Virginia Anglican Wrongly Fired Over Pronouns Vindicated in Settlement

Comment by Tim Mc on October 2, 2024 at 6:01 pm

To God be the Glory!

Comment by Tim on October 2, 2024 at 6:12 pm

I will never understand how you can have a sincerely held religious belief about another person that you barely know.

I’ve been a teacher for more than 15 years. I’ve only had a few transgender students, but this is how the conversation typically goes:

Student: [nervously with eyes downcast] I know on the rolls I’m listed as Suzanne, but do you think you could call me Steve?
Me: OK

And that’s the last conversation we have on the issue for the rest of the year.

We know only the parts of our students’ lives that they care to share with us. We know nothing of their mental health, their internal biochemistry, their genotype, or any dysphoria they feel. We aren’t an expert on them and we shouldn’t have the arrogance to pretend we are.

This isn’t a culture war issue. This is a kid, nervously asking if he’ll be treated with dignity in your class. There’s nothing in the Christian faith that endorses bullying the powerless.

Comment by MikeB on October 2, 2024 at 7:49 pm

Tim,
You completely made that up as well as so many things.

Do you want to finally come clean about what you believe happens to those who do not accept Christ?

It’s very obvious when choosing between man and God which side you exist on.

Comment by Tim on October 2, 2024 at 9:23 pm

Not made up at all, except the names for the purpose of complying with federal privacy law.

Care to respond to any actual point I made, or are you just here for the personal attacks?

Comment by MikeB on October 2, 2024 at 9:52 pm

Tim,
Let’s look at your recent lies:
Adding a additional 0 on the end of Palestinian deaths.
Boasting you never judge just before and after you continually judging people’s motives.

But sure let’s play your game.
You are an adult, when a confused female comes into your class and shows that she hates herself enough to want to deny her God given body, you decided like always to do what you want.
So you abused your position of authority and you abused her, you pushed her further down the path of mental illness, encouraging her further from God.

God created her perfect in her body. If she was overweight I assume you would tell her that she should accept herself.

But instead of telling her that God created her perfectly, and finding out what was bothering her you abused her and made her hate herself more.

Your sick abuse Flys in the face of a perfect God and of science. Yes Tim You are an abuser.

Comment by Tim on October 2, 2024 at 11:07 pm

It must feel strange, thinking that every person you’re interacting with is somehow demanding you affirm them before God.

That kid wasn’t confused, or looking for validation. Unsurprisingly, like the rest of my students, he didn’t give me a vote on how he lived his life or whether he was Christian, Jewish, Muslim, other, or none.

He just asked if I could be kind. And despite all my faults, that’s something I can do.

Comment by MikeB on October 2, 2024 at 11:25 pm

Tim,
As you are making up this story, of course you will claim to know her inner monologue.

Do you believe in a God who does not make mistakes?

Comment by JohnD on October 3, 2024 at 5:11 am

Please see the kink for facts and circumstances pertaining to the case.

https://www.constangy.com/employment-labor-insider/va-supreme-court-reverses-dismissal-of-teachers-pronoun-lawsuit

Comment by David on October 3, 2024 at 8:08 am

I fail to see how pronouns would even arise in a classroom setting. They would be used when talking about a student and not to the student.

Refusal to address a student by their preferred name should not be allowed. I can recall when students were given “American” names if their native names were deemed difficult by the teacher.

I once had a history teacher who was very anti-German because of WWII. On the first day of class, he attempted to guess which students were Jewish. He made a mistake in my case and things went downhill from there. He would address me in the German form of my family name. Unknown to him and myself, my name was originally German, but that was back in the 1750s.

Comment by Different Steve on October 3, 2024 at 8:23 am

Tim’s fiction is like Snoopy’s. “There were only a few dark and stormy nights over 15 years, but the typical one wanted to be called a bright sunny day. I said ok. That’s the whole story, nothing else happened. The End. Moral of the Story: I am good, you are bad and should feel bad.”

It’s an odd story that Tim tells, because it doesn’t say what happened after these “few” kids after agreed to call them some other name than they are on the rolls that is normally associated with the opposite sex. It says that’s the last that is said about it for the remainder of the year. Where’s the rest of the story? Did he regularly call on these kids such names for the remainder of the year? Did Tim have occasion to use these kids preferred pronouns? (The article is about preferred pronouns, right?) When, where and how? Usage examples? How old were these kids? Best I can figure, must have been elementary school, considering he had them for an entire year. How did this work out for the kids? How did their classmates react? Did the parents know and what was their reaction? Did the school know and what was the school’s reaction? What is the school policy regarding these situations? Did the student dress like the opposite sex? Did they go on to transition? What happened next for these kids after they left his classroom?

Comment by MikeB on October 3, 2024 at 8:14 pm

David,
It’s more like how the ACLU fought to not force people into saying the pledge of allegiance.

It’s tyrannical for you to say that I have to say anything.

I fully reject your worldview where I have to say things because other people tell me to.

Comment by Tim on October 3, 2024 at 8:15 pm

If it helps folks treat transgender kids with a bit more grace, I’m happy to share more details. I’ve been teaching for around 15 years, first in a red state and later in a blue one. In that time I’ve had maybe 6-8 transgender students. Some years there are none and usually there’s only one. I would say this is typical for a public high school teacher. I see the kids about an hour a day on average.

I strongly believe that the kindness of using a kid’s preferred name and chosen pronouns is the right thing to do. I ascribe this to my Christian faith (in that Christ would always defend the powerless against the powerful) but it’s also true that acting this way is legally part of my job. It is state policy in my current state, and since I taught in the red state during the Obama years, it was binding federal policy back then.

I’ve looked hard and can’t really find any Scripture that justifies antitransgender action. The typical evangelical apology will start with Genesis saying God created man and woman, which no one denies, but there’s nowhere that says these are immutable properties. It will then maybe switch to talking about sexual intercourse, but that’s not the same thing and certainly irrelevant in a teacher/student context. So I don’t understand how anyone can have a Christian belief that lets them mistreat a transgender student. It’s not part of our faith.

Pronouns do come up in class more than you’d think. An example would be “Sally made this claim, why is her argument different than Bobby’s? ” I’ll mess up on occasion and will typically email the kid an apology afterwards. The response is almost always something like “thanks for caring.”

For the most part, this isn’t really an issue that divides students- I’ve never had a kid call out another in class. And that makes sense: the reason kids are in my class and interacting with each other is to learn some specific knowledge and get credit on their transcripts. Our relationship is professional, and there’s just no reason to upset each other in such a situation.

In general there’s one conversation with a kid about names and pronouns, and for the rest of the year they’re just another student. I speak with them daily like every kid, but about classwork or other topics we’re mutually interested in.

Comment by MikeB on October 3, 2024 at 9:38 pm

Tim,
So you magically understand a students mind when their parents don’t?

In your still made up situation the parents registered her under her actual name and you believe she knows better than her parents? Knowing that she can’t choose to smoke or drink, or vote, or join the military; society and science has realized that the teenager mind is incapable of significant decisions and those are left to parents, but you admit you used your position of authority to abuse both the trust her parents put into the school, and her mental safety.

Because you think she’s really a man?

Go back to my question, do you think that God is perfect and creates us in the right biological bodies?

Comment by Douglas E Ehrhardt on October 4, 2024 at 4:45 am

No one ever changed their biological sex. This is a demonic attack on the human race. The destruction of the so called gender transition industry is well documented.

Comment by David on October 4, 2024 at 8:57 am

Intersex conditions, which are not the current trans debate, often result in medical intervention to make the patient definitely one gender. This is debated in the intersex community. Some feel that no changes should be made to them as children and they should be allowed to remain as they are.

I have always opposed hormone therapies and surgery to change sex as it is medically unwise.

The use of preferred names is a matter of courtesy. Mocking a student by refusing to use their name should not be tolerated. Remember the song, “A boy named Sue?”

Comment by MikeB on October 4, 2024 at 9:28 am

David,
The case is that his decision was to avoid using any pronouns.

It’s not mocking in anyway.

It’s a deeply held belief.

That you are arguing should be illegal.

Comment by Tim on October 4, 2024 at 9:31 am

I just want to give a bit of a reality check here. You’re trying to argue that I’m somehow extreme and going rogue against society’s wishes, but I’m arguing that my job as a teacher is to treat each student in front of me with dignity and respect no matter who they are and what my religious beliefs are. As an agent of the state, that’s literally my responsibility under the first amendment.

Now you raise two other issues. One is a secular issue: what responsibity do schools have to inform parents about their children. For most of the transgender students I’ve had this is a non-issue as the parents are fully aware. Current guidance in my state is that if a student doesn’t want their parents to know about being transgender then the school needs to contact legal counsel for due process advice. Decisions on how to proceed would be made above the teacher level.

You are trying to get me to say that the existence of transgender people is evidence God makes mistakes. I think you are dangerously close to violating Deuteronomy 6:16 here and that you’re essentially putting God to the test by claiming He made a perfect gender binary. Scripture never claims this. God created a man and a woman at the beginning in Genesis. Beyond that, scripture is silent.

The gender binary viewpoint you hold would of course fail any legitimate test, given that in the US 1 in 2000 babies are born with an intersex condition. Many other people are born with chromosomal abnormalities that they never learn about unless they affect fertility and go to be tested. Luckily this was your test of God’s perfection, and not God’s.

It’s ironic that you’re insisting on this point, because the sentence “God doesn’t make mistakes” is used in affirming churches to tell trans people that they are children of God and He created them for a reason.

Comment by David on October 4, 2024 at 10:09 am

In my 40-year working life in reproductive genetics, a number of unusual cases were seen. We had a normal-looking “female” come in for infertility and was found to be an XY male with androgen insensitivity. There were persons with both male and female cells in their bodies (“mosaics”). How one defines “intersex” varies. The whole issue of genetic disease is troubling to theology. The usual explanations are, “My ways are not your ways” and “Mysterious are the ways…” I do not recall raising the issue of informing parents. Again, intersex and trans are two different things.

Comment by Tim on October 4, 2024 at 10:44 am

David, fair point about intersex versus transgender. There is overlap (babies where the wrong gender was chosen for an intersex person) but there is a distinction. I guess the point I was trying to make is that gender seems to be biologically complicated. In addition to all this we’ve been dousing ourselves with industrial chemicals for a hundred years, and some are hormone like. My position has really become “I can’t understand what this person’s life or biochemistry is like, but I’ll respect them and take their word for it.”

Comment by MikeB on October 4, 2024 at 11:08 am

Tim,
No, what your problem is is that you are a repeated liar again and again who makes up things to damage Christianity and mislead others.

You can back track all you want to “oh well” like Pontius Pilate and claim “I wash my hands of it because government rules”

But in your original lying scenario the child was named female (it’s really easy for parents to change names), and the school had not been told (if they had, you would have been told ahead of time and the rolls updated).

Then you took it upon yourself to use your position of authority and aid her delusions. You made it seem like it was all you, you keep backtracking.

You refuse to be pinned down on theology, because you obviously believe in a fully different religion, and your whole shtick is telling others you are a better Christian than them. Just because YOUR theology is questioned do to your intense heresy, does not mean anyone of questioning God.

Oh wait to you it’s one and the same, you are your own god.

Matthew 19:4
He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

Comment by Tim Ware on October 4, 2024 at 11:24 am

Kids are kids and come up with all kinds of ideas, ideas they come up with today and then eventually leave and go on to another stage.

Where in the world would a child get the idea that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body or she is a man trapped in a woman’s body on their own? They wouldn’t. They get that idea because they have read or heard about it and think it’s in some way cool. They see it on TV, they see it on the Internet, they hear it talked about positively at school, they read about it, and they even hear it talked about positively by some Christians. So they jump on the bandwagon. In other words, they are conditioned to be receptive to the idea.

I don’t look at this transgender stuff as sin as much as I look at it as mental illness. I’m not saying it’s not sinful; I just think the majority of the classification should be mental illness.

I don’t think we as a society should be normalizing mental illness.

Comment by MikeB on October 4, 2024 at 11:25 am

David,

John 9:3
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

Most Christians have love and sympathy for both the intersexed (a fact), and people who think they are transgendered.
In humanity, no one has been big gamete and small gamete fertile, maybe we will discover someone who is one day, but we haven’t.

But like you said, there is a huge difference between the two, and the trans supporting community should stop picking on intersexed people by tying them to people who’s condition is mental as opposed to physical.

Comment by Tim on October 4, 2024 at 3:10 pm

For someone who like calling other people liars so much, you’re quite comfortable writing untrue statements.

First, it is NOT easy to get a name change and it isn’t free. It involves getting a court order and schools can’t update formal records without one. Many SIS (School Information Systems) have a field for nickname, so often schools will use that. The name would then appear on the role (using the example names I gave) as Doe, Suzanne (Steve.) Such a kid would want to clarify that with his teachers.

Secondly, you’ve taken Matthew 19 so far out of context it’s unrecognizable. Had you finished that sentence, everyone would know that this passage is an argument against heterosexual divorce and has nothing to do with the existence of transgender people.

Comment by MikeB on October 4, 2024 at 3:36 pm

Tim,
Are you saying that this girl’s family was too poor to do a name change?

You again try to change the topic, you are fully aware that you lied and it became exposed. You have zero shame.

Your whole theology as that no verse means anything, that historical church interpretations and logical conclusions mean nothing, that verses that you disagree with can be ignored, or pretended to be vague when they are clear as day.

Without biological sex there is no such thing as heterosexual marriage.

Comment by Different Steve on October 5, 2024 at 10:15 am

Notice that I ask for answers to questions, and Tim responds with “further detail”. Obviously, evasive. As for the further detail, the only thing resembling an answer to one of my questions would be his suggesting there were never any downsides ever however minor (basically, “they all lived happily ever after”). Mainly, he just repeats his same old talking points with some word salad interpolation. I cannot help but note how the number of students varies throughout his comments: first it is a composite story about a few, then it’s a true story about one student, then back to being a composite story, but then about several. I am, however, picking up on an air of smugness, privilege and comfort in his “further details” (along with the sheer number of times this happened) that I can only assume that he is following his school’s official pollicy (what those policies are is only one among various questions he has evaded). Presumably because, if he is just following orders, isn’t doing this based on conscience like he pretends. He’s a lot like a lot of clergy, taking the course of maximum privilege and comfort and misinterpreting the Bible to match the current thing. Like Upton Sinclair said”.
“It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding”

Comment by Tim on October 5, 2024 at 4:31 pm

Steve given that you’re the second one that’s accused me of lying I have to ask… what do y’all think I’m lying about? My statements have been pretty simple: typically the only conversation a teacher and a transgender kid have about gender identity is when they tell you their name and pronouns and then that’s really it. You just treat them like any other kid. What would there be there to lie about?

I guess my evidence to support that this is what it’s like is that you don’t really hear about situations like this French teacher got himself in because almost all teachers of all political and religious stripes just treat the kid the best they can. After all they’re a kid and taking care of them is a job and an honor.

My numbers haven’t changed in my posts. My first post clearly said I was giving a typical conversation. Since there was interest I made a second post about ballpark figures over my career. Surely you can understand that the details of each specific kid are unique and that I can’t give any real names for legal and safety reasons.

The only reason I can think of that y’all are personally attacking me, a straight white cisgender married man, is that you recognize that your scriptural basis against transgender people is nonexistent. Perhaps another tactic might be more appropriate: quit bullying transgender people. Jesus isn’t going to defend your cruelty. And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ (Matthew 25:40 ESV)

Comment by MikeB on October 5, 2024 at 4:52 pm

Tim,
You aren’t going to be able to explain away your lies. No one would believe you if you said you were gay or straight.

You are only viewed as a liar who attacks Christianity and the word of God. You repeatedly deny scripture you dislike, you are hateful and judgmental and then claim others are cruel to you.

Your words are what we call out. You may think that as long as you don’t admit to lying that people won’t be able to prove it. But that’s not true, your lies are here plain as day. You refuse to state what you believe in.

You are a heretical and blasphemous flash shepard who denies all scripture that he disagrees with.

For shame.

Comment by Different Steve on October 6, 2024 at 10:32 am

Tim, I don’t recall calling you a liar. I’m try to avoid using ad hominems, and if I did so, please consider any withdrawn. I’ve been trying to express my dismay at the quality and quantity of your posts, which I have to be unhelpful, poorly reasoned, inconsistent, factually questionable, unreasonable and endless, with little or nothing to say except “social justice” and patting yourself on the back over and over again. To a certain extent, I’m reading between the lines, because you leave out stuff that I can’t help but notice.

It’s been noted by some that “social justice” doesn’t really have any specific meaning, it can mean whatever anybody thinks it should. It certainly does’t mean justice. Putting a qualifier like social in front of justice, essentially means “something other than justice”. It’s sort of like “our democracy”, which pretty much means, something other than democracy. I don’t claim to have read the Bible, but I don’t think the phrase “social justice” is in it, although the word justice occurs throughout. This makes sense, considering the phrase “social justice” was only coined a few centuries ago.

Not saying I know it all or have all the answers. But I can’t help but notice when somebody’s trying to sell me something that seems inconsistent with the readings I heard over decades of Episcopal Church attendance. Not that the sermons were necessarily consistent with the readings.

Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like the other men—swindlers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and pay tithes of all that I acquire.’
But the tax collector stood at a distance, unwilling even to lift up his eyes to heaven. Instead, he beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man, rather than the Pharisee, went home justified. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Comment by Tim on October 6, 2024 at 12:25 pm

I’ll take the fact that neither of you seem to be able to argue that being cruel to trans people is consistent with scripture as a win.

I’m not here to make you happy. I’m here to rebuke those who take the Lord’s name in vain and use it to hurt vulnerable people, like this teacher did.

Comment by MikeB on October 6, 2024 at 2:20 pm

Tim,

You again ignore that I called you out for not caring that the girl in your story, who thought she was “Trans”, literally hated her body and who she is.

Telling you that she deserves to hear that she is a child of God, that she is fearfully and wonderfully made, that God has placed her in the right body and He loves her without end…

You call that cruel?

No, you using your position of authority to reinforce her self hatred and delusion is cruel.
You call bad good and good bad. You make up a story how you know that some girl, you later admit you see an hour a day or so, knows so much about herself as a young teen that you take her at her word because it’s easy for you to ignore her painful shriek for attention.

You refuse to clarify what you believe, because you know it has nothing to do with Historical Christianity. If you were honest you would confess to that. But you are not.

Comment by Different Steve on October 7, 2024 at 9:21 am

Tim, I’m pretty sure we don’t agree on the meanings of the words “cruelty” or “trans”, nor what is in the Bible.

The kids in your classes weren’t trans (you have posted something like “who knows, they could have gender dysphoria”). Being the adult in the room is not cruelty. There’s lots of cruelty in the Bible, however, a prominent one being the crucifixion of Jesus. Now there’s some cruelty for you, You would think nobody would have a problem believing that Jesus suffered, but apparently some mainline clergy do.

I can’t resist pointing out another seminal bit of cruelty in the Bible: Abraham being ordered by God to sacrifice his favorite son like an animal. I mean, forgetting the ritual murder of the son, modern sensibility alarms go off just by suggesting somebody had a favorite kid. You can say that story is an obscure outlier, and you would be wrong. For three great religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism), this is the point of origin. So, they are called the Abrahamic religions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/opinion/transgender-children-gender-dysphoria.html

Comment by Different Steve on October 7, 2024 at 11:52 am

This list of the greatest Princess Bride movie quotes ‘is what bwings us togeva today.’

1. “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

https://parade.com/983468/alexandra-hurtado/princess-bride-quotes/