Maybe This Sacking Will Lead to the Lawsuit We Need

Not freedom *of* religion; freedom *from* religion

“It will end with lawsuits.” That’s what opponents of pediatric gender medicine, and of the movement to teach children that they may be born in the wrong body, has speculated for years. Most, though definitely not all, of the lawsuits brought by detransitioners have derailed along the way. Then again, the lawsuits seeking to overturn various bans on those practices have failed, too.

One lawsuit that did succeed was Kluge v. Brownsburg Community School Corporation, in which a teacher sued after being fired for refusing to use his students’ preferred names and pronouns. The reason for his refusal? It conflicted with his religious beliefs.

As far as I know (and please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong), we have not yet seen a US case that parallels Maya Forstater v CGD Europe. Forstater was fired for posting gender-critical tweets, and initially an employment tribunal found her beliefs were “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” After an appeal, it was established that gender-critical beliefs were in fact protected.

This, of course, was a huge deal, and Forstater was speaking out seven years ago, from the depths of the censoriousness goop, long before there was an established resistance as there is now.

What we could use in America is a lawsuit that establishes objection to participating in the rituals of gender identity beliefs as protected by the First Amendment. That is, we’ve had a religious freedom case, but we haven’t had a case about freedom from the religion of gender identity.

Maybe we now will. On January 22, lawyer Glenna Goldis posted on X that she’d been fired by New York Attorney General Letitia James for engaging in “disruptive public speech”—a post that had more than a million views at last perusal, and which has resulted in an article in The New York Post and offers from Megyn Kelly and others for more publicity.

But if it’s true that the firing was illegal and a violation of Goldis’s free speech rights, then this could be just the case we need to establish in the US that gender-critical speech is protected, too. But we don’t know the facts—just what Goldis says are the facts.

I met Goldis in 2022, and she began her career writing about this issue on this very Substack, under a pseudonym, Unyielding Bicyclist. I really liked her writing, though in the end it became too didactic for this publication and I suggested she send it to what was then the LGBT Courage Coalition.