I would describe “telling teachers to make an effort to remember students’ preferred names, and apologize if they get it wrong”, as pretty much “doing little or nothing”. It’s hardly a huge burden on anyone.
Again, can you explain why it is a “burden” or a “task” to avoid intentionally mis-gendering kids? It’s a nothing sandwich, and just more evidence of the snowflakiness and desired victimhood by some right wingers. And explain why it’s OK to discriminate as long as the minority is less than 1% of the population?
Treating a kid with respect and trying to not subject them to discrimination and hate is not “special treatment”. It’s common decency. And not doing so can have massive repercussions.
“Nonbinary youth who reported that ‘no one’ respected their pronouns had more than 2.5 times the rate of attempting suicide compared to those who reported that ‘all or most of the people’ they know respected their pronouns. Among those who didn’t have anyone in their life who respected their pronouns, 27 percent attempted suicide in the past year. The rate of attempting suicide in the past year dropped to 15 percent when a lot of people respected their pronouns and 10 percent when all or most people respected their pronouns.”
So what when the teacher (or student) requests a preferred joke or insulting name that’s not obvious?
I believe that you are as accepting as you say you are. But I strongly recommend learning more about the issue before commenting on it. Some of the ideas you’ve presented are straight out of the transphobe handbook. Note that I do not think that you are transphobic.
There are an ever-increasingly ludicrous number of burdens placed on teachers these days, but “call the kid what they’d like to be called” is not one of them. Teachers have been juggling nicknames, pronunciations, and “there are six Aarons in here, what the hell” for generations. It is not hard.
“Respect your students” is bedrock, baseline, foundational stuff for ethics in education.
Just quoting this for emphasis since I saw it after I posted. If you have two options, and you know that one of those options will dramatically increase the odds of one of your students trying to kill themselves… I mean, fuck.
Let me throw an idea out there
School has a policy that teachers use a student’s preferred name.
Student’s name is Elizabeth but she wants to be called Liz.
Teacher refuses because Liz’s parent named her Elizabeth and to change her name disrespects her parents.
According to Deut 5:16 (and many other places in The Bible) this is a sin and consequently condoning it violates the teacher’s religious beliefs.
Does it end up in court?
Would the discussion be this heated since it is a nickname and not a gender-identifier being debated?
OK, someone brought up the Talmud, giving me the opportunity to repost this three-part Twitter thread from Rabbi Akiva Weisenger, who in most contexts I would describe as a right-wing asshole:
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For those wondering why I, an Orthodox rabbi, deplore the Texas trans law – aren’t I supposed to stand up for Torah values or whatever? – a thread:
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I don’t like it when kids kill themselves.
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End of thread.
Then I think we’re in agreement that First Amendment rights such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech (and probably freedom of association) are not absolute in a school setting.
The school, as an employer, can set reasonable standards on how its employees address students. And the employees have to comply with these rules or resign their employment.
I don’t feel it will be difficult for the school to show this is a reasonable standard. (They’ll have an easier time than the teacher will if she is asked to provide scriptural evidence for her religious belief. Being a conservative is not a religion.)
I think this is a key issue. We are in the midst of a societal change. We want people to realize that transphobia is not just normal behavior; it’s a form of bigotry.
We’ve already had this conversation many times - about Catholics, Jews, Blacks, women, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, and gays. And now we’re having it about transsexuals.
Spoiler alert: Normal people will get educated and will come to realize that transsexuals have the same rights and deserve the same respect as everyone else. And bigots will be upset that they’ve lost another group of people they can target with impunity.
Its also pretty telling to the whole recent debate about anti-trans laws that it is a teacher taking this to court not a pupil or parent.
This is not about religious parents being forced into raising their children a certain way by the big bad secular medical/education establishment.
Its about trans kids, parents of trans kid, and the doctors of trans kids being in complete agreement about the correct way to treat those trans kids to have the most beneficial outcome for the kids themselves, and being criminalized for doing so by the GOP-run government (and in this case, based on how far this case goes, the GOP-appointed judiciary).
Quick off topic aside: As others have pointed out 10% seems awfully high for a percentage of non-CIS. Do you have any feeling as to what proportion of these students actually view themselves as such versus choosing the “they” pronoun as a sign of solidarity with those who do? Not that it really makes a difference since even if that is the reason they prefer to be called “they” it still makes sense to be respectful of their intentions.
No, just once. You’d file it with the main office and that’s how it would show up on attendance sheets and class rolls.
I’m kind of in this category. It’s not so much that I firmly reject beliefs, I just don’t think the government should meddle with them. Beliefs in religion should be effectively invisible to the government; laws should be made without regard to them. If it makes sense for a law to have a provision that says, “You must follow this law unless you really really don’t want to,” that should be written into the law.
As it stands, that seems to be the default: if you really really don’t want to follow a law, so claim many religious folks, you don’t have to. And the court is backing them up on this in case after case.
The only time a government should be aware of religion is in the context of discrimination: if it’s found that a law was written specifically to complicate religious practices and has no other reasonable purpose, that’s a bad law.
There doesn’t even need to be that level of paperwork. The teacher can just ask on the first day what kids want to be called and amend the roll sheet accordingly; which, at least in my experience, they all do anyway. (Although in my day it was just to see whether Benjamin wanted to be called Ben).
(I would say that the official name on the school records shouldn’t change until and unless the student’s name is legally changed, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to address them that way)
I think it’s trickier than that. Note that there are lots of people who consider refusing to call someone with a male name on their birth certificate by a female name to be in the same category as “Boaty McBoatface”. And resolving that problem is not as simple as pointing to trans rights, because, kids being kids, for every kid who legitimately wants a differently gendered name, there will be plenty of others who request the most ridiculous barely-within-the-lines name they can think of because they think it’s hilarious* to make the gym teacher refer to them as “Princess”, or something.
Adjudicating which of those requests are sincere and which are not on the margin is a legitimately hard problem! There are of course plenty of easy to differentiate cases, but give the mischievous kids some credit; they’re going to hit you with the hard ones. There are people with the given name of “Princess”, and while I think it’s kind of a silly name, how do you determine whether it’s a joke or not? When you turn down the kid who requested “Boaty McBoatface”, he’s going to come back with the request to be called “Bodie” and everyone is going to snicker whenever the teacher says it because while it’s a real name it’s pronounced basically the same.
It’s easy to come up with examples that are clear-cut and think the problem is simple. What’s the trickiest case you can think of, and how would you resolve it?
And of course, if you get it wrong, you might face a lawsuit.
*they are correct. It’s pretty funny.
Using this info, I’d suggest it would be a good thing if the kids’ parents and family respected their choices, before worrying about school personnel fulfilling that function. 
To restate the position I think I made pretty clear many posts back, I’m pretty much in favor of calling kids in school pretty much whatever they want. Pretty comfortable that joke and ever-changing names could be dealt with as they arise. And I’m pretty comfortable that this teacher is an asshole.
But what I said was, the TEACHER should not be making this policy. The school/district should give clear guidance. And it might be as simple of a matter of the parents filling out a card. Or having the kid fill out a card - and take it home for parents signature.
Is it at all an issue if a kid wants to be called by a “different sex” name, but the parent strongly disagrees? Legally, I could imaging the parent’s rights might control. Like I said, I have no respect for religious assholes. But people have a right to believe in religion if they want to. And they have a right to be assholes. They are just limited with respect to some ways that they are able to ACT on those beliefs. If I were a religious parent, believing there are only 2 sexes/genders, I would expect to have considerable input into what the public school employees call my kid?
Sucks for ANY kid to be born to such people. Especially sucks if a kid is “different” in any respect.
IIRC the supreme court does not need someone to prove or show that their belief is supported by a given religion. That the person claims to believe it as a matter of faith is enough.
Yes, that works fine for people with stable nicknames or other names. If you follow the specific thread back, the purpose of the paperwork process is to reduce the frequency with which someone might change preferred names.
I think in general it’s not a problem for teachers to use alternate names, but if a teacher has 100+ students and ~10% of them decide to abuse the process for kicks and request a new name every few weeks, that becomes a challenge.
Slight Hijack: Could that standard be legislated? Like could Congress pass a law requiring a religious exemption to be signed off by a member of the clergy? Or is it so ingrained in the 1st Amendment that no justification is required.