Ohio professor Nicholas Meriwether is going to court to fight for their right to misgender their students based on their extremist views about gender identity.
Please note, I am tempted to use “their” in the gender-neutral, singular sense to refer to the professor throughout because a.) they’ve irritated me and b.) my own view on gender identity and language is that, if anything, “they/them” should be a default to ensure that each individual gets to opt into gender identity rather than have it be assigned. Seem wrong to you? It is. So I’ll revert to “he/him/his.”
Point is, each person’s choice of pronoun is profoundly important to their identity; using the appropriate pronoun isn’t any harder than remembering someone’s name. You may stumble, but that doesn’t mean you give up and tell your friend you’re just going to call them something else.
Flipped around, can you imagine introducing yourself to someone only to have them just call you by the name they feel best suits you based on their views? That’s pretty much what’s happening when someone rejects something as basic as a pronoun, the way another person wants to be spoken to and referenced.
I haven’t tried running this logic by Meriwether, a professor of philosophy, but it’s doubtful it’d have any effect on his thinking. After all, any number of students he’s traumatized and internal university actors who’ve responded have yet to budge him. Instead, he doubled down.
Meriwether has teamed up with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a far-right hate group that instigates and cultivates lawsuits with the aim of expanding the made-up concept of “religious liberty” as a positive right. Real religious freedom, you see, is a negative right—it’s the right to practice your religion free of interference. What Meriwether and his band of merry bigots are fighting for is the positive right to act on their “religious beliefs” even when it violates others’ negative rights, like the right to be free from sex discrimination.
In language familiar to any who’ve been following the Trump-Pence anti-LGBTQ crusade, Meriwether argues in his complaint against the university that he has a right to use the pronouns that correspond to the sex a student was assigned at birth—rather, even, than the student’s legal gender—because “gender is fixed” and “cannot be changed, regardless of an individual’s feelings or desires.”
Courtesy of Equality Case Files:
Like the professor it’s written for, the complaint—which numbers a staggering 371 pages—misgenders the student targets of Meriwether’s bigotry.
ADF’s position isn’t even internally consistent. At a minimum, it is lazily developed in the legal sense. While Meriwether argues that “gender is fixed,” the brief also states that “the concept of gender identity is entirely subjective and fluid.”
In January 2018, a male student demanded that Dr. Meriwether address him as a woman because he identified as such and threatened to have Dr. Meriwether fired if he declined. To accede to these demands would have required Dr. Meriwether to communicate views regarding gender identity that he does not hold, that he does not wish to communicate, and that would contradict (and force him to violate) his sincerely held Christian beliefs. Thus, he declined but offered to use whatever proper name the student preferred to accommodate this student and to make him feel as comfortable as possible without violating his own deeply-held beliefs and convictions.
The university has sided with students against Meriwether, holding him accountable for violating its non-discrimination policy. That’s what’s led to the instant case. Across a total of nine causes of action, Meriwether’s arguing that his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and free exercise of religion, his right to be free of “unconstitutional conditions” in his employment, and his 14th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection, state law religious freedom rights, and contractual rights are being violated.
We’ll just have to see what happens in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. Should the case be appealed (which it will be, if ADF loses), it’ll go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which also includes Kentucky, Michigan, and Tennessee.
In closing, I applaud Ms. Bruening, whom Meriwether insisted on calling “Mr. Bruening” or just “Bruening” (in the guise of accommodation) though he called other students by their preferred honorific and last name. She challenged Meriwether’s discriminatory practices. He explained his position no better than his brief does. Thus, she replied, “Then I guess this means I can call you a cunt.”