Virginia high school teacher fired for refusing to use transgender student's new pronouns

[mahatmakanejeeves]

After the vote, reporters asked the fired teacher, a married father of 4, why this was worth losing his family’s sole source of income.

“There are some hills that are worth dying on,” he said

Link to tweet

Virginia high school teacher fired for refusing to use transgender student's new pronouns

By GRAHAM MOOMAW Richmond Times-Dispatch 12 hrs ago

WEST POINT — A Virginia high school teacher was fired Thursday for refusing to use a transgender student’s new pronouns, a case believed to be the first of its kind in the state. ... After a four-hour hearing, the West Point School Board voted 5-0 to terminate Peter Vlaming, a French teacher at West Point High School who resisted administrators’ orders to use male pronouns to refer to a ninth-grade student who had undergone a gender transition. The board met in closed session for nearly an hour before the vote.

Like a similar transgender rights case in nearby Gloucester County that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Vlaming’s situation could present a novel legal case as public bodies continue to grapple with how to reconcile anti-discrimination policies with the rights of religious employees.

The high school in West Point, a town in King William County about an hour east of Richmond, has about 265 students. ... Vlaming, 47, who had taught at the school for almost seven years after spending more than a decade in France, told his superiors his Christian faith prevented him from using male pronouns for a student he saw as female.
....

Vlaming, who is pursuing a master’s degree in school administration at the College of William & Mary, asked the School Board to consider what he called the “absurdity” of punishing a teacher for discrimination on the basis of pronoun usage alone, with no accusation of overtly malicious behavior. ... “I am being punished for what I haven’t said,” Vlaming said.

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Twitter: @gmoomaw

[elias7]

1. Obviously not a history teacher

He said he is losing his job for having views held by “most of the world for most of human history.”

Given humans have around for 300,000 years or so, really anything that we’ve learned in the past 50,000 years or so is pretty much discardable

[Initech]

2. Wow, what a dick.

[Odoreida]

3. Unpleasant update

Students walk out to protest firing of Christian teacher for opposing transgender pronoun use rules
https://www.christianpost.com/news/students-walkout-to-protest-firing-of-christian-teacher-for-opposing-transgender-pronoun-use-rules.html

Students at a public high school have demonstrated their support for a Christian teacher fired from his position because he refused to refer to a trans-identified student by their preferred pronoun.

Less than 24 hours after the West Point, Virginia school board unanimously voted to terminate high school French instructor Peter Vlaming, a large group of students walked out of their classes to protest the decision.

...