In New Hampshire, a teenager has filed a lawsuit against his school after he was suspended simply for stating the fact that there are only two genders, the New York Post reports.
The lawsuit was filed against Exeter High School on November 4th, with the assistance of a Christian organization called Cornerstone Action. In the suit, the student said he was suspended from one football game by his school’s athletics program for reaffirming the biological fact that there are only two genders, male and female.
The comments were made during a conversation between the student and some of his friends on a bus after school hours, where the student noted that plural pronouns were difficult to use in Spanish due to the Spanish language’s use of gendered pronouns for men and women. A female student interrupted the conversation at that point to make the false claim that there are more than two genders, to which the student replied with “no there isn’t. There’s only two genders.” He later continued the debate in a text conversation with another student, which the school obtained screenshots of and printed out for him when they informed him of his suspension.
In the lawsuit, the student claims that his statement of this fact is part of his Catholic beliefs, and that the district’s policies on “gender pronouns” and “non-binary gender identity” infringe on his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The policies in question dictate that students must be referred to by the pronouns of their choice, and students who do not use these pronouns are subject to punishment by the school.
The student admits to violating this policy because he does not consider this policy to be legitimate. “He in fact denied, and will continue to deny, that any person can belong to a gender other than that of ‘male’ or ‘female’” the lawsuit reads. The student says he “will never refer to any individual person using plural pronouns such as ‘they,’ using contrived pronouns such as ‘ze,’ or with any similar terminology that reflects values which (the student) does not share.”
When superintendent David Ryan was asked about the suspension and subsequent lawsuit, he said that the school would review the student’s complaint and “will be able to share a statement once we have completed that review.”