Kansas City teacher’s rights violated by forced trans pronoun use, ‘white shaming’ curriculum, lawsuit alleges

A Kansas City teacher who says she was punished for refusing to go along with the district’s anti-white racial and pro-trans gender indoctrination is suing her district for violations of her constitutional rights, state law and teaching contract.

Caedran Sullivan, an English teacher at Shawnee Mission North High School in KC suburb Overland Park, Kansas, blew the whistle on the district’s “white shaming” curriculum in a Lion column last year that made national news – and may have made life more difficult for her at work.

“This is a case about the government controlling speech and abridging free-speech rights through retaliation and intimidation,” reads the lawsuit filed Oct. 28 in U.S. District Court. “It is about the government compelling speech to fit its orthodoxy and punishing speech that does not fit its narrative.

“In this case, a government entity has punished and continues to punish both

speech that is not acceptable to the government under its new “transgender” orthodoxy and

speech opposing the government’s unlawful, racist conduct. …

“At a time when our freedoms are under attack through baseless arguments that the First Amendment does not protect ‘misinformation,’ ‘hate-speech,’ or speech that does not fit a particular narrative, this case is even more important because it is about the government punishing those who will not disseminate the government’s opinion on so-called ‘gender-ideology’ that treads on religious freedom, and it is about the government punishing those who dare speak up in opposition to the government’s anti-white ideology that is just as racist as anti-black ideology, or any other race-based ideology.”

Sullivan’s lawsuit says the district’s “Communication with Parents Policy, and the Trans Practices (collectively, the ‘New Trans Orthodoxy’) insists: “All students have the right to be addressed by the name and pronouns that correspond to the gender identity they assert at school.”

“Defendants are violating a public school teacher’s rights by forcing her to say things which violate her religious, moral, and personal beliefs by requiring her use words endorsing and supporting the fiction that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, or that one can disavow his or her sex because one feels like it.

“In doing so, the government is violating the teacher’s rights of conscience and the government is also punishing her for speaking up about the government’s imposition of racist, anti-white ideology prevalent in the government’s mandatory DEI training.”

The Lion reached out to the Shawnee Mission School District for comment. A spokesperson responded that the district doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

“My client cares about every one of her students and just wants to teach kids,” Sullivan’s lawyer, Fritz Edmunds, wrote in a statement responding to media inquiries. “She did not want to sue the district. She suggested getting away from denigrating anyone based on their race under the guise of DEI.

“She also doesn’t want to hide from parents when their children are experimenting at school with different genders. And she doesn’t want to participate in those experiments because she believes it potentially harms students to endorse the fiction that girls or boys can change sexes or genders.

“When she tried everything she could and the district punished and demoted her anyway for declining to speak messages that were untrue, harmful to kids, and violated her conscience, she had no option but to file suit.”

“We are being manipulated and intimidated by a divisive ‘woke’ ideology that is creating a culture of contempt and disrespect,” Sullivan wrote in her Lion column in April 2023. “There is repeated white shaming and a preoccupation with white people as the ‘oppressor,’ including staff field trips with a focus on ‘systemic racism.’”

District teachers were told to keep gender transitions secret from parents, she wrote.

“If parents knew what goes on in our schools, the majority would be appalled.”

The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and, ultimately, declarations that her rights have been violated and won’t continue to be in the future, as well as unspecified compensatory, punitive damages and attorney’s fees.

Sullivan announced her lawsuit Wednesday morning in another opinion column at FoxNews.com.

“The $400,000 Corwin DEI Curriculum our district embraces has its roots in radical Marxist extremism and indoctrinates with shocking anti-America, anti-family, and anti-White propaganda,” she writes.

“The Corwin Curriculum focuses on DEI over academics, with political ideology such as this: ‘Since 90% of our nation’s teachers are white, the business of achieving greater equity and excellence in public education is in large part a process of transforming the beliefs and behaviors of white educators.’

“Through the mandatory DEI curriculum, White people are portrayed as the problem: ‘Together they [White people] are experiencing a collective meltdown over the realities of race and their own whiteness,’ and ‘White supremacist hate groups represent one particularly hostile form of fundamentalist white identity, but there is also the Tea Party version that masks its racism with the guise of patriotism.’ …

“After I wrote a letter asking for our principal to request more balanced views without divisive, anti-White political ideology, the district subjected me to an “investigation” for “deadnaming” and then another sham “investigation” for “gender identity discrimination.”

“The district found no evidence of discrimination (I try not to use pronouns), but it disciplined me anyway for using “incorrect pronouns on one or a couple of occasions during the school year” – a claimed violation of a nonexistent pronoun policy.”