A professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio has won a substantial damages and legal fees payout after a three-year legal battle arising from his reluctance to use preferred pronouns when addressing a transgender student.
Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at the university said his constitutional rights had been violated and that the university, who rebuked him for the incident, was attempting to convince him to go against his Christian beliefs.
The legal case arose after a transgender student in Meriwether’s class, born male but identifying as female, asked the professor to use female pronouns – she, her – when addressing her in class.
Meriwether, who addressed students either by “Mr.” or “Ms.”, offered what he called a compromise – that he would refer to the student by their preferred proper name – the female name – or by the last name only, without title, but this offer was refused by the student.
The professor told the student that addressing her by her preferred pronouns would “violate his conscience and sincerely held religious beliefs”—specifically, his belief that “God created human beings as either male or female, that this gender is fixed in each person from the moment of conception, and that it cannot be changed, regardless of an individual’s feelings or desires,” according to his lawsuit.
Referring to the student by the pronouns that reflect an identity different to that from birth, would, Meriwether said, force him to “communicate views regarding gender identity that he does not hold, [and] that he does not wish to communicate[.]”
He said: “The student approached me after class and said that he wanted to be referred to as a female, and I tried to find an accommodation with the student.
“I was willing to use his proper name, female proper name, and initially the administration was willing to go along with that, but then the administration changed course and demanded that I defer to the ideology, that I refer to the student as a female and I simply could not do that,” he told Fox News.
“I believe that God created men and women, male and female. But also the idea that my speech could be coerced, could be compelled by the administration … The college classroom is to be a place of debate and discussion and freewheeling ideas. The university has no place in telling professors how they are to think with the students. It was a coercion of my freedom of speech.”
The university said that the rebuke was because Meriwether was “expressing views that differ from [the university’s] own orthodoxy”.
But the appeals court has now ruled that the incident did violate Dr Meriwether’s right to free speech, and ordered the university to pay $400,000 in damages and legal fees, which they have agreed to do.
In a statement, the university said: “Though we have decided to settle, we adamantly deny that anyone at Shawnee State deprived Dr Meriwether of his free speech rights or his rights to freely exercise his religion.
“We continue to stand behind a student’s right to a discrimination-free learning environment as well as the rights of faculty, visitors, students and employees to freely express their ideas and beliefs.
Campaign group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) supported Prof Meriwether in his case and welcomed the decision.
Travis Barnham, senior counsel at ADF, said: This case forced us to defend what used to be a common belief — that nobody should be forced to contradict their core beliefs just to keep their job.
“Dr Meriwether went out of his way to accommodate his students and treat them all with dignity and respect, yet his university punished him because he wouldn’t endorse an ideology that he believes is false.”