A three-judge appellate panel has ruled that a transgender teacher cannot use she/her pronouns in the classroom.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals made the 2-1 decision in accordance with Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law, with the majority claiming that the plaintiff, high school algebra teacher Katie Wood, “hasn’t shown a substantial likelihood” that the law violates her right to free speech.

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The opinion was written by U.S. Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom and signed off on by Judge Andrew Brasher, both of whom were appointed by the current president. It overturns a preliminary injunction issued in 2024 by U.S. District Judge Mark Walker – a Barack Obama appointee – and remands the case back to the district court.

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The appellate decision asserted that “a teacher’s right to speak is not without limits” because, as public employees, they speak in part on behalf of the government. The decision said Wood “cannot show… that she was speaking as a private citizen rather than a government employee.”

U.S. Circuit Judge Adalberto Jordan, also an Obama appointee, dissented. “Florida, however, has recently come to believe that the First Amendment does not prevent it from dictating what can and cannot be said,” he wrote, adding that Wood “has substantially demonstrated that her use of her preferred personal title and pronouns constitutes private speech on a matter of public concern rather than government speech.”

Wood sued the state after Florida passed HB 1069, which states that “an employee or contractor of a public K-12 educational institution may not provide to a student his or her preferred personal title or pronouns if such preferred personal title or pronouns do not correspond to his or her sex.” Violations of the law are punishable by termination and even suspension or revocation of a teaching certificate.

After the law passed, Wood was told by the school’s principal that she could no longer refer to herself as “Miss,” even though she had legally changed her name and gender markers on her government-issued documents and gone by “Ms. Wood” for four years.

In his issuance of a preliminary injunction, Judge Walker declared, “Once again, the State of Florida has a First Amendment problem. This time, the State of Florida declares that it has the absolute authority to redefine your identity if you choose to teach in a public school. So, the question before this Court is whether the First Amendment permits the State to dictate, without limitation, how public-school teachers refer to themselves when communicating to students. The answer is a thunderous ‘no.’”

“Ours is a Union of individuals,” he added, “celebrating ourselves and singing ourselves and being ourselves without apology.”

The injunction applied specifically to Wood rather than all trans teachers in the state, as does the appellate court’s decision to overturn it.

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