The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ohio’s fourth-largest school district cannot enforce its policy requiring students to use their peers’ preferred gender pronouns.
The Olentangy Local School District enacted an anti-harassment policy that banned students from using gender-related language the school deemed insulting.
Parents Defending Education filed a lawsuit against the district in May 2023, arguing that the policy is an unconstitutional violation of students’ First Amendment rights.
In a 10-7 decision on Thursday, the court found that the school district’s pronoun policy raises “serious free-speech concerns.”
While the school has an obligation to protect all students, including ones who identify as transgender, it “introduced no evidence that the use of biological pronouns would disrupt school functions or qualify as harassment under Ohio law,” the court said.
“Our society continues to debate whether biological pronouns are appropriate or offensive — just as it continues to debate many other issues surrounding transgender rights,” it added. “The school district may not skew this debate by forcing one side to change the way it conveys its message or by compelling it to express a different view.”
Schools may restrict student speech only when it significantly disrupts the learning environment or infringes on others’ rights, the court said in its opinion, finding that Olentangy “fell far short” of that threshold.
The ruling reverses an earlier three-judge panel decision from July 2024 that had upheld the district’s policy under disruption-based reasoning.
Olentangy’s policy included provisions requiring the use of “preferred pronouns” and barring “misgendering” or other gender-related derogatory remarks under its harassment code.
The decision now sends the case back to the federal district court in Columbus with instructions to issue a preliminary injunction preventing the district from enforcing the policy.
The ruling could have broader implications for school districts nationwide that have adopted similar pronoun and gender-identity language policies.
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