwhether, the appeals court is allowing the objecting teacher’s case to go forward, here for a jury determination as to whether accommodating Kluge would produce an “undue hardship” on the school.
Judge Brennan wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge St. Eve. Judge Rovner dissented.
Here is how Judge Brennan summarized the issues and the case:
Brownsburg High School instituted a policy mandating teachers call students by their first names as they appeared in its database. For transgender students who had changed their first names, the database listed their new ones.
John Kluge was a teacher at Brownsburg. He repeatedly objected to the school’s name policy on religious grounds. Kluge believed that calling transgender students names that conflicted with their biological sex encouraged their transgender identities—a sin, in his view. So, he requested an accommodati
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