The Brevard County school district in Florida is considering whether it can punish students who voluntarily use names other than the ones they were legally assigned at birth. The district recently refused to re-hire a teacher who referred to a student by their chosen name — state law requires parents to provide written permission before educators can use any alternative to a student’s legal name.
Earlier this month, Satellite High School AP English teacher Melissa Calhoun became the first known Florida educator to lose her job as a result of the aforementioned name policy contained in the state’s 2023 “Don’t Say Gay Law.” A parent accused Calhoun of “influencing and grooming” her 17-year-old daughter to “transition and be gay,” though Calhoun had been using the student’s chosen name since 2022, a year before the new law forbade it. Upon notification of the new law, Calhoun told the student she could no longer use her chosen name, but Calhoun was still denied a contract renewal for breaking the law, even though the community rallied to support her.
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Now that Calhoun has been removed, the district is considering whether to discipline the student for using a chosen name in school without parental permission. The student in question used to regularly submit assignments with their chosen name written at the top, but state law mostly covers the behavior of parents and educators, not students.
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The state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, H.B. 1069, says that “it shall be the policy” of public schools that “a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such a person’s sex.” The law forbids students from using campus facilities that match their gender identity rather than the sex they were assigned at birth, but it doesn’t explicitly forbid students from voluntarily using their own chosen name in schools.
Justin Armstrong, the district’s director for systems of support in student services, said that the student could be disciplined under the district’s Student Code of Conduct for false reporting, willful disobedience, and insubordination. He also said the code of conduct could discipline students for failure to follow directions from those in authority or “failure to identify one’s self,” Florida Today reported.
It’s unclear if the district’s 2025-2026 code of conduct will address students’ use of chosen names. Jen Cousins, chair of Central Florida chapter of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) told the aforementioned publication, “Punishing a student for using their nickname on an assignment by bending the rules of the Student Code of Conduct is just another way that Brevard Public Schools continue to be LGBTQ+ intolerant.”
“Brevard students deserve better than this, and they deserve an inclusive learning environment where they feel safe and accepted, not fearful of punishment simply for being themselves,” Cousins added.
An April 2024 study from the Williams Institute found that 93% of transgender youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S. live in states that have proposed or passed laws restricting their access to health care, sports, school bathrooms and facilities, or the use of gender-affirming pronouns. An estimated 300,100 youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S. identify as transgender, the institute found, though it’s unclear if the student in question identified as trans.
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